t
Abbot built himself, in place of the old Gothic lodging below those
solemn walls, a sort of Chateau Gaillard, a dainty abode in the manner
of Louis Quinze--swept away that too at the Revolution--where the great
oaks now flourish, with the rooks and squirrels.

Yet the order of Cluny, in its time, in that dark period of the
eleventh and twelfth centuries, had deserved well of those to whom
religion, and art, and social order are precious. The Cluniacs had in
fact represented monasticism in the most [130] legitimate form of its
activity; and, if the church of Vezelay was not quite the grandest of
their churches, it is certainly the grandest of them which remains. It
is also typical in character. As Notre-Dame d'Amiens is pre-eminently
the church of the city, of a commune, so the Madeleine of Vezelay is
typically the church of a monastery.

The monastic style proper, then, in its peculiar power and influence,
was Romanesque, and with the Cluniac order; and here perhaps better
than anywhere else we may understand what it really came to, what was
its effect on the spirits, the imagination.

As at Pontigny, the Cistercians, for the most part, built their
churches in lowly valleys, according to the intention of their founder.
The representative church of the Cluniacs, on the other hand, lies amid
the closely piled houses of the little town, which it protected and
could punish, on a steep hill-top, like a long massive chest there,
heavy above you, as you climb slowly the winding road, the old
unchanged pathway of Saint Bernard. In days gone by it threatened the
surrounding neighbourhood with four boldly built towers; had then also
a spire at the crossing; and must have been at that time like a more
magnificent version of the buildings which still crown the hill of
Laon. Externally, the proportions, the squareness, of the nave (west
and east, the vast narthex or porch, and the [131] Gothic choir, rise
above its roof-line), remind one of another great Romanesque church at
home--of the nave of Winchester, out of which Wykeham carved his richly
panelled Perpendicular interior.

At Vezelay however, the Romanesque, the Romanesque of Burgundy, alike
in the first conception of the whole structure, and in the actual
locking together of its big stones, its masses of almost unbroken
masonry, its inertia, figures as of more imperial character, and nearer
to the Romans of old, than its feebler kindred in England or Normandy.
We