that worn by the church of Saint Benigne at
Dijon, or the queer sort of awning which shades the Cathedral of Saint
Jean at Lyon.

"And in any case a tower without a tapering spire never soars to heaven.
It always rises heavily, pants on the way, and falls asleep exhausted.
It is, as it were, an arm without a hand, a wrist without palm and
fingers, a stump; or, again, a pencil uncut, having no point wherewith
to write up beyond the clouds the prayers from below; in short, it is
for ever inert.

"We must turn to the steeple, to the stone spire, to find the true
symbol of prayers shot up to pierce the sky and reach the Heart of the
Father, which is their target.

"And in this family of arrows what a variety we see; no two darts are
alike!

"Some are set in a collar of turrets at their base, held in a circle of
pinnacles, like the points of a Magian king's diadem; this we see in the
bell-tower of Senlis.

"Others seem to have about them the children born in their image, little
spires, all round them; some are covered with bosses, knobs, and
blisters; others pierced like colanders and strainers, in patterns of
trefoils and quaterfoils that seem to have been punched out; here we
find some that are covered with ornament, with teeth like a rasp, ridges
of notches, or bristling with spines; others are imbricated with scales
like a fish, as we see in the older spire at Chartres; and others again,
like that at Caudebec, display the emblem of the Roman Church, the
triple crown of the Pope.

"Out of this general outline, which was almost forced upon them, and
which they hardly ever tried to avoid, this pyramid or pepper-caster,
jelly-bag or extinguisher, the architects of the Middle Ages evolved the
most ingenious combinations and varied their designs to infinity.

"How mysterious for the most part is the origin of our cathedrals! Most
of the artists who built them are unknown; nay, the age of the stones is
rarely a matter of certainty, for the greater part of them have been
wrought upon by the alluvium of ages.

"They almost all cover intervals of two, three, or four centuries each;
they extend from the beginning, of the thirteenth century till the first
years of the sixteenth.

"And on reflection that is very intelligible.

"It has been accurately remarked that the thirteenth century was the
great period of cathedral-building. It gave birth to almost every one of
them; and then, being created, their growth was checke