ed with gorgeous old
glass. The sustained height of this almost detached choir is very noble;
its lightness and grace, its soaring symmetry, carry the eye up to
places in the air from which it is slow to descend. Like Tours, like
Chartres, like Bourges (apparently like all the French cathedrals, and
unlike several English ones), Le Mans is rich in splendid glass. The
beautiful upper windows of the choir make, far aloft, a brave gallery of
pictures, blooming with vivid colour. It is the south transept that
contains the formless image--a clumsy stone woman lying on her
back--which purports to represent Queen Berengaria aforesaid.

The view of the cathedral from the rear is, as usual, very fine. A small
garden behind it masks its base; but you descend the hill to a large
_place de foire_, adjacent to a fine old public promenade which is known
as Les Jacobins, a sort of miniature Tuileries, where I strolled for a
while in rectangular alleys destitute of herbage and received a deeper
impression of vanished things. The cathedral, on the pedestal of its
hill, looks considerably farther than the fair-ground and the Jacobins,
between the rather bare poles of whose straightly planted trees you may
admire it at a convenient distance. I admired it till I thought I should
remember it (better than the event has proved), and then I wandered away
and looked at another curious old church, Notre-Dame-de-la-Couture. This
sacred edifice made a picture for ten minutes, but the picture has faded
now. I reconstruct a yellowish-brown facade and a portal fretted with
early sculptures; but the

[Illustration: LE MANS--THE CATHEDRAL]

details have gone the way of all incomplete sensations. After you have
stood awhile, in the choir of the cathedral there is no sensation at Le
Mans that goes very far. For some reason not now to be traced I had
looked for more than this. I think the reason was to some extent simply
in the name of the place; for names, on the whole, whether they be good
reasons or not, are very active ones. Le Mans, if I am not mistaken, has
a sturdy, feudal sound; suggests something dark and square, a vision of
old ramparts and gates. Perhaps I had been unduly impressed by the fact,
accidentally revealed to me, that Henry II., first of the English
Plantagenets, was born there. Of course it is easy to assure one's self
in advance, but does it not often happen that one had rather not be
assured? There is a pleasure sometimes in runn