cathedrals
at Bourges and Auxerre.

The sculptured decoration of the later portion is exceedingly well
disposed, and of such magnitude and numbers as to lack that poverty in
the ensemble often apparent in a more pretentious work.

The Church of St. Etienne in Nevers, so thoroughly Roman in inception of
design and execution of detail, indicates more vividly than any other
example that might possibly be taken, the shortness of time in which the
Gothic development actually took place. With Notre Dame at Paris full
in mind, it is well to recall that these accepted perfect examples of
two contrasting types are scarce a hundred and fifty miles apart, and,
in point of time, but sixty years. What an exemplification this surely
is of the transition which came to the art of church building in the
twelfth century; what extraordinary rapidity of conception and
development, and how narrow were the confines of the true Gothic spirit,
indigenous only to the royal domain, which alone produced the churches
which fully merit the concisely expressed definition of Gothic: "A
manner of building maintained (sustained) by a system of thrust and
counter thrust."

[Illustration: _CATHEDRAL of S. MAMMES LANGRES_]

IV

ST. MAMMES DE LANGRES

Langres is reminiscent of but one other cathedral city in the north of
France; like Laon, it occupies and fortifies the crest of a long drawn
out hill, or, to give it dignity, it had perhaps best be called in the
language of the native "de la montagne de Langres," since from its apex,
it is truly dominant of a wide expanse of horizon.

Of the Burgundian transition type, the Cathedral at Langres, dedicated
to St. Jean the Evangel and St. Mammes, is in many ways a remarkable
architectural work, but contaminated beyond cure by two overbearing
Greco-Roman towers and a portal of the mid-eighteenth century. As a
relief, there adjoins the main body of the church, on the southeast, one
of those masterworks of the supreme Gothic era,--a canon's cloister of
an exceeding thirteenth-century beauty. In other respects, the exterior
is of little note except as to its wonderful degree of prominence in the
general grouping of the roofs of the town, when the city is viewed from
below.

The interior spreads itself out in severe and imposing lines with hardly
a remarkable feature in either transepts or nave. The organ-loft, a
Calvary, and a marble statue of the Virgin, by Lescornel, a sculptor of
Langres, and