In the following pages, therefore, it will not be necessary to recur to the freemasons nor their masters—at least not more than incidentally— till we come to Germany. Nor will it be necessary to attempt to define who was the architect of any particular building. The names usually fixed upon by antiquaries after so much search are merely those of the master-masons or foremen of the works, who had nothing whatever to do with the main designs of the buildings. The simple fact that all the churches of any particular age are so like to one another, both in plan and detail, and so nearly equal in merit, is alone sufficient to prove how little the individual had to do with their design, and how much was due to the age and the progress the style had achieved at that time. This, too, has always proved to be the case, not only in Europe, but in every corner of the world, and in every age when architecture has been a true and living art. CHAPTER IX. FRENCH GOTHIC CATHEDRALS. CONTENTS. Paris—Chartres—Rheims—Amiens—Other Cathedrals—Later Style—St. Ouen’s, Rouen. THE great difficulty in attempting to describe the architecture of France during the glorious period of the 13th century is really the _embarras de richesse_. There are even now some thirty or forty cathedrals of the first class in France, all owing their magnificence to this great age. Some of these, it is true, were commenced even early in the 12th, and many were not completed till after the 14th century; but all their principal features, as well as all their more important beauties, belong to the 13th century, which, as a building epoch, is perhaps the most brilliant in the whole history of architecture. Not even the great Pharaonic era in Egypt, the age of Pericles in Greece, nor the great period of the Roman Empire, will bear comparison with the 13th century in Europe, whether we look to the extent of the buildings executed, their wonderful variety and constructive elegance, the daring imagination that conceived them, or the power of poetry and of lofty religious feelings that is expressed in every feature and in every part of them.