What painted glass was to the interior of a French cathedral sculpture was to the exterior. Almost all the arrangements of the façade were modified mainly to admit of its display to the greatest possible extent. The three great cavernous porches of the lower part would be ugly and unmeaning in the highest degree without the sculptures that adorn them. The galleries above are mere ranges of niches, as unmeaning without their statues as the great mullioned windows without their “storeyed panes.” In such lateral porches too, as those for instance at Chartres, the architecture is wholly subordinate to the sculpture; and in a perfect cathedral of the 13th century the buttresses, pinnacles, even the gargoyles, every “coign of vantage,” tells its tale by some image or representation of some living thing, giving meaning and animation to the whole. The cathedral thus became an immense collection of sculptures, containing not only the whole history of the world as then known and understood, but also of an immense number of objects representing the arts and sciences of the Middle Ages. Thus the great cathedrals of Chartres and Rheims even now retain some 5000 figures, scattered about or grouped together in various parts, beginning with the history of the creation of the world and all the wondrous incidents of the 1st chapter of Genesis, and thence continuing the history through the whole of the Old Testament. In these sculptures the story of the redemption of mankind is told as set forth in the New Testament, with a distinctness, and at the same time with an earnestness, almost impossible to surpass. On the other hand ranges of statues of kings of France and other popular potentates carry on the thread of profane history to the period of the erection of the cathedral itself. In addition to these we have interspersed with them, a whole system of moral philosophy, as illustrated by the virtues and the vices, each represented by an appropriate symbol, and the reward or punishment its invariable accompaniment. In other parts are shown all the arts of peace, every process of husbandry in its appropriate season, and each manufacture or handicraft in all its principal forms. Over all these are seen the heavenly hosts, with saints, angels, and archangels. All this is so harmoniously contrived and so beautifully expressed, that it becomes a question even now whether the sculpture of these cathedrals does not excel the architecture.