The two cathedrals of Toul and Tours present many points of great beauty, but their most remarkable features are their western façades, both of late date, each possessing two towers terminating in octagonal lanterns, with details verging on the style of the Renaissance, and yet so Gothic in design and so charmingly executed as almost to induce the belief, in spite of the fanciful extravagance which it displays, that the architects were approaching to something new and beautiful when the mania for classical details overtook them. The two cathedrals of Limoges and Dijon belong to the latter half of the 13th century, and will consequently when better known fill a gap painfully felt in the history of the art. [Illustration: 637. Façade of Cathedral at Troyes. (From Arnaud.)] It would be tedious to enumerate all the great cathedrals of the country, or to attempt to describe their peculiarities; but we must not omit all mention of such as Lisieux, remarkable for its beautiful façade, and Evreux, for the beauty of many of its parts, though the whole is too much a patchwork to produce an entirely pleasing effect. Nevers, too, is remarkable as being one of the only two double-apse cathedrals in France, Besançon being the other. At Nevers this was owing to the high altar having been originally at the west, a defect felt to be intolerable in France in the 16th century, when the church was rebuilt, when it was done without destroying the old sanctuary. Bordeaux, already mentioned for its noble nave without aisles, possesses a chevet worthy of it, and two spires of great beauty at the ends of the transepts, the only spires so placed, I think, in France. Autun has a spire on the intersection of the nave with the transepts as beautiful as anything of the same class elsewhere. The cathedral of Lyons is interesting, as showing how hard it was for the Southern people of France to shake off their old style and adopt that of their Northern neighbours. With much grandeur and elegance of details, it is still so clumsy in design, that neither the whole nor any of its parts can be considered as satisfactory. The windows, for instance, as shown in the woodcut (No. 638), look more like specimens of the so-called carpenter’s Gothic of modern times than examples of the art of the Middle Ages.