Our best English examples show a proportion of rather less than one-tenth, and though they have not the great height and wide-spreading vaults of the French cathedrals, their spires and pinnacles externally perhaps more than counterbalance this. Taken altogether it may generally be stated that one-tenth is about the proportion in the best Gothic churches of the best age. When we find it exceed this, it is obvious that the lightness of the walls and pillars has been carried to excess, and even in St. Ouen, if there is an error, it is on this side. There can be no question that to produce a satisfactory effect a church requires solidity, and apparent as well as real strength; for, without affecting the extreme massiveness of Egyptian art, with its wonderful expression of power and durability, there is an opposite extreme far more prejudicial to true architectural effect in parading, as it were, mechanical contrivances of construction, so as to gain the utmost utilitarian effect with the least possible expenditure of means. This the Egyptians utterly despised and rejected, and heaped mass on mass, even at the expense of any convenience or use for which the building might have been designed. The French architects, on the other hand, made it their study to dispense with every ton of stone they could possibly lay aside. This system they undoubtedly carried too far, for without looking at such extreme examples as the choir of Beauvais or St. Ouen, everywhere in France we find a degree of airy lightness and tenuity of parts destructive of many of the most important conditions of architectural excellence. FURNITURE OF CHURCHES. Little less thought and expense were probably bestowed upon what we may call the furnishing of Gothic churches than upon the fabrics themselves. Though the objects included in this denomination were altogether of a lower class of art, they were still essential parts of the whole design, and we cannot fairly judge of the buildings themselves without at least endeavouring to supply their minor arrangements. It is not easy to do this in France, nor indeed in any part of Europe, as no one church or chapel displays at the present day all the wealth and ornament which once belonged to it. There is scarcely a single church in France with its original altar, the most sacred and therefore generally the most richly adorned part of the whole. These have either been plundered by the Huguenots, rebuilt in the execrable taste of the age of Louis XIV., or destroyed during the Revolution. The cathedrals of Amiens and Rouen are among the few which retain their original stalls; and the enclosure of the choir at Chartres is one of the most elaborate pieces of ornamental sculpture to be found. That at Alby has been before alluded to, and fragments of this feature still exist in many cathedrals. [Illustration: 669. Rood-Screen from the Madeleine at Troyes. (From Arnaud, ‘Voyage dans l’Aube.’)]