The God in Judgment of the tympanum, one of the most ancient and complete of the many examples of the subject to be seen in France, is striking, terrifying almost, in vigour, in that dramatic power which, even so early, was one of the marked characteristics of Burgundian sculpture. With hands outstretched He sits between the elect and the damned. On His left, in the place of torment, the sinners, weighed in the angel balance, and found wanting, are handed over, for torment, to the powers of darkness, whose bony claws, reaching down, fasten upon more victims from a sinful world. The hideous malignity upon the faces of these tormentors, the twisted, tortured postures of the despairing victims, all heighten the effect, and contrast strongly with the still somewhat rigid, though easier, lines of the other picture, where mighty angels are lifting into a heavenly mansion the spirits of the redeemed. [Illustration: ST. LAZARE.] Not less effective, probably, in execution and symbolism, was the figure of the door-post upon which rests this early conception of the world's destiny. Here was Lazarus, who triumphed over death, and beside him, his sisters, Martha and Mary, symbols of two aspects of personal service. The original statues were destroyed at the Revolution, but the lines of their substitutes, among the most successful modern imitations that I know, have still, in form and drapery, something of Hellenic delicacy, suggesting that the original sculptor's eye was lit by the dying radiance of Grecian art, or by the herald beams of an earlier, unremembered Renaissance. The author of this ancient sculpture is known. He has written his name above the lintel: "Gisilbertus hoc fecit." I need not enumerate all the other subjects of the carvings on this beautiful porch; the reader will not have any difficulty in discovering some of them for himself--Jerome and his Lion; Hagar and Ishmael driven out by Abraham; Balaam and the Ass; the Presentation in the Temple; and, on the archivolt, the signs of the Zodiac. It is curious that Voltaire appears to have had some influence, good and bad--the good was involuntary--over the destiny of this porch of Autun. While staying at the Château of Montjeu, where he attended the marriage of the Duc de Richelieu, he condescended to visit the cathedral, and so ridiculed the barbarism of its architecture, and especially of its sculptured adornments, that the Canons had the whole of the great tympanum plastered over, to hide the composition of the Last Judgment. In doing this, they preserved it from damage during the Revolution, and it remained so hidden for seventy years.[58] Eventually, after its existence had been entirely forgotten, an intelligent inhabitant of the city suspected that there might be carving beneath the plaster, and made the great discovery.