“We may take it for granted,” Mr. Lonergan says in his “Historic Churches of Paris,” “that those who dedicated the church to the Virgin were not influenced alone by the fact that a previous temple in her honour had stood on the banks of the river, but by the impetus given to what Protestants call her ‘worship’ and Catholics her ‘cult’ or devotion in the twelfth century.” From the earliest times there existed, especially among sailors and fishermen, the feeling of devotion to the Virgin Mary. They prayed to her who held the Divine Infant on her knees to intercede for the lives of men who sailed across the waters on dark and starless nights. This worship of the Virgin steadily grew all over France, and the founders of the great monastic orders--Saint Augustin, Saint Benedict, and Saint Francis, and the famous Saint Bernard of Clairvaulx--are all included by Dante as paying special devotion to the Virgin; and history has furnished us with many other names, amongst which are those of Hildebert, the bishop of Le Mans, Yves and Pierre, bishops of Chartres, and the scholar of St. Denis, Pierre Abélard. At no time was this more noticeable than in the centuries following the completion of Notre Dame. In consequence of this great growth of Mary-worship, the Virgin came to be regarded as the protectress of the people--as, indeed, she is to this day--and the Church of Notre Dame began to be the people’s church, a kind of centre, civil as well as ecclesiastical, of the city life. For instance, Notre Dame in Paris became not only the house of worship and prayer, but “the house both of God and man,” and this through no irreverent feeling. The _parvis_ or garden in front of the Cathedral became a gathering-ground for the townsfolk--a remnant of this feeling, it would seem, still exists in the markets which in lesser towns are nearly always held round the church--fairs took place there, the buyers bringing their purchases to be blessed by the priest as they passed the church steps; and the various festivals of the Church gave rise to secular feasts and sports of all kinds, as well as to the performance of the miracle plays which were attended by the people with such simple wonder and reverence, and which in England laid the foundation of the secular comedies. The monks of Saint Germain originally came from Autun, and at first acknowledged the rule of Saint Basil, which was afterwards exchanged for that of Saint Benedict. After its restoration in the eleventh century the foundations became very powerful, and round its walls grew up the _bourg_ of Saint Germain; later it became the Faubourg of that name, the “intellectual quarter” of Paris, the haunt of all the most brilliant spirits of the day; whose streets were trodden by great men, and marked by the footsteps of genius.