The hospital of Beaune has been so often described as to call for little comment. The painted timber vault of the great hall seems to have been imitated from that of Tonnerre. Its distinctive character has unfortunately been destroyed by the construction of a ceiling, the joists of which rest on the tie-beams of the original skeleton. But the inner court is intact, with the arcade and well and wash-house so familiar from descriptions and illustrations. Another picturesque and often described feature is the great roof on the south side, with its double row of dormer windows surmounted by a rich ornamentation of hammered lead. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the practice of vaulting the great halls of hospitals with stone was abandoned. It became usual in France and in Flanders to cover the vast aisles with timber roofs, the boarded vaults of which were either pointed or barrel-shaped. The term _maladrerie_ was applied to the small lazar-houses, numbers of which were built in France in the neighbourhood of abbeys or of priories remote from towns and great religious centres. The _Maladrerie du Tortoir_, not far from Laon, on the _Route de la Fère_, is a type of such rural hospitals. Both in plan and in the details of construction it recalls the hospital of Tonnerre, more especially in the ingenious arrangement of the interior. In the planning of these charitable institutions mediæval architects exhibited the same skill and ingenuity which distinguished their treatment of religious monuments. Viollet-le-Duc has pointed out the strange illogicality of such a theory as that which would make artists who showed extraordinary subtlety in religious buildings responsible for so much coarseness in civil structures. We must not hold them accountable for the destruction of their well-planned hospitals from the sixteenth century onwards, and the substitution of buildings, the main preoccupation of whose architects was to provide accommodation for as many patients as possible. Louis XIV. endowed the hospitals built in his reign with the revenues of the lazar-houses and _maladreries_, for which there was no further occasion, leprosy having disappeared from his dominions. But his hospitals leave much to be desired from the hygienic point of view; the mediæval hospitals, on the other hand, have a monumental simplicity of appearance, and offer a liberal supply of light, air, and space to their patients. We do not assert the superiority of the cellular system commonly adopted in hospitals from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, over that of the open wards of our own times, but we may be permitted to point out its great moral advantages. And, as our learned authority remarks, the system owed its adoption to a noble delicacy of charitable feeling in the mediæval founders and builders of our _maisons dieu_.