Chronologically, the next great sculpture of France is that of the Cathedral of Paris, but as I have arbitrarily excluded this city from the survey, since one must stop somewhere, while Paris requires a volume to itself, it is only necessary to say that in spite of the devastations of man during six centuries, ending with the dull barbarity of the architect Sufflot, who hacked away the trumeau of the great central west door, together with a large section of the tympanum of the Last Judgment, in order to provide a more magnificent means of entrance for processions, enough still exists to show the singular mastery of the art. As for the statue of Our Lady on the north transept, it is one of the finest works of sculpture of any time or place, the perfection of the drapery finding rivals only in Greece. It is interesting to realise that this marvellous work antedates Niccolo Pisano by more than a century, so that if there still are those who search for the origins of sculpture after the great blank of the Dark Ages, they must forsake the Renaissance and Italy and find what they sought in France during the culmination of the Middle Ages. At Amiens there is also, over the south portal, a figure of the Blessed Virgin, and while it is wholly different in spirit from that of Paris, it is almost as lovely and even more delicate and full of charm. Paris has the majesty and nobility of Michael Angelo, with nothing of his high but inopportune paganism, but this is like Mino da Fiesole, with all his daintiness and sweetness of feeling, and added to this an almost playful humanism that is wonderfully appealing. “Le Beau Dieu” of Amiens, on the trumeau of the central west door is almost in the class of the Paris Virgin and the sculpture of Reims, and is perhaps more nearly a satisfactory showing forth of Christ in human form than any other work of art in the world. The whole vast church is a pageant of carven figures--prophets, saints, apostles, kings, virtues and vices, symbolical characters, scenes from the Old and New Testaments, the lives of the saints, philosophy, romance--every tympanum is carved in bas relief, and the wall below the columns of the west portals is set with innumerable medallions of the signs of the zodiac and the labours of man. Never was there such an apotheosis of imagination, and only at Reims is there anything a degree finer as art. Even there the difference is mostly one of personal taste; if you like the lost marvels of Reims better than the miraculously preserved wonders of Amiens, well and good; it is for you to say, for both are matchless, each after its own kind. How the amazing array of carvings and statues at Amiens has survived passes the understanding; one would have supposed that its spiritual emphasis, its priceless nature, and its singular beauty would have subjected it to the sequent attentions of Huguenots, Revolutionaries, and the nineteenth century, but all have passed it by; and even the