realisation that Reims is a record of human greatness to which the gunners and their masters cannot attain, a lasting reproach to inferiority, a sermon and a prayer, a menace to bloated self-sufficiency and to a baseless pride. Nobility engenders hate as well as reverence, the choice depends only on the nature of the man who confronts it, and there never has been a time in all history when decadence did not bring into existence a hatred of all fine and noble things that for very rage and resentment willed the destruction of the dumb accuser. Reims, and what Reims stood for, cannot exist in the world together with their potent and efficient negation; therefore Reims perishes, as has perished at similar times in the past so much of the record in sublimity and beauty of that human superiority which is the silent accuser of all spiritual and ethical degeneration. For the making of the west front of Reims all the great masters and craftsmen of France gathered together, and the sculpture showed not only greater excellence than may be found elsewhere, but a greater variety in genius and personality. It is not that in the doors of this façade were to be found great statues in conspicuous places with lesser work all around; every piece of sculpture or of carving was a masterpiece of its kind. High up in the gables, hidden in the shadows of the archivolts, forgotten in odd corners where only persistent search would reveal them, were little figures or isolated heads as carefully thought out and as finely felt as the august hierarchies of the front itself. Personality, varied, vital, distinguished, marked the sculpture of Reims, together with an unerring sense of beauty of formalised line, and an erudition, a familiarity with the Scriptures, with scholastic philosophy, with the [Illustration: THREE DESTROYED FIGURES FROM REIMS]