might think, to create a paradise for the imagination, where one could escape from the too numerous horrors of a none too accommodating world. The more specifically devotional pictures are very numerous and generally anonymous; painters then were craftsmen, members of guilds devoted to the upbuilding of the highest standards of workmanship, and caring little for their own personal fame. Picture exhibitions and competitions for prizes and medals were also unknown, which made a difference. In all these works is the same sweet humanism, the invariable personal appeal, and it is easy to understand that a new art such as this must have been a wonderful boon to a weary and disappointed generation. The Teuton had at last found a field for the expression of that æsthetic sense that was one of the inalienable possessions of man down to the nineteenth century, and he made the very best of it, as he was to make the best of the still newer art of music a few centuries later. The world wanted this new art, and from Cologne it spread rapidly to the west into Flanders and Brabant, and south to Franconia and Suabia. To the [Illustration: BACHARACH ON THE RHINE] school of Cologne Hubert van Eyck owed much, he could hardly have been what he was but for Master Wilhelm and his contemporaries, but he added something of his own Flanders, and more of himself, and the art he initiated rose immeasurably above its source. In sculpture also the Teuton found a facile and congenial form of expression, but this art developed rather to the north and east of the Rhine. Hildesheim was, of course, the centre, for it was here that Bishop Bernward gathered or educated his amazing craftsmen in bronze. Where such an artist came from, as he who made the cathedral doors and the bronze column, heaven alone knows, for it was early in the eleventh century that these came into existence. They began a school, however, that continued in Saxony for many centuries and had its influence over all Germany. The early thirteenth-century bronze font, also in the cathedral, is one of those masterpieces that defy comparison. The great school of sculpture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was that which grew up between the Elbe and the Hartz Mountains, not only in Hildesheim but Halberstadt, Bamberg, Freiberg, Magdebourg, Naumbourg, the masters of Magdebourg ranking with those of Amiens and Reims. Undoubtedly there is French influence here, perhaps through the training, under the masters of France, of the craftsmen who later went back to their native lands to practise their art. In Strasbourg the French influence is even more clearly seen but here it is rather in the line of the more southerly schools. It is at Strasbourg that we find that singular and ingenious masterpiece, the “Pillar of the Angels,” slender grouped shafts with intermediate niches, one above the other, each containing an exquisite statue of an apostle, an angel, or, at the top, our Lord at the Day of Judgment.