This is one of those sudden and unprecedented happenings in mediæval art that mark the vast vitality, imagination, and personal initiative of the time. It has no progenitors, no successors, it is a sport of personal genius, and the masterpiece of one Ervin de Steinbach, who appears to have been the architect for the later portions of the cathedral. Apart from Strasbourg, however, sculpture seems never to have been a favoured art in the Rhineland, and the painting of Cologne remains its chief claim to honourable record, though stained glass reached considerable heights, as is seen both at Cologne and Strasbourg, and on definitely local lines. By the fifteenth century the Flemish schools of art of all kinds had succeeded by their sheer achievement in establishing their dominant influence along the Rhine, and with the Renaissance the lingering elements of an instinctive practice of beauty quite died away. XV THE FOREST OF ARDEN Where the immemorial Forest of the Ardennes closes in on the Moselle that winds beautifully to the Rhine, there is a little land that can give us small aid in the way of art, for the hand of man and of an implacable fatality has been heavy, and little remains, but it is a place of infinite charm and of significance as well, while in the last year its ancient name has come into the light again, even as it was some centuries ago. It has borne many names, acknowledged many sovereignties; Roman Belgica, part of the kingdom of the Ripuarian Franks, Austrasia, Lorraine, a province of the Germanic Holy Roman Empire, Burgundy, the Netherlands (Spanish and Austrian), France again, both of the republican and imperial mode, then back in an amorphous Germany, and now, crushed into a tiny but concentrated state, an independent but sovereign Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, imprisoned for the moment in dark fastnesses of oppression wherefrom no word issues forth, but destined under God to a triumphant release and to a restoration that may mean a return to earlier and wider frontiers.