If we like, we may go far beyond the dim and mysterious era of the Carolings, finding in Trèves old Roman ruins that take us back four or five centuries earlier, but the real history of this region begins with Charlemagne and takes us to his favourite city of Aix-la-Chapelle for the single, but vastly significant, building left us as evidence of his inspiration and his creative power. With the ending of this day-dream there comes a great silence, while civilisation and culture disappear again, to be restored two centuries later, far to the west, and at the hands of the Normans. Here we find St. Georges de Bocherville, Fécamp, and the inestimable and forgotten ruins of Jumièges. For transition to Gothic we have Senlis, Soissons, Noyon, with Laon and Paris as earliest Gothic of pure and consistent type; Châlons, Amiens, and Reims for culmination, and Abbeville, Rouen, Beauvais, Troyes, and Strasbourg for its sumptuous decline. From the other hand we go on from Aix to Cologne for the fine eleventh-century work that took up the tale after the second Dark Ages that followed the ending of the empire of the Carolings, with more examples at Laach and in Hildesheim, which also are beyond our survey. A century later we get the consistent Teutonic art of Trèves, Mayence, Spires, and Worms, while the high Gothic of the noon of mediævalism is found at Cologne and Strasbourg, with the last rich fantasy of all, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in Brussels and Antwerp and Malines, in Courtrai, Tournai, Namur, Louvain, Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges. For Renaissance we find all we need, and everywhere; churches, palaces, guild-halls, châteaux, dwellings, from the fanciful transition at Dieppe, Rouen, Gisors, to the sophisticated, well-conditioned, and perfectly artificial restored classic of Nancy. As there is no other country in the north, of equal area, where history has been made so plenteously and of such varied quality, so it is with its art, and its architecture in particular, which marks the beginnings, the culmination, and the close of the three stylistic periods of Christian civilisation in the West--Carolingian, Norman, and Gothic--and through monuments singularly significant and equally notable in their perfection. It would be impossible to quote a tenth of them; there are a hundred at least, each of which demands (and many have received) a volume or more, but at least we can pick the most priceless, either for history or beauty, in a farewell that may be final for all, as already it is for such consummate and vanished masterpieces as the Cloth Hall at Ypres and the Cathedral of Reims. Let us begin with Aix, just over the Belgian [Illustration: JUMIÈGES]