modified at San Miniato in Florence, a few years before, though these were certainly never built at Jumièges. The west front, with its tall, flanking towers, is of the Como type (query: Is the hand of the Comacine master visible here?), while all the vertical proportions are more lofty and aspiring than had ever been known before. As a matter of fact, given the chevet with its aisle and radiating chapels, which was already being worked out farther south by the simple process of halving the Syrian, Byzantine, Ravennesque, and Carolingian polygonal church and attaching this to the simultaneously developed nave, and you have all the potency of the Gothic system, the high vault (sexpartite or quadripartite) with its flying buttresses now to be worked out at Caen, giving the final structural element, while the expanding Catholic faith and the buoyant northern blood were woven together to have issue in that essentially mediæval character which was to transform the whole, infusing it with that peculiar spiritual quality which gave its distinctive character, through a new vision of beauty, to the art that had been evolved for the full expression of a Christian civilisation at last triumphant and supreme over a dead paganism. After Cluny and Jumièges, Paris, Bourges, Chartres, and Reims are inevitable, and the working out of a great destiny is headlong and almost incredible. Jumièges was finished in 1066, the year of the Norman conquest of England; Reims was begun in 1212. Within a space of a century and a half the greatest architectural evolution in history had taken place, so echoing and voicing an equally unprecedented development in human character and culture. In 1066, hardly more than fifty years had passed since Christian society emerged from two centuries of barbarism; in 1212 it had mounted to the loftiest levels of human achievement, with a theology, a philosophy, and an art, whatever its form, with which there had been nothing comparable in the past, with which the achievements that were to follow, as they now show themselves in the red light of a revealing war, seem only the insane wanderings of a disorganised horde.