In France and Germany there are many remarkable leaded spires, but we can only stay to mention the steeple at Chalons-sur-Marne, the central flèche at Amiens, and the belfry at Calais. The steeple at Chalons is a most interesting work, large and well-designed, with faint and fascinating remains of a gorgeous scheme of colour decoration patterning the whole surface of the lead with figures and canopies resembling the drawing on stained glass, the lead rolls passing across the design like the iron glazing bars. This was carefully drawn by Burges and illustrated in the _Builder_ for 1856, and the whole spire is represented to scale in the Sketch Book of the Architectural Association for 1883. This is a work of the end of the thirteenth century, and the decoration was done in the following century. It will be well to mention it more particularly later, but as Viollet-le-Duc says that nearly all the lead work of the middle ages was so decorated we may conclude that such a magnificent spire as St. Paul’s was not entirely bare of gold and colour. The flèche at Amiens, which rises from the roof some 100 feet of “transparent fretwork which seems to bend to the west wind,” is well illustrated in Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionary as well as by Burges. Every resource of the art was lavished on it, pinnacles and niches, lead statues, tracery, great circular coronets of pierced cast work. The sheet lead was diapered with fleurs-de-lis, and all was decorated with designs in colour and gold. Although perfectly Gothic in form it is a work of the sixteenth century, and the painting is in the manner of the Renaissance. At Calais the fine belfry represented in Fig. 14, which was completed about 1600, is in some respects very English in character, while on the other hand it is a northern representative of a class of bulbous spires which are as much cupolas as spires, and were probably often intended as fantastic domes. These, although later found all across Europe, from Russia to Belgium, were never naturalised in England on a large scale, our nearest approach to them being in the ogee cupolas of small turrets and lanterns and some of Wren’s spires. In Holland they were very much affected in the most extravagant forms, and they are now the constant form of church spire seen in eastern Europe. They seem much at home in such a city as Buda-Pesth, and have doubtless characteristics which endear them to those of Mongolian blood and speech. It is an interesting point to decide whether these forms are in origin actually Eastern--“travelled topes” as a friend says--or whether they are the natural outcome of a combination of spire and dome in a period of extravagant and declining taste. [Illustration: FIG. 14.--Calais Belfry.] § V. OF DOMES.