resting-place. If the Greeks, as at least one of them says, really believed there could be no true beauty without bigness, that thought certainly is most specious in regard to architecture; and the thirteenth-century church of Amiens is one of the three or four largest buildings in the world, out of all proportion to any Greek building, both in that and in the multitude of its external sculpture. The chapels of the nave are embellished without by a double range of single figures, or groups, commemorative of the persons, the mysteries, to which they are respectively dedicated--the gigantic form of Christopher, the Mystery of the Annunciation. The builders of the church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are apt to be good, and really make their mark. Robert de Luzarches and his successors aimed rather at the domical outline, with its central point at the centre of the church, in the spire or fleche. The existing spire is a wonderful mass of carpentry [124] of the beginning of the sixteenth century, at which time the lead that carefully wraps every part of it was heavily gilt. The great western towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, example of its species--three profound, sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the House of Judah, ancestors of Our Lady; then the great rose; above it the ringers' gallery, half masking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their top-most storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar, towers, oddly oblong in plan, as if never intended to carry pyramids or spires. They overlook an immense distance in those flat, peat-digging, black and green regions, with rather cheerless rivers, and are the centre of an architectural region wider still--of a group to which Soissons, far beyond the woods of Compiegne, belongs, with St. Quentin, and, towards the west, a too ambitious rival, Beauvais, which has stood however--what we now see of it--for six centuries.