[ABOUT six miles north of the original Paris stands the great =Basilica of St. Denis=—the only church in Paris, and I think in France, called by that ancient name, which carries us back at once to the days of the Roman Empire, and in itself bears evidence to the antiquity of the spot as a place of worship. Around it, a squalid modern industrial town has slowly grown up; but the nucleus of the whole place, as the name itself shows, is the body and shrine of the martyred bishop, St. Denis. Among the numerous variants of his legend, the most accepted is that which makes the apostle of Paris have carried his head to this spot from Montmartre. (Others say he was beheaded in Paris and walked to Montmartre, his body being afterwards translated to the Abbey; while there are who see in his legend a survival of the Dionysiac festival and sacrifice of the vine-growers round Paris—Denis=Dionysius=Dionysus.) However that may be, a chapel was erected in 275 above the grave of St. Denis, on the spot now occupied by the great Basilica; and later, Ste. Geneviève was instrumental in restoring it. Dagobert I, one of the few Frankish kings who lived much in Paris, built a “basilica” in place of the chapel (630), and instituted by its side a Benedictine Abbey. The church and monastery which possessed the actual body of the first bishop and great martyr of Paris formed naturally the holiest site in the neighbourhood of the city; and even before Paris became the capital of a kingdom, the abbots were persons of great importance in the Frankish state. The desire to repose close to the grave of a saint was habitual in early times, and even (with the obvious alteration of words) antedated Christianity—every wealthy Egyptian desiring in the same way to “sleep with Osiris.” Dagobert himself was buried in the church he founded, beside the holy martyr; and in later times this very sacred spot became for the same reason the recognised burial-place of the French kings. Dagobert’s fane was actually consecrated by the Redeemer Himself, who descended for the purpose by night, with a great multitude of saints and angels.