Transcriber's Note: Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Italic text is denoted by _underscores_ and bold text by =equal signs=. STAINED GLASS AGENTS AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64 & 66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK AUSTRALASIA THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 205 FLINDERS LANE, MELBOURNE CANADA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LTD. ST. MARTIN'S HOUSE, 70 BOND STREET, TORONTO INDIA MACMILLAN & COMPANY, LTD. MACMILLAN BUILDING, BOMBAY 309 BOW BAZAAR STREET, CALCUTTA [Illustration: PLATE I THE ASCENSION WINDOW, LE MANS Possibly Eleventh Century] STAINED GLASS OF THE MIDDLE AGES IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE PAINTED BY LAWRENCE B. SAINT DESCRIBED BY HUGH ARNOLD ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK SOHO SQUARE·LONDON·MCMXIII PREFACE The Cathedral verger, conducting his flock of tourists round the building, while giving them plenty of really interesting and valuable information about it (for the verger of to-day is a different man from his predecessor, and is often very intelligent and well informed), remarks briefly, "The glass is of the thirteenth century"--or fourteenth or fifteenth, as the case may be; the procession gazes carelessly at it, and passes on. Yet from out of that dazzling and glowing labyrinth of coloured jewels a past age is speaking far more articulately, if one stops to unravel the message, than ever in stone or wood, and it is for those who can be induced to take that second look which will be followed by a third and a fourth and many more that I have written this book. It is impossible in a book of this size to give an adequate review of all the important windows even within the limits of place and time which I have set myself. I have therefore chosen for study certain typical windows in each century, and have written about them some of the things which interest me and which, I hope, will interest others. The work of the countries and period I have chosen is of course the most important of all. There is beauty, it is true, in much Renaissance work (only a prig could resist the gaiety and charm of the windows of St. Vincent at Rouen), but it is for the most part beauty achieved in spite of, and not through, the material. There is beautiful mediæval work in Germany and Italy, but the Germans, till the Renaissance, clung to a rather lifeless and archaic convention, and the Italians were hampered by their greater knowledge of painting. The art has found its noblest expression in the work of the great school which for nearly the whole of the Middle Ages was common to France and England.