Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival building, its great porches arched around with sculptured saints and prophets. There are two towers, one of them topped by a surprising steeple, a hundred feet in height, which is a landmark for all the country round. The deep porches rich in shadow, the slender lofty towers, compose an exterior altogether simple, noble, and religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like all Gothic churches, is best seen from without. Within, that bare unending height of pillar, that cold frigid solemnity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, is less touching than the grand yet homely massiveness of Romanesque, or even than the serene placidity of the classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his prayers in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built apparently for the worship of giraffes or pelicans? Oh for the little, low-roofed chapels of St. Mark’s, the unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant’ Ambrogio, or even the simple, pious beauty of such a Norman village church as St. Georges de Boscherville, near Rouen! Think of the quaint, sombre poetry of Notre-Dame-du-Port at Clermont-Ferrand, of Saint Julien at Brioude, or Saint Trophime at Arles; or even remember the elegant and holy grace of the Parisian St. Etienne du Mont--these be churches in which to say one’s prayers. Whereas your Northern Gothic is a marvellous poem from without; but how frigid is the chill interior of those august and noble monuments! Duty divorced from charity is not more cold; and I can easier imagine a filial and happy spirit of worship in the humblest square-towered parish church. As it happened, we did not see the interior of Senlis at its best. The spring cleaning was in full force; the straw chairs were heaped in an immense barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral--and really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like Socrates in his basket--an energetic char-man was brushing the cobwebs from the sculptured capitals with a huge besom made of the dried but leafy boughs of trees. He had been hauled up there in a sort of crate by some ingenious system of ropes and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that vast cleanly interior was not unpicturesque; it was like a caricature of any picture of Mr. Orchardson’s. IV