all its boasting cannot begin to make anything
comparable to that antique glass made and put in place by faith and love
long before Columbus discovered America. There are tiny bits of it in
this country as a result of the relic hunting of our soldiers in the
World's War. Many of them got a fragment of the shattered glass of
Rheims, "petrified color" deep sky blue, ruby, golden green, and sent it
home to a sweetheart, a wife or sister to be mounted on a ring or set in
a pin.

The donors for the most part of the glass of the thirteenth century
Cathedrals, were guilds at that time. For the Cathedral of Chartres
e.g. the drapers and the furriers gave five windows, the porters one,
the tavern-keepers two, the bakers two.

In Dante's time glass-making reached its climax and then the curve began
to decline, until in the eighteenth century and in the early part of the
nineteenth century glass-making reached its lowest point.

Great as was Dante's day in the efficiency and education promoted by the
Guild system--Dante himself was a member of it--the achievement of his
era in architecture was the "most notable perhaps because what happened
there epitomizes all that was done elsewhere and the nature of what was
accomplished is precisely that which informed the whole body of medieval
achievement." (The Substance of Gothic, p. 137.)

In the course of the century that gave birth to Dante, architecture rose
to a glory never equalled before or after. In France alone between the
years of 1180 and 1270 eighty great cathedrals and five hundred abbey
houses were constructed. It was in this century that Notre Dame, Paris,
arose, "the only un-Greek thing" said R.M. Stevenson, "which unites
majesty elegance and awfulness." But it was not alone. Other Notre Dames
sprung up in Germany, Italy and Spain. In England also, in that period
there were more than twenty cathedrals in the course of construction,
some of them in places as small as Wells, whose population never
exceeded four thousand.

To look today upon Wells with its facade of nearly three hundred
statues, one hundred and fifty-three of which are life size or heroic
and then to realize that this magnificent poem in stone was composed by
villagers unknown to us and unhonored and unsung, is to open our eyes
to the wonders accomplished by the foremost age of architecture.

So wonderful are those cathedrals that Ferguson, the standard English
authority on Gothic architecture, does not