othing can efface that first breathless sense of soaring height and
beauty which impresses you on your first entrance as you look up to
the great windows of the clerestory, with the saints upon their
silvery glass, set between the long slender shafts of columns that
spring straight from the ground, and leap upwards like a fountain
clear and undivided to the keystone of the roof. Though I was
unwillingly bound to confess that even the old Rose windows
disappointed me, the bunch of glaring cauliflowers which is the new
western Rose is worse than anything in any building of this size and
general beauty. But the other windows are an abiding joy, made of that
exquisite moonlit glass, in which the colours shine like jewels, and
are set as rarely.

Nor is the Church without its claim to right of place in history as
well as art. For the old Abbey of St. Ouen was one of the most
considerable in Normandy. It held fiefs not only in the city, but in
the Foret Verte outside, and lands all over the province, with the
right of nomination to very many livings. From the Pope himself the
Abbot held, since 1256, certain valuable privileges in conferring
minor dignities, and in the list of those who held that splendid post
after the uncle of the Conqueror, are the names of d'Estouteville, de
Lorraine, de Bourbon, de Vendome, de la Tour d'Auvergne, and lastly
Etienne Charles de Lomenie de Brienne, who was found dead in his bed
when the warrant had gone out for his arrest in 1794. In 1602 only was
the ceremony of the "Oison bride" given up, which commemorated the old
privileges of the Abbot's Mills. Even longer lasted the ancient
ceremony by which the monks received every archbishop on his entrance
into Rouen, and on his death watched for the first night by his bier
in their own abbey. In their cemetery you have already seen Jeanne
d'Arc go through her mockery of "abjuration." Within it, too, her
memory was "rehabilitated." In this church young Talbot was laid to
rest, who fell in the English wars. In its cemetery was received James
II. of Gt. Britain, who was escorted, on his flight from England, by
armed citizens of Rouen from the Chartreuse of St. Julien to the
Abbey.

[Illustration: THE NAVE OF ST. OUEN]

And it may be that the old Sacristan, for your good fortune, will be
living still to tell you of the greatest Englishman he has ever heard
of, John Ruskin, who often looked into that quaint mirror of Holy
Water, and watched the stra