et conjunctionem cum iis qui vere sunt,
per lucem veritatis. Et tertium, Salvatori supplex oro, ut ab oculis
animorum nostrorum caliginem prorsus abstergas; ut norimus bene, qui
Deus, aut Mortalis habendus. Amen."]

22. And having prayed this prayer, or at least, read it with honest
wishing, (which if you cannot, there is no hope of your at present
taking pleasure in any human work of large faculty, whether poetry,
painting, or sculpture,) we may walk a little farther westwards down
the nave, where, in the middle of it, but only a few yards from its
end, two flat stones (the custode will show you them), one a little
farther back than the other, are laid over the graves of the two great
bishops, all whose strength of life was given, with the builder's, to
raise this temple. Their actual graves have not been disturbed; but
the tombs raised over them, once and again removed, are now set on
your right and left hand as you look back to the apse, under the third
arch between the nave and aisles.

23. Both are of bronze, cast at one flow--and with insuperable, in
some respects inimitable, skill in the caster's art.

"Chefs-d'oeuvre de fonte,--le tout fondu d'un seul jet, et
admirablement."[52] There are only two other such tombs left in
France, those of the children of St. Louis. All others of their
kind--and they were many in every great cathedral of France--were
first torn from the graves they covered, to destroy the memory of
France's dead; and then melted down into sous and centimes, to buy
gunpowder and absinthe with for her living,--by the Progressive Mind
of Civilization in her first blaze of enthusiasm and new light, from
1789 to 1800.

[Footnote 52: Viollet le Duc, vol. viii., p. 256. He adds: "L'une
d'elles est comme art" (meaning general art of sculpture), "un
monument du premier ordre;" but this is only partially true--also I
find a note in M. Gilbert's account of them, p. 126: "Les deux doigts
qui manquent, a la main droite de l'eveque Gaudefroi paraissent etre
un defaut survenu a la fonte." See further, on these monuments, and
those of St. Louis' children, Viollet le Duc, vol, ix., pp. 61, 62.]

The children's tombs, one on each side of the altar of St. Denis, are
much smaller than these, though wrought more beautifully. These beside
you are the _only two Bronze tombs of her Men of the great ages_, left
in France!

24. And they are the tombs of the pastors of her people, who built for
her the first perfe