rful episcopal patron, invested
their civic pride in a vast cathedral, outrivalling neighbours, as
being in effect their parochial church, and promoted there the new,
revolutionary, Gothic manner, at the expense of the derivative and
traditional, Roman or Romanesque, style, the imperial style, of the
great monastic churches. Nay, those grand and beautiful people's
churches of the thirteenth century, churches pre-eminently of "Our
Lady," concurred also with certain novel humanistic movements of
religion itself at that period, above all with the expansion of what is
reassuring and popular in the worship of Mary, as a tender and
accessible, though almost irresistible, intercessor with her severe and
awful Son.

Hence the splendour, the space, the novelty, of the great French
cathedrals in the first Pointed style, monuments for the most part of
the artistic genius of laymen, significant pre-eminently of that Queen
of Gothic churches at Amiens. In most cases those early Pointed
churches are entangled, here or there, by the constructions of the old
round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or
aisle, side by side, though in strong contrast with, the soaring new
Gothic of nave or transept. But of that older [111] manner of the
round arch, the plein-cintre, Amiens has nowhere, or almost nowhere, a
trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of
its first period, found here its completest expression. And while
those venerable, Romanesque, profoundly characteristic, monastic
churches, the gregarious product of long centuries, are for the most
part anonymous, as if to illustrate from the first a certain personal
tendency which came in with the Gothic manner, we know the name of the
architect under whom, in the year A.D. 1220, the building of the church
of Amiens began--a layman, Robert de Luzarches.

Light and space--floods of light, space for a vast congregation, for
all the people of Amiens, for their movements, with something like the
height and width of heaven itself enclosed above them to breathe
in;--you see at a glance that this is what the ingenuity of the Pointed
method of building has here secured. For breadth, for the easy flow of
a processional torrent, there is nothing like the "ambulatory," the
aisle of the choir and transepts. And the entire area is on one level.
There are here no flights of steps upward, as at Canterbury, no
descending to dark crypts, as in so ma