his personal way of conception and execution prevail there,
renders his own work vivid and organic, and apt to catch the interest
of other people. He is no longer a Byzantine, but a Greek--an
unconscious Greek. Proof of this is in the famous Beau-Dieu of Amiens,
as they call that benign, almost classically proportioned figure, on
the central pillar of the great west doorway; though in fact neither
that, nor anything else on the west front of Amiens, is quite the best
work here. For that we must look rather to the sculpture of the portal
of the south transept, called, from a certain image there, Portail de
la Vierge doree, gilded at the expense of some unknown devout person at
the beginning of the last century. A presentation of the mystic, the
delicately miraculous, story of Saint Honore, eighth Bishop of Amiens,
and his companions, with its voices, its intuitions, and celestial
intimations, it has evoked a correspondent method of work at once [121]
naive and nicely expressive. The rose, or roue, above it, carries on
the outer rim seventeen personages, ascending and descending--another
piece of popular philosophy--the wheel of fortune, or of human life.

And they were great brass-founders, surely, who at that early day
modelled and cast the tombs of the Bishops Evrard and Geoffrey, vast
plates of massive black bronze in half-relief, like abstract thoughts
of those grand old prelatic persons. The tomb of Evrard, who laid the
foundations (qui fundamenta hujus basilicae locavit), is not quite as
it was. Formerly it was sunk in the pavement, while the tomb of Bishop
Geoffrey opposite (it was he closed in the mighty vault of the nave:
hanc basilicam culmen usque perduxit), itself vaulted-over the space of
the grave beneath. The supreme excellence of those original workmen,
the journeymen of Robert de Luzarches and his successor, would seem
indeed to have inspired others, who have been at their best here, down
to the days of Louis the Fourteenth. It prompted, we may think, a high
level of execution, through many revolutions of taste in such matters;
in the marvellous furniture of the choir, for instance, like a whole
wood, say a thicket of old hawthorn, with its curved topmost branches
spared, slowly transformed by the labour of a whole family of artists,
during fourteen years, into the stalls, in number one hundred and ten,
with nearly four [122] thousand figures. Yet they are but on a level
with the Flamboyant carv