le entreaty of its senior by
babbling prayer and ingratiating smiles; to persuade the Father by
childlike lisping.

"But to return to the west portal," Durtal went on, "in spite of the
importance of its grand decoration, displaying the Eternal Triumph of
the Word, the interest of artists is irresistibly attracted to the
ground storey of the building, where nineteen colossal stone statues
stand in the space that extends from tower to tower; part against the
wall, and part in the recesses of the door-bays.

"The finest sculpture in the world is certainly that we find here. There
are seven kings, seven saints or prophets, and five queens. There were
originally twenty-four of these statues, but five have disappeared and
left no trace.

"They all wear glories excepting the three first, nearest to the new
belfry, and all stand under canopies of pierced work, representing roofs
or tabernacles, palaces, bridges--a whole town in little, Sion for
children, a dwarfed New Jerusalem.

"They all are standing, each on a column with a guilloche pattern; on
plinths carved over with lozenges, diamond points, fir-cone scales, with
chain patterns, fretwork, billets, chequers like a chess-board of which
the alternate squares are hollowed out; and paved with a sort of mosaic,
inlaid patterns which, like the borders of the church windows, suggest a
reminiscence of Mussulman goldsmith's work, and show the origin of the
style brought from the East by the Crusaders.

"The three first statues in the recess to the left, nearest the new
spire, do not stand on any pattern borrowed from the heathen; they are
trampling on indescribable monsters. One, a king whose head having been
lost, has been fitted with the head of a queen, treads on a man
entangled by serpents; another king stands on a woman who holds a
reptile by the tail with one hand, and with the other strokes the plait
of her own hair; the third, a queen, her head crowned with a plain gold
fillet and her shape that of a woman with child, while her face is
smiling but commonplace, has at her feet two dragons, a monkey, a toad,
a dog, and a snake with an ape's head. What is the meaning of these
enigmas? No one knows--no more, indeed, than we know the names of the
sixteen other statues placed along the porch.

"Some believe that they represent the ancestry of the Messiah, but this
assertion has no evidence to support it; others find here a mixed
assemblage of the heroes of the Old Testame