at Reims and at Paris, with the gangs of
sinners held in chains tugged by demons, and those of the same kind at
Amiens, have none of them such breadth of scope."

At Bourges, as in all works of this class in the Middle Ages, the dead
are escaping from their sepulchres, and on the uppermost frieze, below a
figure of Christ, with whom the Virgin and Saint John are interceding,
Saint Michael is weighing souls; to the left devils are dragging away
the wicked, and to the right angels are conducting the blessed.

The resurrection of the dead, as it is represented by the image-maker of
Le Berry, is enough to set the noisy prudery of the Catholics neighing,
for the figures are nude, and certain reticences, usually observed at
any rate in the female form, are here omitted. Men and women push up the
lid of the tomb, stride across the edge, leap up, roll over pell mell,
one above another; some ecstatically clasping their hands in prayer,
their eyes fixed on heaven; others anxiously looking about them on all
sides; others praying with terror, throwing up their arms; others,
again, in dejected attitudes, beating their breasts in lamentable
self-accusation; and yet others who are dazzled by the abrupt change
from darkness to light, shaking their numbed limbs and trying to move.

The mad confusion of all these human beings, suddenly awakened, and
brought like owls into the light of day, trembling with fear or with joy
as they see and understand that the day of Judgment is come, is all
expressed with a fulness, a spirit, a certainty of observation which
leave the petty accuracy and mild energy of the Chartres sculptor far
behind them.

In the upper division, again, the weighing of souls goes on in a
magnificent composition; Saint Michael with wide-spread wings holds a
large pair of scales and smiles as he caresses a little child with
folded hands, while a goat-headed devil watches eagerly to seize him if
the Archangel should turn away; and behind this lingering demon begins
the dolorous procession of the outcast. Nor have we here the infernal
courtliness of the scene as represented at Chartres, the doubtful
consideration of an evil spirit gently driving in a nun; it is brutality
in all its horror, the lowest violence; the sometimes comic side of
these struggles is not to be seen here. At Bourges the myrmidons of the
deep work and hit with a will. A devil with a wild beast's muzzle and a
drunkard's face in the middle of his fat stom