st. Then, as companion
figures, Saint Ambrose and Saint Jerome;--the first often redundant and
pompous in second-rate prose, but ingenious and delightful in his hymns;
the second who, in the Vulgate, really created the language of Church
use, purifying and airing the Latin of Pagan literature, foul with
lascivious meaning, reeking at once of an old goat and of essence of
roses. Again, face to face, two Popes, Saint Leo and Saint Gregory, and
two Abbots of Monasteries, Saint Laumer and Saint Avitus, who was Prior
of a House founded in the forests of Le Perche."

These two last statues had been added later; their style and costume
betrayed a date subsequent to the thirteenth century; had they, then,
taken the place of others representing the same Monks, or different
Saints?

The tympanum again expressed the same purpose of parallelism, evidently
intended by the master of the work. This was also devoted to two miracle
workers, to a correspondence in this respect of the north and the south.
It represented episodes in the lives of Saint Nicholas and Saint Martin:
Saint Nicholas furnishing a dowry for the daughters of a gentleman who
was dying of hunger, and about to sell their honour, and the sepulchre
of this archbishop exuding an oil of sovereign efficacy in the cure of
diseases; Saint Martin giving half of his cloak to a beggar, and then
beholding Christ wearing the garment.

The remainder of this porch was of secondary interest. In the mouldings
of the arches and in the pillars of the bays the ranks of the Confessors
appeared again, the nine choirs of Angels, the parable of the wise and
foolish Virgins, a replica of the four-and-twenty elders on the royal
front, the Prophets of the Old Testament, the Virtues, the Vices, the
Christian Virgins, and small statues of the Apostles, all more or less
injured and more or less invisible.

This south porch, with its seven hundred and eighty-three statues and
statuettes, spoken of by the guide-books as the most attractive of all,
was to artists, on the contrary, the least absorbing; for, with the
exception of the noble effigies of Saint Theodore and Saint George, the
glorification of the others who dwell there was on the whole, from the
artistic point of view, very inferior in interest to the sculpture on
the twelfth-century west front, or even to that of the north porch--that
complete embodiment of the Two Testaments--where the sculpture, if more
barbarous, was less placid and