ions. In size, while in many instances
not having the length of nave of several in England, they have nearly
always an equal, if not a greater, width and an almost invariably
greater height, though not equal in superficial area to St. Peter's in
Italy, the Dom at Cologne, or even the cathedral at Seville in Spain.

Such Romanesque types as are to be seen to the northward of the Loire
are mostly found in the smaller churches of Brittany, while the early
transition type, so familiar throughout the Netherlands, is, in France,
usually seen in the neighbourhood of the frontiers of the Low Countries.

"Les Grandes Cathedrales" of the north are distinctly those of Paris,
Amiens, Reims, Rouen, Beauvais, and Chartres; and it is to them that
reference must continually be made; while the severely plain transitory
types of Noyon or Soissons, or the more effective development of Laon,
and the flamboyant structures of Troyes and Nantes, at least lean toward
the decadence.

The difficulty of assigning ranks to these monumental cathedrals is made
the greater by reason of the fact that to-day it is with but one people
that we have to reckon, so far as their temperament and environment is
concerned. Since feudal times the movement has ever been toward one
nation, one people, and one view, different from that presented in the
middle ages.

For centuries after the break of Roman power it had been mostly one
local influence against another which prevented perfect cohesion to any
national spirit, and thus it was that the tendencies of the cathedral
builders, though Roman as to their teaching and religion, and doubtless,
in many instances, with regard to their birth as well, followed no
special style until the era of Gothic development. Unconsciously,
transitory types crept in, until suddenly throughout northern Europe
there bloomed forth within less than a century of time the so-called
Gothic in all its splendour, and with scarce a century between the
commencement and the completion of some of the most notable of the
group. The Romanesque types which still lingered in Brittany, though
well worthy of special consideration to-day, are unimportant and in a
way insignificant when compared with the grand group.

To most of us it will be impossible to conjure up any more significant
thought with regard to mediaeval church architecture than that fostered
by the memories of acquaintanceship with these examples of north France;
an opinion which