land was an immense effort, and its consequences were far-reaching, but the first crusade was altogether the most interesting event in European history. Never has the Western world shown anything l

he East was the common enemy, always superior in wealth and numbers, frequently in energy, and sometimes in thought and art. The outburst of the first crusade was splendid even in a military s

f churches in every path of tourist travel. Normandy is full of it; Bayeux and Caen contain little else. At the Mount, the eleventh-century work was antiquated before it was finished. In the year 1112, Abbot Roger II was obliged to plan and construct a new group in such haste that it is said to have been finished in 1122. It extends from what we have supposed to be the old refectory to the parvis, and abuts on the three lost spans of the church, covering abo

over their fickleness since. They never tired of its possibilities. Sometimes they put the pointed arch within the round, or above it; sometimes they put the round within the pointed. Sometimes a Roman arch covered a cluster of pointed windows, as though protecting and caressing its children; sometimes a huge pointed arch covered a great rose-window spreading across the whole front of an enormous cathedral, with an arcade of Romanesque windows beneath. The French architects felt no discord, and there wa

a his betrothed. In the twelfth century Saint Bernard recited "Ave Stella Marts" in an ecstasy of miracle before the image of the Virgin, and the armies of France in battle cried, "Notre-Dame-Saint-Denis-Montjoie." What the Roman could no

at they felt they expressed; and if the seventeenth century forgot it, the twentieth in turn has forgotten the seventeenth. History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. The eleventh century is no worse off than its neighbours. The twelfth is, in architecture, rather better of

p. 252) gives a list of Romanesque and Transition crypts, about one hundred and twenty, to serve as examples for the study. The Aquilon is not one of them,

angement. Both show the first heavy hint at the broken arch. There are no nervures-no rib-vaulting,-and hardly a suggestion of the Gothic as one sees it in the splendid crypt of the Gros Fillers close at hand, except the elaborately intersecting vaults and the heavy columns; but the promenoir above is an astonishing leap in time and art. The promenoir has the same arrangement and columns as th

asy for a graduate of the Beaux Arts; and few architectural fields have been so earnestly discussed and disputed. We must not touch it. The age of the "Chanson de Roland" itself is not so dangerous a topic. Our vital needs are met, more or less sufficiently, by taking the promenoir at the Mount, the crypt at Saint-Denis, and the western portal at Chartres, as the trinity of our Transition, and roughly calling their date the years 1115-20, To overload the memory with dates is the vice of every schoolmaster and the passion of every second-rate scholar. Tourists want as few dates as possible; what they wan

refectory, eighty or a hundred persons could have been seated at table, and perhaps this may have been about the scale of the Abbey's needs, at that time. Whatever effort of fancy was needed to place Duke William and Harold in the old refectory of 1058, none whatever is required in order to see his successors in the halls of Roger II. With one exception they were not interesting persons. The exception was Henry II of England and Anjou, and his wife Eleanor of Guienne, who was for a while Regent of Normandy. One of their children was born at Domfront, just beyond Avranches, an

e two towers, crumbled and fell for want of proper support. What would correspond to the cathedrals of Noyon and Soissons and the old clocher and fleche of Chartres

Abbey, and in doing so, set fire unintentionally to the Abbey itself. The sacrilege shocked Philip Augustus, and the wish to conciliate so powerful a vassal as Saint Michel, or his abbot, led the King of France to give a large sum of money for repairing th

administration, or for guests of importance, must be next the refectory. The kitchen and offices would be placed on the lowest stage, if for no other reason, because the magazines were two hundred feet below at the landing-place, and all supplies, including water, had to be hauled up an inclined plane by windlass. To administer such a society required the most efficient management. An abbot on this scale was a very great man, indeed, who enjoyed an establishment of his own, close by, with officers in no small number; for the monks alone numbered sixty, and even these were not enough for the regular church services at seasons of pilgrimage. The Abbot was obliged to entertain scores and hundreds of guests, and these, too, of the

ough. As the Abbot laid his requirements before the architect, he seems to have begun by fixing the scale for a refectory capable of seating two hundred guests at table. Probably no king in Europe fed more persons at his table than this. According to M. Corroyer's plan, the length of the new refectory is one hundred and twenty-three feet (37.5 metres). A row

vel of the church, and opened directly into the north transept. This arrangement was then doubled; and the second set of rooms, at the west end, contained the cellar on the lower level, another great room or hall above it, and the cloister at the church do

ts which has an architecture of its own. The rooms that concern us are those immediately above: the so-called Salle des Chevaliers at the west end; and the so-called refectory at the east. Every w

about ninety feet long, and sixty feet in its greatest width. It has three ranges of columns making four vaulted aisles which seem to rise about twenty-two feet in height. It is warmed by two huge and heavy cheminees or fireplaces in the outside wall, between the windows. It is lighted beautifully, but mostly from above through round windows in the arching of the vaults. The vaulting is a study for wiser men than we can ever be. More than twenty strong round columns, free or engaged, with Romanesque capitals, support heavy ribs, or nervures, and while the two central aisles are eighteen feet wide, the outside aisle, into which the windows open, measures only ten feet in width, and has consequently one of the most sharply pointed vaults we shall ever meet. The whole design is as beautiful a

d their round capitals are still slightly severe. Every detail is lightened. The great fireplaces are removed to each end of the room. The most interesting change is in the windows. When you reach Chartres, the great book of architecture will open on the word "Fenestration,"- Fenestre,-a word as ugly as the thing was beautiful; and then, with pain and sorrow, you will have to toil till you see how the architects of 1200 subordinated every other prob

flood the room. Probably they were intended for glass, and M. Corroyer's volume contains wood-cuts of a few fragments of thirteenth-century glass discovered in his various excavations; but one may take for granted that with so much light, colour was the object intended. The floo

restore one great chateau, he chose the latest, Pierrefonds, built by Louis d'Orleans in 1390. Vestiges of Saint Louis's palace remain at the Conciergerie, but the first great royal residence to be compared with the Merveille is Amboise, dating from about 1500, three centuries later. Civilization made almost a clean sweep of art. Only here, at Mont-Saint-Michel, one may still sit at ease on the stone benches in; the embrasures of the refectory windows, looking over the thirteenth-century ocean and watching the architect as he worked out the details which were to produce or accent his contrasts or harmonie

le. From the outside one can see that at this corner the architect had to provide a heavy buttress against a double strain, and he built up from the rock below a square corner tower as support, into which he worked a spiral staircase leading from the cellar up to the cloisters. Just above the level of the great hall he managed to construct this little room, a gem. The place was near and far; it was quiet and central; William of Saint- Pair, had he been still alive, might have written his "Roman" there; monks might have illuminated missals there. A few steps upward brought them to the cloisters for medi

he most curious and complete cloisters that we have in France," he said; although in France there are many beautiful and curious cloisters. For another reason it has value. The architect meant it to reassert, with all the art and grace he could command, the mastery of love, of thought and poetry, in religion, over the masculine, military energy of the great

ht and length stand up at all was no easy matter, as Robert de Torigny had shown; and so the architect buttressed them from bottom to top with twelve long buttresses against the thrust of the interior arches, and three more, bearing against the interior walls. This gives, on the north front, fifteen strong vertical lines in a space of two hundred and t

se in the Abbot as well as in the architect. God reconciles all. The world is an evident, obvious, sacred harmony. Even the discord of war is a detail on which the Abbey refuses to insist. Not till two centuries afterwards did the Mount take on the modern expression of war as a discord in God's providence. Then, in the early years of the fifteenth century, Abbot Pierre le Roy plastered the gate of the chatelet, as you now see it, over the s

an in a bolder, stronger, closer union than ever was expressed by other art; and wh