As for the devotion of the respectable classes! It would scare away the angels!" "With a few rare exceptions the fine flower of female Pharisaism is no doubt the outcome of that class," said the Abbe Plomb, and he added in a half jesting, half sorrowful tone,-- "And I, here at Chartres, am the distressful gardener of these souls!" "To return to our starting point," said the Abbe Gevresin: "what was the birthplace of the Gothic ?" "France: so Lecoy de la Marche emphatically asserts.

'The buttress made its appearance as the essential basis of a style in the early years of Louis le Gros, in the district lying between the Seine and the Aisne.' In his opinion the first practice of this form was in the Cathedral of Laon; other authorities regard it as merely supplementary to earlier basilicas, instancing Saint-Front at Perigueux, Vezelay, Saint-Denis, Noyon, and the ancient college chapel at Poissy; but no two agree.

One thing is certain, Gothic art is the art of the North; it made its way into Normandy, and from thence into England.

Then it spread to the Rhine in the twelfth century, and to Spain by the beginning of the thirteenth.
Gothic churches in the South are but an importation, evidently ill-assorted with the men and women who frequent them, and the merciless blue sky which spoils them." "And observe," said Durtal, "that in our country that aspect of mysticism is discordant with the rest." "How is that ?" "Well, you see, in the distribution of the sacred arts France received architecture only.

Consider the pre-Raphaelite painters.