Page:The Bible of Amiens.djvu/178

142 ; and the glorious carvings of the exterior walls and interior wood of the choir, which an English rector would almost instinctively think of as done for the glorification of the canons, was indeed the Amienois carpenter's way of making his Master-carpenter comfortable, —nor less of showing his own native and insuperable virtue of carpenter, before God and man.

5. Whatever you wish to see, or are forced to leave unseen, at Amiens, if the overwhelming responsibilities of your existence, and the inevitable necessities of precipitate locomotion in their fulfilment, have left you so much as one quarter of an hour, not out of breath—for the contemplation of the capital of Picardy, give it wholly to the cathedral choir. Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here—but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is late,—fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century—and has some Flemish stolidity mixed