begun about the year 1260, but was little advanced at the commencement
of the following century; nor were its nineteen chapels, the works of
the piety of individuals, completed before 1350. The roof of the choir
remained imperfect till ninety years afterwards, whilst that of the
transept is as recent as 1628[5]. The most ancient work is discernible
in the transepts, but the lines are obscured by later additions. A
cloister gallery fronted by delicate mullions runs round the nave and
choir, and the extent and arrangement of the exterior would induce a
stranger, unacquainted with the history of the building, to suppose that
he was entering a conventual or cathedral church. The parts long most
generally admired by the French, though they have always been miserable
judges of gothic architecture, were the vaulted roof, and the pendants
of the Lady-Chapel. The latter were originally ornamented with female
figures, representing the Sibyls, made of colored terra cotta, and of
such excellent workmanship, that Cardinal Barberini, when he visited
this chapel in 1647, declared he had seen nothing of the kind, not even
in Italy, superior to them for the beauty and delicacy of their
execution; but they are now gone, and, according to Noel[6], were
destroyed at the time of the bombardment. The state, however, of the
roof does not seem to warrant this observation; and, contrary also to
what he says, the pendants between the Lady-Chapel and the choir are
still perfect, and serve, together with numerous small canopies in the
chapel itself, to give a clear idea of what the whole must have been
originally. One of the most elegant of the decorations of the church is
a spirally-twisted column, elaborately carved, with a peculiarly
fanciful and beautiful capital, placed against a pillar that separates
the two south-eastern chapels of the choir. The richest object is a
stone-screen to a chantry on the north side, which is divide into
several canopies, whose upper part is still full of a profusion of
sculpture, though the lower is sadly mutilated. I could not ascertain