and I have not the spirit to go into statistics about it.
It is not statistical to say that the cathedral stands
half-way down the hill of Poitiers, in a quiet and
grass-grown _place_, with an approach of crooked lanes
and blank garden-walls, and that its most striking
dimension is the width of its facade. This width is
extraordinary, but it fails, somehow, to give nobleness
to the edifice, which looks within (Murray makes the
remark) like a large public hall. There are a nave
and two aisles, the latter about as high as the nave;
and there are some very fearful modern pictures,
which you may see much better than you usually see
those specimens of the old masters that lurk in glow-
ing side-chapels, there being no fine old glass to dif-
fuse a kindly gloom. The sacristan of the cathedral
showed me something much better than all this bright
bareness; he led me a short distance out of it to the
small Temple de Saint-Jean, which is the most curious
object at Poitiers. It is an early Christian chapel,
one of the earliest in France; originally, it would seem,
- that is, in the sixth or seventh century, - a bap-
tistery, but converted into a church while the Christian
era was still comparatively young. The Temple de
Saint-Jean is therefore a monument even more vener-
able than Notre Dame la Grande, and that numbness
of age which I imputed to Notre Dame ought to reside
in still larger measure in its crude and colorless little
walls. I call them crude, in spite of their having
been baked through by the centuries, only because,
although certain rude arches and carvings are let