will find it loses nothing of its richness--it only gains in truth, and
therefore in grace, until just at the moment of transition into the
pointed style, you have the consummate type of the sculpture of the
school given you in the west front of the Cathedral of Chartres. From
that front I have chosen two fragments to illustrate it. [Footnote:
This part of the lecture was illustrated by two drawings, made
admirably by Mr. J. T. Laing, with the help of photographs from statues
at Chartres. The drawings may be seen at present at the Kensington
Museum: but any large photograph of the west front of Chartres will
enable the reader to follow what is stated in the lecture, as far as is
needful.]

These statues have been long, and justly, considered as representative
of the highest skill of the twelfth or earliest part of the thirteenth
century in France; and they indeed possess a dignity and delicate
charm, which are for the most part wanting in later works. It is owing
partly to real nobleness of feature, but chiefly to the grace, mingled
with severity, of the falling lines of excessively _thin_ drapery;
as well as to a most studied finish in composition, every part of the
ornamentation tenderly harmonizing with the rest. So far as their power
over certain tones of religious mind is owing to a palpable degree of
non-naturalism in them, I do not praise it--the exaggerated thinness of
body and stiffness of attitude are faults; but they are noble faults,
and give the statues a strange look of forming part of the very
building itself, and sustaining it--not like the Greek caryatid,
without effort--nor like the Renaissance caryatid, by painful or
impossible effort--but as if all that was silent and stern, and
withdrawn apart, and stiffened in chill of heart against the terror of
earth, had passed into a shape of eternal marble; and thus the Ghost
had given, to bear up the pillars of the church on earth, all the