hand of God.  Next is shown the miracle of the lances; stuck in the ground at night, they are found in the morning to have burst into foliage, prefiguring martyrdom.  Two thousand people perish in battle.  Then begins the story of Roland which the artists and donors are so eager to tell, knowing, as they do, that what has so deeply interested men and women on earth, must interest Mary who loves them.  You see Archbishop Turpin celebrating mass when an angel appears, to warn him of Roland’s fate.  Then Roland himself, also wearing a halo, is introduced, in the act of killing the giant Ferragus.  The combat of Roland and Ferragus is at the top, out of sequence, as often happens in the legendary windows.  Charlemagne and his army are seen marching homeward through the Pyrenees, while Roland winds his horn and splits the rock without being able to break Durendal.  Thierry, likewise sainted, brings water to Roland in a helmet.  At last Thierry announces Roland’s death.  At the top, on either side of Roland and Ferragus, is an angel with incense.

The execution of this window is said to be superb.  Of the colour, and its relations with that of the Saint James, one needs time and long acquaintance to learn the value.  In the feeling, compared with that of the twelfth century, one needs no time in order to see a change.  These two windows are as French and as modern as a picture of Lancret; they are pure art, as simply decorative as the decorations of the Grand Opera.  The thirteenth century knew more about religion and decoration than the twentieth century will ever learn.  The windows were neither symbolic nor mystical, nor more religious than they pretended to be.  That they are more intelligent or more costly or more effective is nothing to the purpose, so long as one grants that the combat of Roland and Ferragus, or Roland winding his olifant, or Charlemagne cutting off heads and transfixing Moors, were subjects never intended to teach religion or instruct the ignorant, but to please the Queen of Heaven as they pleased the queens of earth with a roman, not in verse but in colour, as near as possible to decorative perfection.  Instinctively one looks to the corresponding bay, opposite, to see what the artists could have done to balance these two great efforts of their art; but the bay opposite is now occupied by the entrance to Saint Piat’s chapel and one does not know what changes may have been made in the fourteenth century to rearrange the glass; yet, even as it now stands, the Sylvester window which corresponds to the Charlemagne is, as glass, the strongest in the whole cathedral.  In the next chapel, on our left, come the martyrs, with Saint Stephen, the first martyr, in the middle window.  Naturally the subject is more serious, but the colour is not differently treated.  A step further, and you see the artists returning to their lighter subjects.  The stories of Saint Julian and Saint Thomas are more amusing than the plots of half the thirteenth-century romances, and not very