kindness is great, whose patience is heavenly, and whose good opinion you would so gladly gain, will turn from you with pain, if not with horror.  The Gothic is singular in this; one seems easily at home in the Renaissance; one is not too strange in the Byzantine; as for the Roman, it is ourselves; and we could walk blindfolded through every chink and cranny of the Greek mind; all these styles seem modern, when we come close to them; but the Gothic gets away.  No two men think alike about it, and no woman agrees with either man.  The Church itself never agreed about it, and the architects agree even less than the priests.  To most minds it casts too many shadows; it wraps itself in mystery; and when people talk of mystery, they commonly mean fear.  To others, the Gothic seems hoary with age and decrepitude, and its shadows mean death.  What is curious to watch is the fanatical conviction of the Gothic enthusiast, to whom the twelfth century means exuberant youth, the eternal child of Wordsworth, over whom its immortality broods like the day; it is so simple and yet so complicated; it sees so much and so little; it loves so many toys and cares for so few necessities; its youth is so young, its age so old, and its youthful yearning for old thought is so disconcerting, like the mysterious senility of the baby that—­

    Deaf and silent, reads the eternal deep,
     Haunted forever by the eternal mind.

One need not take it more seriously than one takes the baby itself.  Our amusement is to play with it, and to catch its meaning in its smile; and whatever Chartres maybe now, when young it was a smile.  To the Church, no doubt, its cathedral here has a fixed and administrative meaning, which is the same as that of every other bishop’s seat and with which we have nothing whatever to do.  To us, it is a child’s fancy; a toy-house to please the Queen of Heaven,—­ to please her so much that she would be happy in it,—­to charm her till she smiled.

The Queen Mother was as majestic as you like; she was absolute; she could be stern; she was not above being angry; but she was still a woman, who loved grace, beauty, ornament,—­her toilette, robes, jewels;—­who considered the arrangements of her palace with attention, and liked both light and colour; who kept a keen eye on her Court, and exacted prompt and willing obedience from king and archbishops as well as from beggars and drunken priests.  She protected her friends and punished her enemies.  She required space, beyond what was known in the Courts of kings, because she was liable at all times to have ten thousand people begging her for favours—­ mostly inconsistent with law—­and deaf to refusal.  She was extremely sensitive to neglect, to disagreeable impressions, to want of intelligence in her surroundings.  She was the greatest artist, as she was the greatest philosopher and musician and theologist, that ever lived on earth, except her Son, Who, at Chartres, is still an Infant under her guardianship.