Her taste was infallible; her sentence eternally final.  This church was built for her in this spirit of simple-minded, practical, utilitarian faith,—­in this singleness of thought, exactly as a little girl sets up a doll-house for her favourite blonde doll.  Unless you can go back to your dolls, you are out of place here.  If you can go back to them, and get rid for one small hour of the weight of custom, you shall see Chartres in glory.

The palaces of earthly queens were hovels compared with these palaces of the Queen of Heaven at Chartres, Paris, Laon, Noyon, Rheims, Amiens, Rouen, Bayeux, Coutances,—­a list that might be stretched into a volume.  The nearest approach we have made to a palace was the Merveille at Mont-Saint-Michel, but no Queen had a palace equal to that.  The Merveille was built, or designed, about the year 1200; toward the year 1500, Louis XI built a great castle at Loches in Touraine, and there Queen Anne de Bretagne had apartments which still exist, and which we will visit.  At Blois you shall see the residence which served for Catherine de Medicis till her death in 1589.  Anne de Bretagne was trebly queen, and Catherine de Medicis took her standard of comfort from the luxury of Florence.  At Versailles you can see the apartments which the queens of the Bourbon line occupied through their century of magnificence.  All put together, and then trebled in importance, could not rival the splendour of any single cathedral dedicated to Queen Mary in the thirteenth century; and of them all, Chartres was built to be peculiarly and exceptionally her delight.

One has grown so used to this sort of loose comparison, this reckless waste of words, that one no longer adopts an idea unless it is driven in with hammers of statistics and columns of figures.  With the irritating demand for literal exactness and perfectly straight lines which lights up every truly American eye, you will certainly ask when this exaltation of Mary began, and unless you get the dates, you will doubt the facts.  It is your own fault if they are tiresome; you might easily read them all in the “Iconographie de la Sainte Vierge,” by M. Rohault de Fleury, published in 1878.  You can start at Byzantium with the Empress Helena in 326, or with the Council of Ephesus in 431.  You will find the Virgin acting as the patron saint of Constantinople and of the Imperial residence, under as many names as Artemis or Aphrodite had borne.  As Godmother [word in Greek] Deipara [word in Greek], Pathfinder [word in Greek], afterwards gave to Murillo the subject of a famous painting, told that once, when he was reciting before her statue the “Ave Maris Stella,” and came to the words, “Monstra te esse Matrem,” the image, pressing its breast, dropped on the lips of her servant three drops of the milk which had nourished the Saviour.  The same miracle, in various forms, was told of many other persons, both saints and sinners; but it made so much impression on the mind of the age that, in