fifty earthly kingdoms, as you will see when we come to the immense effort to gratify her in the glass of her windows.  Illusion for illusion,—­granting for the moment that Mary was an illusion,—­the Virgin Mother in this instance repaid to her worshippers a larger return for their money than the capitalist has ever been able to get, at least in this world, from any other illusion of wealth which he has tried to make a source of pleasure and profit.

The next point on which Mary evidently insisted was the arrangement for her private apartments, the apse, as distinguished from her throne-room, the choir; both being quite distinct from the hall, or reception-room of the public, which was the nave with its enlargements in the transepts.  This arrangement marks the distinction between churches built as shrines for the deity and churches built as halls of worship for the public.  The difference is chiefly in the apse, and the apse of Chartres is the most interesting of all apses from this point of view.

The Virgin required chiefly these three things, or, if you like, these four:  space, light, convenience; and colour decoration to unite and harmonize the whole.  This concerns the interior; on the exterior she required statuary, and the only complete system of decorative sculpture that existed seems to belong to her churches:—­ Paris, Rheims, Amiens, and Chartres.  Mary required all this magnificence at Chartres for herself alone, not for the public.  As far as one can see into the spirit of the builders, Chartres was exclusively intended for the Virgin, as the Temple of Abydos was intended for Osiris.  The wants of man, beyond a mere roof-cover, and perhaps space to some degree, enter to no very great extent into the problem of Chartres.  Man came to render homage or to ask favours.  The Queen received him in her palace, where she alone was at home, and alone gave commands.

The artist’s second thought was to exclude from his work everything that could displease Mary; and since Mary differed from living queens only in infinitely greater majesty and refinement, the artist could admit only what pleased the actual taste of the great ladies who dictated taste at the Courts of France and England, which surrounded the little Court of the Counts of Chartres.  What they were—­these women of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—­we shall have to see or seek in other directions; but Chartres is perhaps the most magnificent and permanent monument they left of their taste, and we can begin here with learning certain things which they were not.

In the first place, they were not in the least vague, dreamy, or mystical in a modern sense;—­far from it!  They seemed anxious only to throw the mysteries into a blaze of light; not so much physical, perhaps,—­since they, like all women, liked moderate shadow for their toilettes,—­but luminous in the sense of faith.  There is nothing about Chartres that you would think mystical, who know