at Chartres; and in the interior of Amiens the round arch of the rose is the last vault of the nave, seen through a vista of pointed vaults, as it is here.  All these are supposed to be among the chief beauties of the Gothic facade, although the Gothic architect, if he had been a man of logic, would have clung to his lines, and put a pointed window in his front, as in fact he did at Coutances.  He felt the value of the rose in art, and perhaps still more in religion, for the rose was Mary’s emblem.  One is fairly sure that the great Chartres rose of the west front was put there to please her, since it was to be always before her eyes, the most conspicuous object she would see from the high altar, and therefore the most carefully considered ornament in the whole church, outside the choir.  The mere size proves the importance she gave it.  The exterior diameter is nearly forty-four feet (13.36 metres).  The nave of Chartres is, next perhaps to the nave of Angers, the widest of all Gothic naves; about fifty-three feet (16.31 metres); and the rose takes every inch it can get of this enormous span.  The value of the rose, among architects of the time, was great, since it was the only part of the church that Villard de Honnecourt sketched; and since his time, it has been drawn and redrawn, described and commented by generations of architects till it has become as classic as the Parthenon.

Yet this Chartres rose is solid, serious, sedate, to a degree unusual in its own age; it is even more Romanesque than the pure Romanesque roses.  At Beauvais you must stop a moment to look at a Romanesque rose on the transept of the Church of Saint-Etienne; Viollet-le-Duc mentions it, with a drawing (article, “Pignon"), as not earlier than the year 1100, therefore about a century earlier than the rose of Chartres; it is not properly a rose, but a wheel of fortune, with figures climbing up and falling over.  Another supposed twelfth-century rose is at Etampes, which goes with that of Laon and Saint-Leu-d’Esserent and Mantes.  The rose of Chartres is so much the most serious of them all that Viollet-le-Duc has explained it by its material,—­the heavy stone of Bercheres;—­but the material was not allowed to affect the great transept roses, and the architect made his material yield to his object wherever he thought it worth while.  Standing under the central croisee, you can see all three roses by simply turning your head.  That on the north, the Rose de France, was built, or planned, between 1200 and 1210, in the reign of Philip Augustus, since the porch outside, which would be a later construction, was begun by 1212.  The Rose de France is the same in diameter as the western rose, but lighter, and built of lighter stone.  Opposite the Rose de France stands, on the south front, Pierre Mauclerc’s Rose de Dreux, of the same date, with the same motive, but even lighter; more like a rose and less like a wheel.  All three roses must have been planned at about the same time,