To his reign belongs the second alliance in the history of Abbeville, the pact signed between the King of France and Cardinal Wolsey, on behalf of Henry VIII., against the common enemy, Charles V.—a figure so commanding, so infinitely greater than his contemporaries, that beside him the brilliancy of François, the gallantry of Henry, and the pomp and magnificence of his favourite Wolsey, seemed entirely eclipsed, and the three men appear almost as puppets, unstable and vacillating, now the closest of friends, and now the bitterest of enemies.

Abbeville still maintains many of the old picturesque landmarks which made it a favourite sketching ground for Prout and for Ruskin. The market-place is surrounded by a number of houses with high pitched gables, coloured in various tints of white, grey and pale green. Some beautiful drawings by Ruskin, executed in pencil and tint, which have lately been exhibited to the public, bear testimony to its picturesqueness, of which a great deal still remains in the side streets and along the river front.

ABBEVILLE

The church of St. Wolfran is late Flamboyant, and is looked upon by Ruskin as “a wonderful proof of the fearlessness of a living architecture,” for, say what one will of it, that Flamboyant of France, however morbid, was as vivid and intense in its imagination as ever any phase of mortal mind. The nave consists of bays having a high clerestory and a triforium screened by rich sixteenth century carving. The ribs of the vaulting fall sheer down without imposts or break of any kind. The low chancel and eastern termination of the church are unworthy of the splendid carving of the western façade.

The approach to Amiens offers no coup d’œil of clustering towers or spires such as an English or Norman cathedral city usually gives us, and the Cathedral itself is hidden as we pass into the heart of the town along the Rue des Trois Cailloux, a street which is said to follow the alignment of the old city walls. Ruskin advises the traveller, however short his time may be, to devote it, not to the contemplation of arches and piers and coloured glass, but to the woodwork of the chancel, which he considers the most beautiful carpenter’s work of the Flamboyant period. Note should be taken of two windows in the Chapel of the Cardinal de la Grange, built about 1375. These are very interesting as foreshadowing in their detail that style of architecture—the Flamboyant—which obtained in France in the fifteenth century and was contemporaneous with the English Perpendicular.

The two western towers look little more than heavily built buttresses, and as towers are not very appropriate in design, being not square, but oblong in plan. They rise little above the ridge line of the nave, whose crossing with the transepts is marked by a beautiful flèche, which Ruskin, however, describes as “merely the caprice of a village carpenter.” As he further declares, the Cathedral of Amiens is “in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure sculpture to Bourges,” yet it fully deserves the name given to it by Viollet-le-Duc—“The Parthenon of Gothic architecture.”

THE PLACE VOGEL, AMIENS

The height of the nave and aisles is, according to Mr. Francis Bond in his book “Gothic Architecture in England,” respectively nearly three times their span, and the vastness of the fenestration is very striking, particularly in the clerestory, through whose lower mouldings the triforium is negotiated, thus dividing each bay into two storeys, clerestory and pier arch, instead of into three, clerestory triforium and pier arch. This gives the effect after which the French architect strove: one vast blaze of light and colour through the upper windows, coming not only from the clerestory, but from the glazed triforium also; the magnificent deep blue glass typifying the splendour of the heavens. On the other hand, in a sunny clime, builders cared less for light, and preferred the effect of a blind triforium which throws the choir below into gloomy and mysterious shadow. Thus we see that upon the design of the triforium depends to a very great extent the effect of the light and shade of the interior of a great church.

Once, being personally conducted by the dean over one of the cathedrals of the west of England, the writer was suddenly called upon to give the derivation of “triforium.” The word is applied to the ambulatory or passage, screened by an arcade, which runs between the pier arches and clerestory windows, and is considered to refer to the three openings, or spaces, trinæ fores, into which the arcading was sometimes divided. It probably has nothing to do with openings in multiples of three, nor with a Latinised form of “thoroughfare,” as suggested in Parker’s Glossary, although the main idea is that of a passage running round the inside of a church, either as at Westminster, in the form of an ambulatory chamber, or of a gallery pierced through the main walls, from whence the structure can be inspected without the trouble of using ladders or erecting scaffolding. M. Enlart in his “Manuel d’Archéologie Française,” derives the word from a French adjective “trifore,” or “trifoire,” through the Latin “transforatus,” a passage pierced through the thickness of the wall; and this idea of a passage-way is certainly suggested by an old writer, Gervase, who, in his description of the new Cathedral of Canterbury, rebuilt after the fire, alludes to the increased number of passages round the church under the word “triforia.” “Ibi triforium unum, hic duo in choro, et in alâ ecclesiæ tercium.”

On the north side of the Cathedral flows the Somme, and there is perhaps no better means of realising the great height and mass of the building than by walking along the river banks, whence we see the old houses, great and small, rise tier above tier under the quiet grey outline of this “giant in repose.”

EVENING ON THE SOMME AT AMIENS

In an extract from his private diary Ruskin gives the following description of this walk along the river, showing it in an aspect at once squalid and picturesque: “Amiens, May 11th.—I had a happy walk here this afternoon, down among the branching currents of the Somme: it divides into five or six, shallow, green, and not over-wholesome; some quite narrow and foul, running beneath clusters of fearful houses, reeling masses of rotten timber; and a few mere stumps of pollard willow sticking out of the banks of soft mud, only retained in shape of bank by being shored up with timbers; and boats like paper boats, nearly as thin at least, for the costermongers to paddle about in among the weeds, the water soaking through the lath bottoms, and floating the dead leaves from the vegetable baskets with which they were loaded. Miserable little back yards, opening to the water, with steep stone steps down to it, and little platforms for the ducks; and separate duck