Explore "The Cathedral of Amiens" by Esther Singleton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
JOHN RUSKIN.
It is the admitted privilege of a custode who loves his cathedral to depreciate, in its comparison, all the other cathedrals of his country that resemble, and all the edifices on the globe that differ from it. But I love too many cathedrals -- though I have never had the happiness of becoming the custode of even one -- to permit myself the easy and faithful exercise of the privilege in question; and I must vindicate my candour and my judgment in the outset, by confessing that the Cathedral of AMIENS has nothing to boast of in the way of towers, -- that its central _flèche_ is merely the pretty caprice of a village carpenter, -- that the total structure is in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, and in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury -- nothing of the might of Durham; no Dedalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the Cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet le Duc --