architecture. In that grandiose art of building, the most national,
the most tenaciously rooted of all the arts in the stable conditions
of life, there were historic documents hardly less clearly legible
than the manuscript chronicle. By the mouth of those stately
Romanesque [19] churches, scattered in so many strongly characterised
varieties over the soil of France, above all in the hot, half-pagan
south, the people of empire still protested, as he understood,
against what must seem a smaller race. The Gothic enthusiasm indeed
was already born, and he shared it--felt intelligently the
fascination of the Pointed Style, but only as a further
transformation of old Roman structure; the round arch is for him
still the great architectural form, la forme noble, because it was to
be seen in the monuments of antiquity. Romanesque, Gothic, the
manner of the Renaissance, of Lewis the Fourteenth:--they were all,
as in a written record, in the old abbey church of Saint-Savin, of
which Merimee was instructed to draw up a report. Again, it was as
if to his concentrated attention through many months that deserted
sanctuary of Benedict were the only thing on earth. Its beauties,
its peculiarities, its odd military features, its faded mural
paintings, are no merely picturesque matter for the pencil he could
use so well, but the lively record of a human society. With what
appetite! with all the animation of George Sand's Mauprat, he tells
the story of romantic violence having its way there, defiant of law,
so late as the year 1611; of the family of robber nobles perched, as
abbots in commendam, in those sacred places. That grey, pensive old
church in the little valley of Poitou, was for a time like Santa
Maria del Fiore to [20] Michelangelo, the mistress of his affections-
-of a practical affection; for the result of his elaborate report was
the Government grant which saved the place from ruin. In
architecture, certainly, he had what for that day was nothing less