We met
priests in three-cornered hats, long frock-coats, and knee-breeches; also
soldiers and gendarmes, and peasants and children, clattering over the
pavements in wooden shoes.
It makes a great impression of outlandishness to see the signs over the
shop doors in a foreign tongue. If the cold had not been such as to dull
my sense of novelty, and make all my perceptions torpid, I should have
taken in a set of new impressions, and enjoyed them very much. As it
was, I cared little for what I saw, but yet had life enough left to enjoy
the cathedral of Amiens, which has many features unlike those of English
cathedrals.
It stands in the midst of the cold, white town, and has a high-shouldered
look to a spectator accustomed to the minsters of England, which cover a
great space of ground in proportion to their height. The impression the
latter gives is of magnitude and mass; this French cathedral strikes one
as lofty. The exterior is venerable, though but little time-worn by the
action of the atmosphere; and statues still keep their places in numerous
niches, almost as perfect as when first placed there in the thirteenth
century.
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