After skirting the coast and its dreary expanse of sandhills, reminding one very much of those singular sands on the north coast of Cornwall, which are so often shifting about, covering up new churches, or uncovering the old oratory of some early British saint, we reach the banks of the Somme, and then travel along a poor peaty tract of country until the famous west front and short but lofty nave of Abbeville come in view. Thence by a valley (rather more rich than is common in good churches) we continue our race for Amiens. Among these churches I may instance the hipped saddle-back roofed steeples of Picquigny, Hangest, and Pont Rémy, as very valuable examples of their order; that of Picquigny, indeed, surmounting a central steeple, and finished at the top with some delicate open ironwork, is about as graceful a specimen as I know.
At Longpré is another church with a steeple of some pretension, but not satisfactory. It has a perforated spire of stone much too small for the size of the tower, and ungraceful in the extreme.
At Amiens one always longs to stop again and again to feast one's eyes upon its glorious cathedral, perhaps after Chartres and the Parthenon the noblest and most masculine piece of architecture in the world. But with us this was impossible; our destiny was--come what might--to endeavour at any rate to discharge ourselves in Paris within the shortest possible number of hours from London; and the dusk of the early autumn evening prevented our having more than the very slightest glimpse of the Minster.
The refreshment-room at Amiens is one of the best I have ever been in--reasonable, clean, and good--and placed just at that happy distance from the sea at which the poor wretches who have been in the depths of woe on the passage begin to recover their presence of mind, and with it, of course--as good Englishmen--their appetites; what wonder then if the Buffet at Amiens prospers!
The rest of our journey to Paris was all performed in the dark, relieved only by the sight of the then long-expected comet, and it was almost midnight ere we found ourselves settled at our hotel.
I am never sorry to have a day in Paris. In spite of alterations and reconstructions which have converted an interesting old city into the most spick-and-span place in the world, there are even to the present day parts which are untouched by the improver, and full of a pleasant national character which seems to be little to the liking of the rulers of the French. There is, too, in spite of the changes which a great and rich city must always undergo, a great deal which is interesting to the architect. We may look at old engravings, and wish ourselves back in those old times when the walls surrounded the city where now the Boulevards run round its heart, when the Temple and a number of other important buildings, now wholly destroyed, adorned the country just outside the walls; but the city which has still, among other architectural treasures, such churches as Notre Dame, S. Germain des Près, the Sainte Chapelle, S. Martin des Champs, and a host of lesser lights, and the Chapel of Vincennes, and S. Denis within a short drive, is in quite a different category from such a city as London, and is indeed hardly second to any other in Europe in architectural interest.