Though in 1855 he took no summer holiday, he went over in the fall to see the designs at Lille with William Morris, and pushed on to S. Omer. The notebook of that journey is particularly rich in detail, both personal and architectural. The trip supplied material for papers in the _Ecclesiologist_, supplemented by another two years later, through Normandy, the Soissonnais and the German border. Even to-day when that country has been written to death, ploughed up by pedants and harrowed by illiterate motorists and photographers, the papers are almost too good to leave in the dust of old libraries, with their tang of a spring morning early enough to taste of frost. The notebook still is more than half a journal, coloured with detail not so irrelevant as the writer fancied, and I have snatched out a bit about Laon to reprint.[1]
Far more brief are the notebooks, however, of 1860, when he went to the Bernese Oberland and took in the country that lies westward from Lyons--Le Puy, Brioude, Clermont-Ferrand, Nevers,--and many of the smaller churches of that curious Auvergnat type which was to help him so well in the interpretation of Spanish Gothic during the following years. There are sketches and plans aplenty, with the scantiest jottings of fact, and then a few fragments of bibliography; lastly terse notes of reading done, I fancy, in Paris on the way home. These served for an essay on _The Churches of Velay_, which has been printed twice in the _Transactions_ of the Royal Institute of British Architects, once at the time, and again, long after his death, in 1889. It is still inaccessible to most, and I reprint it once more, partly for the bearing on his interpretation of Spanish building, and partly because I know nothing better on Auvergne.
Nothing missed him, not the paintings on the wall at Brioude nor the Liberal Arts on the pavement at Ainay. A scrawled road-map on one page would be still the ecclesiologist’s best guide for the region. The village of Monistrol which harbours, thereabouts, a characteristic church, and to which he refers again for comparison in the Spanish volume, is not, I take pleasure in noting, the scene of the first meeting with Modestine. If it had been, you should not know from Stevenson that a church stood thereby, for the good creature had no great taste in churches, and though the _Inland Voyage_ lay through a cathedral country, small good was that to him.