In his "Miscellaneous Studies" Walter Pater says: "The builders of the Church seem to have projected no very noticeable towers; though it is conventional to regret their absence, especially with visitors from England, where indeed cathedral and other towers are apt to be good and really make their mark.... The great western towers are lost in the west front, the grandest, perhaps the earliest, of its species--three profound sculptured portals; a double gallery above, the upper gallery carrying colossal images of twenty-two kings of the house of Judah, ancestors of our Lady; then the great rose; above it the singers' gallery, half marking the gable of the nave, and uniting at their topmost storeys the twin, but not exactly equal or similar towers, oddly oblong in plan as if meant to carry pyramids or spires. In most cases, those early Pointed churches are entangled, here and there, by the construction of the old round-arched style, the heavy, Norman or other, Romanesque chapel or aisle, side by side, though in strange contrast, with the soaring new Gothic nave or transept. But the older manner of the round arch, the _plein-cintre_, Amiens has nowhere or almost nowhere, a trace. The Pointed style, fully pronounced, but in all the purity of its first period, found here its completest expression."
"We passed Lâon in the dark," is a confession frequently made by travellers. The Geneva express used to stop here for dinner, and during the brief interval allowed for coffee and cigarettes many a traveller has gazed up at the great buttressed hill, silhouetted against a twilight sky, and wondered what manner of place it might be, half-fortress, half-church, rising some three hundred and fifty feet out of the plain with its crest of towers and houses.
If Paris is the type of the island cities of Gaul, surely Lâon may be called the type of the hill cities. "Lâon is the very pride of that class of town which out of Gaulish hill-forts grew into Roman and mediæval cities. None stands so proudly on its height; none has kept its ancient character so little changed to our own day. The town still keeps itself within the walls which fence in the hill-top, and whatever there is of suburb has grown up at the foot, apart from the ancient city."