Among those things in this little volume to which I desire special attention, as being unknown in England, and in some cases never reproduced before, I would mention, in addition to the music in Chapter XIII., the plan in Chapter IX. by Jacques Lelieur, who also drew the view of the whole town reproduced in Chapter XIII. This plan is the only instance of which I am aware which enables us to see a French town of 1525 exactly as it was, for by a queer but easily intelligible mixture of plan and elevation, the architect has drawn not merely the course of various streets but the façades of the houses on each side of them. And this leads me to my last, and perhaps my most striking debt, that to my illustrators; not only to my mother, who drew the arms of Rouen, from a design of 1550, for the first chapter, and Coustou's charming bas-relief of Commerce for the last, but more especially to Miss James; of her work I need say nothing; it is quite able to make its own appeal; but for her indefatigable desire to draw exactly what I wanted and to assist the whole scheme of the book I cannot sufficiently express my gratitude. Her drawings of the Crypte St. Gervais, of the Chapelle St. Julien, and of the Église St. Paul, will be as new as they are valuable to architectural readers; her picture of the Cour des Comptes, and of the old house in the Rue St. Romain were made under exceptional circumstances which may never recur again; and the view of the Chartreuse de la Rose is the first representation of the headquarters of our Henry V. in France which has ever, to my knowledge, been produced in England.
In conclusion I must express the earnest wish that the pages I have written about the carvings of the Maison Bourgtheroulde, and the illustrations accompanying them, will not have been published in vain. That the only authentic contemporaneous record of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, except the one picture at Hampton Court, should now be mouldering into decay in a French town is hardly creditable to those who can act with authority in valuable questions of historical art. If it be impossible to procure any good reproduction of these carvings for the pleasure and instruction of the public in our own National Galleries, a suggestion might at least be made that would secure their better preservation in the French house which they will soon cease to adorn.