PUBLISHERS' PREFACE.

THE present edition of Notre-Dame will be found more complete than any which has hitherto been printed in English. It contains a special translation of Book V., embracing the chapter entitled "Abbas Beati Martini," and the important chapter on Architecture and Printing; also the author's long note added to the edition of 1832, and not included in any other translation. The English edition has been carefully examined and a number of errors have been corrected.

BOSTON, June 6, 1888.

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PREFAСЕ.

SOME years ago, while visiting the cathedral of Notre-Dame, or, to speak more properly, exploring every corner of it, the author of this book discovered, in a dark corner in one of the towers, this word, engraven upon the wall,

̓ΑΝΑΓΚΗ.

These Greek capitals, black with age and deeply cut into the stone, with certain peculiarities of form and posture belonging to the Gothic calligraphy, as if to declare that they had been traced there by some hand of the Middle Ages, -- above all, the dismal and fatal meaning they conveyed, - struck the author forcibly.

He asked himself, he strove to conjecture, what soul in pain this might be that would not quit the world without stamping this stigma of crime or misfortune on the walls of the old cathedral.

Since then the wall has been washed over, or scraped, - I know not which, - and the inscription has disappeared. For thus it is that the wonderful churches of the Middle Ages have been dealt with for two hundred years past. Mutilation attacks them in every direction, from within as well as from without; the priest smears them over, the architect scrapes them, then come the people and demolish them.

Thus, except the frail memory here preserved of it by the author of this book, nothing now remains of the mysterious word engraven in the gloomy tower of Notre-Dame, nothing of the unknown destiny which it so mournfully recorded. The man who wrote that word upon the wall passed away several centuries ago from among men; the word, in its turn, has passed away from the walls of the church; the church itself will soon, perhaps, pass away from the face of the earth.

It is upon the text of that word that this book has been written.

MARCH, 1831.