Thus the Last Judgment, which is not to be found on the outside of the north front, blazes out, within, from the great rose window above on the same side.
This, then, is not cumulative but appropriate development--history begun in one dialect and finished in another.
"In short, it is the ruling idea of the poem which governs all these differences and harmonies; which comes out like a refrain after each of these three strophes in stone; the idea that this church belongs to Our Mother.

The cathedral is faithful to its name, loyal to its dedication.
The Virgin is Lady over all.

She fills the whole interior, and appears outside even on the western and southern portals, which are not especially Hers, above a door, on a capital, high in air on a pediment.
The angelic salutation of art has been repeated without intermission by the painters and sculptors of every age.

The cathedral of Chartres is truly the Virgin's fief.
"And on the whole," thought Durtal, "in spite of the discrepancies in some of its texts, the cathedral is legible.
"It contains a rendering of the Old and New Testaments; it also engrafts on the sacred Scriptures the Apocryphal traditions relating to the Virgin and St.Joseph, the lives of the saints preserved in the Golden Legend of Jacopo da Voragine and the special biographies of the aspiring recluses of the diocese of Chartres.

It is a vast encyclopaedia of mediaeval learning as concerning God, the Virgin, and the Elect.
"Didron is almost justified in saying that it is a compendium of those great encyclopaedias composed in the thirteenth century; only the theory that he bases on this truthful observation wanders off and becomes faulty as soon as he tries to work it out.
"He concludes, in fact, by conceiving of this cathedral as no more than a rendering of the _Speculum Universale_, the _Mirror of the World_ of Vincent of Beauvais; above all, like that work, as an epitome of practical life and a record of the human race throughout the ages.