STREET OF SANTA LUCIA, MALTA
There was at the Centennial Exposition the head of a woman cut in butter, which attracted much attention from the rural visitors. For this they passed by the women painted on canvas or carved in marble, they were too like the real thing, and the countrymen probably knew how difficult it is to make butter into moulds. For some reason Malta reminds you of this butter lady. It is a real city—with real houses and cathedral and streets, no doubt, but you have a feeling that they are not genuine, and that though it is very cleverly done, it is, after all, a city carved out of cheese or butter. Some of the cheese is mouldy and covered with green, and some of the walls have holes in them, as has aerated bread or Schweitzerkase, and the streets and the pavements, and the carved façades of the churches and opera-house, and the earth and the hills beyond—everything upon which your eye can rest is glaring and yellow, with not a red roof to relieve it; it is all just yellow limestone, and it looks like Dutch cheese. It is like no other place exactly that you have ever seen. The approach into the canal-like harbor under the guns and the search-lights of the fortifications, the moats and drawbridges, and the glaring monotony of the place itself, which seems to have been cut out of one piece and painted with one brush, suggest those little toy fortresses of yellow wood which appear in the shop windows at Christmas-time.
Of course the first and last thought one has of Malta is that the island was the home of the Order of the Knights of St. John, or Knights Hospitallers. This order, which was the most noble of those of the days of mediæval chivalry, was composed of that band of warrior monks who waged war against the infidels, who kept certain vows, and who, under the banner of the white cross, became honored and feared throughout the then known world. Their headquarters changed from place to place during the four hundred years that stretched from the eleventh century, when the order was first established, up to 1530, when Charles V. made over Malta and all its dependencies in perpetual sovereignty to the keeping of these Knights. They had no sooner fortified the island than there began the nine months' siege of the Turks, one of the most memorable sieges in history. When it was ended, the Turks re-embarked ten thousand of the forty thousand men they had landed, and of the nine thousand Knights present under the Grand Master Jean de la Valette when the siege had opened, but six hundred capable of bearing arms remained alive.
The order continued in possession of their island until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the French, under General Bonaparte, took it with but little trouble. The French in turn were besieged by Maltese and English, and after two years capitulated. In 1814 the island was transferred to England. It now, in its monuments and its memories, speaks of the days of chivalry; but present and mixed with these is the ubiquitous red coat of the British soldier; and the eight-pointed Maltese cross, which suggests Ivanhoe, is placed side by side with the lion and the unicorn; the culverin has given way to the quick-throbbing Maxim gun, the Templar's sword to the Lee-Metford rifle, and the heroes of Walter Scott to the friends of Mr. Rudyard Kipling.
The most conspicuous relic of the French occupation is not a noble one. It is the penitential hood of the Maltese woman—a strangely picturesque article of apparel, like a cowl or Shaker bonnet, only much larger than the latter, and with a cape which hangs over the shoulders. The women hold the two projecting flaps of the hood together at the throat, and unless you are advancing directly towards them, their faces are quite invisible. The hoods and capes are black, and are worn as a penance for the frailty of the women of Malta when the French took the place and robbed the churches, and pillaged the storehouses of the Knights, and bore themselves with less restraint than the infidel Turks had done.
Malta retains a slight suggestion of mediævalism in the garb of the Capuchin monks, whose tonsured heads and bare feet and roped waists look like a masquerade in their close proximity to the young officers in tweeds and varnished boots. But one gets the best idea of the past from the great Church of St. John, which is full of the trophies and gifts of the Grand Masters of the Order, and floored with two thousand marble tombs of the Knights themselves. Each Grand Master vied with those who had preceded him in enriching this church, and each Knight on his promotion made it a gift, so that to-day it is rich in these and wonderfully beautiful. This is the chief show-place, and the Governor's palace is another, and, to descend from the sublimity of the past to the absurdity of the present, so is also the guard-room of the officer of the day, which generations of English subalterns have helped to decorate. Each year a committee of officers go over the pictures on its walls and rub out the least amusing, and this survival of the fittest has resulted in a most entertaining gallery of black and white.
The Order of Jerusalem, or of St. John, still obtains in Europe, and those who can show fourteen quarterings on one side and twelve on the other are entitled to belong to it; but they are carpet knights, and wearing an enamel Maltese cross on the left side of an evening coat is a different thing from carrying it on a shield for Saracens to hack at.
BRINDISI