The treasury, or as it is called the golden chamber, contains the robes of the priests, which are very magnificent, arranged with great care and order in several ward-robes; and busts of saints and holy utensils in gold and silver, many of which were once encrusted with the most precious stones, but which had been removed by the French, and their places supplied by paste. Amongst the still costly contents of this chamber, I noticed a small tomb of a priest in solid gold and silver, and a skull of St. Peter, of the same precious metal. In this room were several ladies, who appeared to be under the strongest influence of Roman Catholic enthusiasm; not a robe or a relic was exhibited, which did not draw forth some fervidly pious exclamation.
I was shewn, as a marvelous curiosity, the mausoleum of the Three Kings, behind the grand altar towards the east, where the bodies of these personages, and those of the martyrs, Gregory of Spoleto, and Felix Nabor, repose. The bones of the three kings are said to have been brought away by the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, when he sacked Milan, and presented to the archbishop Bernauld of Dassalde, who attended him in his military exploits, and who deposited them near Bonn, from whence they were transferred to the spot where their mausoleum was afterwards erected, before the building of the present cathedral in the year 1170: the bones of these personages, of course, performed all sorts of prodigies; the blind by touching them, became astronomers, and the lame, dancing masters. This tomb, before the last war, was uncommonly rich and magnificent; but the French, who have displayed no great respect for living kings, could not be expected to pay much to three dead ones, and accordingly they have stripped their shrine of most of the jewelry, and precious ornaments. The sacrilege committed upon three holy kings, who were transported so far from their native country, reminds me of an anecdote, in which the playful wit of Mr. Hastings, formerly governor-general of India, was eminently displayed. An antiquary having collected in India a considerable number of Hindoo gods, had them well packed up for the purpose of being sent to England, and on the top of the case wrote in large characters “Gods—please to keep these uppermost;” the governor-general calling one morning on the collector, observed the package in his library, and remarking the superscription, said, “your direction is a wise one, for when you transport gods into a foreign country, it is ten to one but that they are overturned.”
Every street reminds the stranger of the former prevalence of the priesthood. Before the war, the clergy in this city, were divided into eleven chapters, nineteen parishes, nineteen convents for men, and thirty-nine convents for women, besides forty-nine chapels, institutions which supported between two and three thousand persons in useless voluptuousness and sloth.
As the other churches have been stripped of their finery, and were not embellished by any striking work of the statuary, I merely took a cursory view of their exterior: the principal are the Jesuits’ church, the collegiate church of St. Gerion, that of the Maccabees, and the abbey church of St. Pantaleon: all these and a number of other sacred buildings useless to name, abounded with saints and shrines incrusted with a profusion of jewellery, and all the mummery and mockery of cunning and credulity. With respect to the chapel of St. Ursula, a whimsical circumstance occurred some years since: in this depositary, for a great length of time, have reposed the bones of the immaculate St. Ursula, and eleven thousand virgins her companions, who came from England in a little boat in the year 640, to convert the Huns who had taken possession of this city, who instead of being moved by their sweet eloquence and cherub-like looks, put an end to their argument by putting them all to death. Some doubts arose many years since whether any country could have spared so many virgins, and a surgeon, somewhat of a wag, upon examining the consecrated bones, declared that most of them were the bones of full grown female mastiffs, for which discovery he was expelled the city. The convents and monasteries are converted into garrisons for the French troops quartered in the city. It is in contemplation to pull down about two-thirds of the churches.
On account of its numerous religious houses Cologne was called the Holy city. Bigotry, beggary, and ignorance disfigured the place in spite of its once flourishing trade and university. When the French seized upon this city, in 1794, they soon removed the rubbish of ages; three-fourths of the priests had the choice of retiring or entering the army, and when withdrawn, the weak minds over which they had exercised sovereign influence recovered their tone, and lived to hail the hour of their delivery from fanatical bondage, and the sturdy beggars were formed into conscripts. One of the most illustrious of the archbishops of Cologne was Theodoric, who was much celebrated in his time for his talents, erudition and morals. An anecdote is related of him, that upon the emperor Sigismund one day asking him how to obtain happiness hereafter, as the possession of it seemed impossible, Theodoric replied, “You must act virtuously, that is, you should always pursue that plan of conduct which you promise to do whilst you are labouring under a fit of the gravel, gout, or stone.”
When the Devil was sick
The Devil a Monk would be;
When the Devil was well
The Devil a Monk was he.
This city is celebrated for having given birth to Agrippina the mother of Nero, but it has derived more lustre from the immortal Rubens having been born here in 1640: the house in which he resided is still preserved and exhibited with great pride to strangers. This illustrious man was no less a scholar than a painter, and hence his allegorical works are more purely classical than those of any other master: of this the gallery of the Luxembourg and the banqueting-room at Whitehall bear ample testimony. Whilst he painted he used to recite the poems of Homer and Virgil, which he knew by heart, by which he infused the divine spirit of poetry into the productions of his pencil. After having studied a few years in Italy, his renown as an artist spread through Europe, whilst his learning, amenity of manners, elegant accomplishments, and amiable mind, secured to him the esteem and regard of all whom he approached. He was particularly cherished by the kings of England, Spain, and other monarchs: he was even employed upon a very delicate occasion to communicate proposals from the cabinet of Spain to that of London, and Charles I. was so delighted with his various talents, that he conferred upon him the honour of knighthood. The number of his paintings is prodigious. Sir Joshua Reynolds said that the most grand, as well as the most perfect piece of composition in the world, was that of Rubens’s picture of the Fall of the Damned, formerly in the gallery of Dusseldorf; that it combined such a varied, heterogeneous and horrible subject, in such a wonderful manner, that he scarcely knew which most to admire, the invention or the composition of the master. The last of Rubens’s paintings was the Crucifixion of St. Peter, with his head downward, which he presented to St. Peter’s church in this city one day after taking a copy of the register of his birth from its archives: the tasteless and mercenary heads of the church received this invaluable present with little expressions of gratitude, and were disappointed that the donor had not given them money in lieu: when Rubens heard of their dissatisfaction, he offered them 28,000 crowns for the picture, which, merely in consequence of the offer, they considered to be worth infinitely more, and therefore refused to sell him the work of his own hands, and it was preserved with great veneration in the church, where it continued till Cologne became one of the cities of the French empire. Rubens, to the powers and graces before ascribed to him, united the virtue of a christian: from motives of piety and benevolence he adorned many churches and convents with his matchless productions; which, as if the hallowed purpose to which they were devoted had inspired him, whilst he painted, were generally the most masterly efforts of his pencil.