THE JUMMA MUSJID, INDIA.

Historic Buildings

As Seen and Described
by Famous Writers

EDITED AND TRANSLATED

By ESTHER SINGLETON

AUTHOR OF “TURRETS, TOWERS AND TEMPLES,” “GREAT
PICTURES,” “WONDERS OF NATURE,” “FAMOUS PAINTINGS,”
“PARIS,” “LONDON” AND “A GUIDE TO THE OPERA,” ETC.

With Numerous Illustrations

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

1903

Copyright, 1903

By Dodd, Mead & Company

Published October, 1903

Preface

Two principles of selection have guided me in the preparation of this book, the sixth of a series which has met with a cordial reception. One is the beauty or interest from an artistic standpoint; the other, the historical associations. If the reader should miss some famous edifices, he will kindly remember that a small volume cannot contain a complete collection of all the historic buildings still standing, and that many other historic buildings have already appeared in my former books of this series, Turrets, Towers and Temples and Romantic Castles and Palaces.

I have endeavoured to find descriptions that deal with both views, giving the history of the building itself, and a description of its architectural features; and as this book contains, in consequence, a great variety of buildings of all periods and many countries, the student of both art and history will doubtless find pleasure in comparing these various styles of architecture and in composing a mental picture of events that have occurred within their walls.

Some of the buildings will aid him in realizing more fully, perhaps, than before some of the various influences that have aided in developing certain races; for instance, a study of the text and pictures of the cathedrals of Monreale and Palermo will demonstrate the presence of Norman and Saracen in Sicily. In other instances, it is not a long vanished race, but the still-felt presence of some strong personality like that of Shah Jehan, whose mosques and palaces and Taj Mahal stand as monuments not only to the great conqueror, but to the magnificence of his taste.

In this book, I have included several towers and fortresses as well as castles and baronial halls, and the Certosa of Pavia and La Grande Chartreuse, from which later historic home the Carthusian monks of France have lately been driven. In addition to the cathedrals and temples which have been the scenes of memorable historical events, I have added the particularly sacred shrines of the Holy Sepulchre, the Holy House of Loretto and the Campo Santo, Pisa, which attract thousands of the faithful.

Many of the extracts I have translated expressly for this book, and I have taken no liberties with the text, except a little cutting for the sake of space limitations.

E. S.

New York, September, 1903.

Contents

Illustrations

Historic Buildings

THE JUMMA MUSJID
G. W. STEEVENS

Delhi is the most historic city in all historic India.

It may not be the oldest—who shall say which is the oldest among rivals all coeval with time?—though it puts in a claim for a respectable middle-age, dating from 1000 B.C. or so. It has at least one authentic monument which is certainly fourteen or fifteen hundred years old. At that time Delhi’s master called himself Emperor of the World, and emperors, at least of India, have ruled there almost ever since. Mohammed, an Afghan of Ghor, took it in 1193; Tamerlane, the Mogul, sacked it two hundred years later; Nadir Shah, the Persian, in 1739; Ahmed Shah Durani, another Afghan, in 1756; the Marathas took it three years later. Half a century on, in 1803, General Lake took the capital of India for Britain. And British it has been ever since—except for those few months in 1857, when Mutiny brought the ghost of the Mogul empire into the semblance of life again; till Nicholson stormed the breach in the Kashmir Bastion, and dyed Delhi British for ever with his blood.

Look from the Ridge, whence the columns marched out to that last capture: the battered trophy of so many conquerors remains wonderfully fresh and fair. It seems more like a wood than a city. The rolls of green are only spangled with white, as if it were a suburb of villas standing in orchards. Only the snowy domes and tall minarets, the cupolas and gilded pinnacles, betray the still great and populous city that nestles below you and takes breath after her thousand troubles.

Let us go back to the city. Here at least is the Jumma Musjid, the great mosque, saved complete out of the storms—a baby of little more than two hundred years, to be sure, but still something. It is said to be the largest mosque in the world—a vast stretch of red sandstone and white marble and gold upstanding from a platform reached on three sides by flights of steps so tall, so majestically wide, that they are like a stone mountain tamed into order and proportion at an emperor’s will. Above the brass-mounted doors rise red portals so huge that they almost dwarf the whole—red galleries above them, white marble domes above them, white marble minarets rising higher yet, with pillars and cupolas and gilded pinnacles above all. Beside the gateways the walls of the quadrangle seem to creep along the ground; then, at the corners, rise towers with more open chambers, more cupolas and gilded pinnacles. Within, above the cloistered quadrangle, bulge three pure white domes—not hemispheres, like Western domes, but complete globes, only sliced away at the base and tapering to a spike at the top—and a slender minaret flanks each side.

The whole, to Western eyes, has a strange effect. Our own buildings are tighter together, gripped and focused more in one glance; over the Jumma Musjid your eye must wander, and then the mind must connect the views of the different parts. If you look at it near you cannot see it all; if far, it is low and seems to straggle. The West could hardly call it beautiful: it has proportion, but not compass. Therefore it does not abase you, as other great buildings do: somehow you have a feeling of patronage towards it. Yet it is most light and graceful with all its bulk: it seems to suit India, thus spread out to get its fill of the warm sun. It looks rich and lavish, as if space were of no account to it.

You have passed below the cloud-capped towers, out of the gorgeous palaces—and here is Silver Street, Delhi’s main thoroughfare. The pageant fades, and you plunge into the dense squalor which is also India. Along the houses run balconies and colonnades; here also you see vistas of pillars and lattice-work, but the stone is dirty, the stucco peels, the wood lacks paint. The houses totter and lean together. The street is a mass of squatting, variegated people; bulls, in necklaces of white and yellow flowers, sleep across the pavements, donkeys stroll into the shops, goats nibble at the vegetables piled for sale down the centre of the street, a squirrel is fighting with a caged parrot. Here is a jeweller’s booth, gay with tawdry paint; next, a baker’s, with the shopkeeper snoring on his low counter, and everything an inch thick with dust. At one step you smell incense; at the next, garbage.

Inimitable, incongruous India! And coming out of the walls, still crumbling from Nicholson’s cannon, you see mill-chimneys blackening the sky. Delhi, with local cotton, they tell you, can spin as fine as Manchester. One more incongruity! The iron pillar, the ruined mosque, the jewelled halls, the shabby street, and now the clacking mill. That is the last of Delhi’s myriad reincarnations.

SAN DONATO, ITALY.

MURANO
JOHN RUSKIN

We push our way on between large barges laden with fresh water from Fusina, in round white tubs seven feet across, and complicated boats full of all manner of nets that look as if they could never be disentangled, hanging from their masts and over their sides; and presently pass under a bridge with the lion of St. Mark on its archivolt, and another on a pillar at the end of the parapet, a small red lion with much of the puppy in his face, looking vacantly up in the air (in passing we may note that, instead of feathers, his wings are covered with hair, and in several other points the manner of his sculpture is not uninteresting). Presently the canal turns a little to the left, and thereupon becomes more quiet, the main bustle of the water-street being usually confined to the first straight reach of it, some quarter of a mile long, the Cheapside of Murano. We pass a considerable church on the left, St. Pietro, and a little square opposite to it with a few acacia trees, and then find our boat suddenly seized by a strong green eddy, and whirled into the tide-way of one of the main channels of the lagoon, which divides the town of Murano into two parts by a deep stream some fifty yards over, crossed only by one wooden bridge. We let ourselves drift some way down the current, looking at the low line of cottages on the other side of it, hardly knowing if there be more cheerfulness or melancholy in the way the sunshine glows on their ruinous but whitewashed walls, and sparkles on the rushing of the green water by the grass-grown quay. It needs a strong stroke of the oar to bring us into the mouth of another quiet canal on the farther side of the tide-way, and we are still somewhat giddy when we run the head of the gondola into the sand on the left-hand side of this more sluggish stream, and land under the east end of the Church of San Donato, the “Matrice” or “Mother” Church of Murano.

It stands, it and the heavy campanile detached from it a few yards, in a small triangular field of somewhat fresher grass than is usual near Venice, traversed by a paved walk with green mosaic of short grass between the rude squares of its stones, bounded on one side by ruinous garden walls, on another by a line of low cottages, on the third, the base of the triangle, by the shallow canal from which we have just landed. Near the point of the triangular space is a simple well, bearing date 1502; in its widest part, between the canal and campanile, is a four-square hollow pillar, each side formed by a separate slab of stone, to which the iron hasps are still attached that once secured the Venetian standard.

The cathedral itself occupies the northern angle of the field, encumbered with modern buildings, small out-house-like chapels, and wastes of white wall with blank square windows, and itself utterly defaced in the whole body of it, nothing but the apse having been spared; the original plan is only discoverable by careful examination, and even then but partially. The whole impression and effect of the building are irretrievably lost, but the fragments of it are still most precious.

We must first briefly state what is known of its history.

The legends of the Romish Church, though generally more insipid and less varied than those of Paganism, deserve audience from us on this ground, if on no other, that they have once been sincerely believed by good men, and have had no ineffective agency in the foundation of the existent European mind. The reader must not therefore accuse me of trifling, when I record for him the first piece of information I have been able to collect respecting the cathedral of Murano: namely, that the emperor Otho the Great, being overtaken by a storm on the Adriatic, vowed, if he were preserved, to build and dedicate a church to the Virgin, in whatever place might be most pleasing to her; that the storm thereupon abated; and the Virgin appearing to Otho in a dream showed him, covered with red lilies, that very triangular field on which we were but now standing amidst the ragged weeds and shattered pavement. The emperor obeyed the vision; and the church was consecrated on the 15th of August, 957.

Whatever degree of credence we may feel disposed to attach to this piece of history, there is no question that a church was built on this spot before the close of the Tenth Century: since in the year 999 we find the incumbent of the Basilica (note this word, it is of some importance) di Santa Maria Plebania di Murano taking an oath of obedience to the Bishop of the Altinat church, and engaging at the same time to give the said bishop his dinner on the Domenica in Albis, when the prelate held a confirmation in the mother church, as it was then commonly called, of Murano. From this period, for more than a century, I can find no records of any alterations made in the fabric of the church, but there exist very full details of the quarrels which arose between its incumbents and those of San Stefano, San Cipriano, San Salvatore, and the other churches of Murano, touching the due obedience which their less numerous or less ancient brotherhoods owed to St. Mary’s.

These differences seem to have been renewed at the election of every new abbot by each of the fraternities, and must have been growing serious when the patriarch of Grado, Henry Dandolo, interfered in 1102, and, in order to seal a peace between the two principal opponents, ordered that the abbot of St. Stephen’s should be present at the service in St. Mary’s on the night of the Epiphany, and that the abbot of St. Mary’s should visit him of St. Stephen’s on St. Stephen’s day; and that then the two abbots “should eat apples and drink good wine together, in peace and charity.”[1]

But even this kindly effort seems to have been without result: the irritated pride of the antagonists remained unsoothed by the love-feast of St. Stephen’s day; and the breach continued to widen until the abbot of St. Mary’s obtained a timely accession to his authority in the year 1125. The Doge Domenico Michele, having in the Second Crusade secured such substantial advantages for the Venetians as might well counterbalance the loss of part of their trade with the East, crowned his successes by obtaining possession in Cephalonia of the body of San Donato, bishop of Eurœa; which treasure he having presented on his return to the Murano basilica, that church was thenceforward called the church of Sts. Mary and Donato. Nor was the body of the saint its only acquisition: St. Donato’s principal achievement had been the destruction of a terrible dragon in Epirus; Michele brought home the bones of the dragon as well as of the saint; the latter were put in a marble sarcophagus, and the former hung up over the high altar.

But the clergy of St. Stefano were indomitable. At the very moment when their adversaries had received this formidable accession of strength, they had the audacity “ad onta de’ replicati giuramenti, e dell’ inveterata consuetudine,” to refuse to continue in the obedience which they had vowed to their mother church. The matter was tried in a provincial council; the votaries of St. Stephen were condemned, and remained quiet for about twenty years, in wholesome dread of the authority conferred on the abbot of St. Donato, by the Pope’s legate, to suspend any of the clergy of the island from their office if they refused submission. In 1172, however, they appealed to Pope Alexander III, and were condemned again: and we find the struggle renewed at every promising opportunity, during the course of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries; until at last, finding St. Donato and the dragon together too strong for him, the abbot of St. Stefano “discovered” in his church the bodies of two hundred martyrs at once!—a discovery, it is to be remembered, in some sort equivalent in those days to that of California in ours. The inscription, however, on the façade of the church recorded it with quiet dignity:—“MCCCLXXIV. a dì XIV, di Aprile. Furono trovati nella presente chiesa del protomartire San Stefano, duecento e più corpi de’ Santi Martin, dal Ven. Prete Matteo Fradello, piovano della chiesa.”[2] Corner, who gives this inscription, which no longer exists, goes on to explain with infinite gravity, that the bodies in question, “being of infantile form and stature, are reported by tradition to have belonged to those fortunate innocents who suffered martyrdom under King Herod; but that when, or by whom, the church was enriched with so vast a treasure, is not manifested by any document.”

The issue of the struggle is not to our present purpose. We have already arrived at the Fourteenth Century without finding record of any effort made by the clergy of St. Mary’s to maintain their influence by restoring or beautifying their basilica; which is the only point at present of importance to us. That great alterations were made in it at the time of the acquisition of the body of St. Donato is however highly probable, the mosaic pavement of the interior, which bears its date inscribed 1140, being probably the last of the additions. I believe that no part of the ancient church can be shown to be of more recent date than this; and I shall not occupy the reader’s time by any inquiry respecting the epochs or authors of the destructive modern restorations; the wreck of the old fabric, breaking out from beneath them here and there, is generally distinguishable from them at a glance; and it is enough for the reader to know that none of these truly ancient fragments can be assigned to a more recent date than 1140, and that some of them may with probability be looked upon as remains of the shell of the first church erected in the course of the latter half of the Tenth Century.

It is roofed by a concha, or semi-dome; and the external arrangement of its walls provides for the security of this dome by what is, in fact, a system of buttresses as effective and definite as that of any of the northern churches, although the buttresses are obtained entirely by adaptations of the Roman shaft and arch, the lower story being formed by a thick mass of wall lightened by ordinary semicircular round-headed niches, like those used so extensively afterwards in Renaissance architecture, each niche flanked by a pair of shafts standing clear of the wall, and bearing deeply moulded arches thrown over the niche. The walls with its pillars thus forms a series of massy buttresses, on the top of which is an open gallery, backed by a thinner wall, and roofed by arches whose shafts are set above the pairs of shafts below. On the heads of these arches rests the roof. We have, therefore, externally a heptagonal apse, chiefly of rough and common brick, only with marble shafts and a few marble ornaments; but for that reason all the more interesting because it shows us what may be done, and what was done, with materials such as are now at our own command; and because in its proportions, and in the use of the few ornaments it possesses, it displays a delicacy of feeling rendered doubly notable by the roughness of the work in which laws so subtle are observed, and with which so thoughtful ornamentation is associated.

We must now see what is left of interest within the walls.

All hope is taken away by our first glance; for it falls on a range of shafts whose bases are concealed by wooden panelling, and which sustains arches decorated in the most approved style of Renaissance upholstery, with stucco roses in squares under the soffits, and egg and arrow mouldings on the architraves, gilded, on a ground of spotty black and green, with a small pink-faced and black-eyed cherub on every keystone; the rest of the church being for the most part concealed either by dirty hangings, or dirtier whitewash, or dim pictures on warped and wasting canvas; all vulgar, vain, and foul. Yet let us not turn back, for in the shadow of the apse our more careful glance shows us a Greek Madonna, pictured on a field of gold; and we feel giddy at the first step we make on the pavement, for it, also, is of Greek mosaic waved like the sea, and dyed like a dove’s neck.

Nor are the original features of the rest of the edifice altogether indecipherable; the entire series of shafts marked in the ground plan on each side of the nave, from the western entrance to the apse, are nearly uninjured; and I believe the stilted arches they sustain are those of the original fabric, though the masonry is covered by the Renaissance stucco mouldings. Their capitals, for a wonder, are left bare, and appear to have sustained no farther injury than has resulted from the insertion of a large brass chandelier into each of their abaci, each chandelier carrying a sublime wax candle two inches thick, fastened with wire to the wall above. The due arrangement of these appendages, previous to festa days, can only be effected from a ladder set against the angle of the abacus; and ten minutes before I wrote this sentence, I had the privilege of watching the candle-lighter at his work, knocking his ladder about the heads of the capitals as if they had given him personal offence. He at last succeeded in breaking away one of the lamps altogether, with a bit of the marble of the abacus; the whole falling in ruin to the pavement, and causing much consultation and clamour among a tribe of beggars who were assisting the sacristan with their wisdom respecting the festal arrangements.

It is fortunate that the capitals themselves, being somewhat rudely cut, can bear this kind of treatment better than most of those in Venice. They are all founded on the Corinthian type, but the leaves are in every one different: those of the easternmost capital of the southern range are the best, and very beautiful, but presenting no feature of much interest, their workmanship being inferior to most of the imitations of Corinthian common at the period; much more to the rich fantasies which we have seen at Torcello. The apse itself to-day (12th September, 1851), is not to be described; for just in front of it, behind the altar, is a magnificent curtain of a new red velvet with a gilt edge and two golden tassels, held up in a dainty manner by two angels in the upholsterer’s service; and above all, for concentration of effect a star or sun, some five feet broad, the spikes of which conceal the whole of the figure of the Madonna except the head and hands.

The pavement is however still left open, and it is of infinite interest, although grievously distorted and defaced. For whenever a new chapel has been built, or a new altar erected, the pavement has been broken up and readjusted so as to surround the newly inserted steps or stones with some appearance of symmetry; portions of it either covered or carried away, others mercilessly shattered or replaced by modern imitations, and those of very different periods, with pieces of the old floor left here and there in the midst of them, and worked round so as to deceive the eye into acceptance of the whole as ancient. The portion, however, which occupies the western extremity of the nave, and the parts immediately adjoining it in the aisles, are, I believe, in their original positions, and very little injured: they are composed chiefly of groups of peacocks, lions, stags, and griffins,—two of each in a group, drinking out of the same vase, or shaking claws together,—enclosed by interlacing bands, and alternating with chequer or star patterns, and here and there an attempt at representation of architecture, all worked in marble mosaic. The floors of Torcello and of St. Mark’s are executed in the same manner; but what remains at Murano is finer than either, in the extraordinary play of colour obtained by the use of variegated marbles. At St. Mark’s the patterns are more intricate, and the pieces far more skillfully set together; but each piece is there commonly of one colour: at Murano every fragment is itself variegated, and all are arranged with a skill and feeling not to be taught, and to be observed with deep reverence, for that pavement is not dateless, like the rest of the church; it bears its date on one of its central circles, 1140, and is, in my mind, one of the most precious monuments in Italy, showing thus early, and in those rude chequers which the bared knee of the Murano fisher wears in its daily bending, the beginning of that mighty spirit of Venetian colour, which was to be consummated in Titian.

But we must quit the church for the present, for its garnishings are completed; the candles are all upright in their sockets, and the curtains are drawn into festoons, and a pasteboard crescent, gay with artificial flowers, has been attached to the capital of every pillar, in order, together with the gilt angels, to make the place look as much like Paradise as possible. If we return to-morrow, we shall find it filled with woeful groups of aged men and women, wasted and fever-struck, fixed in paralytic supplication, half kneeling, half couched upon the pavement; bowed down, partly in feebleness, partly in a fearful devotion, with their grey clothes cast far over their faces, ghastly and settled into a gloomy animal misery, all but the glittering eyes and muttering lips.

Fit inhabitants, these, for what was once the Garden of Venice, “a terrestrial paradise,—a place of nymphs and demigods!”

We return, yet once again, on the following day. Worshippers and objects of worship, the sickly crowd and gilded angels, all are gone; and there far in the apse, is seen the sad Madonna standing in her folded robe, lifting her hands in vanity of blessing. There is little else to draw away our thoughts from the solitary image. An old wooden tablet, carved into a rude effigy of San Donato, which occupies the central niche in the lower part of the tribune, has an interest of its own, but is unconnected with the history of the older church. The faded frescoes of saints, which cover the upper tier of the wall of the apse, are also of comparatively recent date, much more the piece of Renaissance workmanship, shaft and entablature, above the altar, which has been thrust into the midst of all, and has cut away part of the feet of the Madonna. Nothing remains of the original structure but the semi-dome itself, the cornice whence it springs, which is the same as that used on the exterior of the church, and the border and face-arch which surround it. The ground of the dome is of gold, unbroken except by the upright Madonna, and usual inscription, M R [** symbol] V. The figure wears a robe of blue, deeply fringed with gold, which seems to be gathered on the head and thrown back on the shoulders, crossing the breast, and falling in many folds to the ground. The under robe, shown beneath it where it opens at the breast, is of the same colour; the whole, except the deep gold fringe, being simply the dress of the women of the time. Le donne, anco elle del 1100, vestivano di turchino con manti in spalla, che le coprivano dinanzi e di dietro.[3]

Round the dome there is a colored mosaic border; and on the edge of its arch, legible by the whole congregation, this inscription:

“Quos Eva contrivit, pia Virgo Maria redemit;

Hanc cuncti laudent, qui Christi munere gaudent.”[4]

The whole edifice is, therefore, simply a temple to the Virgin: to her is ascribed the fact of Redemption, and to her its praise.

“And is this,” it will be asked of me, “the time, is this the worship, to which you would have us look back with reverence and regret?” Inasmuch as redemption is ascribed to the Virgin, No. Inasmuch as redemption is a thing desired, believed in, rejoiced in, Yes,—and Yes a thousand times. As far as the Virgin is worshipped in place of God, No; but as far as there is the evidence of worship itself, and of the sense of a Divine presence, Yes. For there is a wider division of men than that into Christian and Pagan: we ask what a man worships, we have to ask whether he worships at all. Observe Christ’s own words on this head: “God is a spirit; and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit, and in truth.” The worshipping in spirit comes first, and does not necessarily imply the worshipping in truth. Therefore, there is first the broad division of men into Spirit worshippers and Flesh worshippers; and then, of the Spirit worshippers, the farther division into Christian and Pagan,—worshippers in Falsehood or in Truth. I therefore, for the moment, omit all inquiry how far the Mariolatry of the early church did indeed eclipse Christ, or what measure of deeper reverence for the Son of God was still felt through all the grosser forms of Madonna worship. Let that worship be taken at its worst; let the goddess of this dome of Murano be looked upon as just in the same sense an idol as the Athene of the Acropolis, or the Syrian Queen of Heaven; and then, on this darkest assumption, balance well the difference between those who worship and those who worship not;—that difference which there is in the sight of God, in all ages, between the calculating, smiling, self-sustained, self-governed man, and the believing, weeping, wondering, struggling, Heaven-governed man;—between the men who say in their hearts “there is no God,” and those who acknowledge a God at every step, “if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.” For that is indeed the difference which we shall find, in the end, between the builders of this day and the builders on that sand island long ago. They did honour something out of themselves; they did believe in spiritual presence judging, animating, redeeming them; they built to its honour and for its habitation; and were content to pass away in nameless multitudes, so only that the labour of their hands might fix in the sea-wilderness a throne for their guardian angel. In this was their strength, and there was indeed a Spirit walking with them on the waters, though they could not discern the form thereof, though the Master’s voice came not to them, “It is I.” What their error cost them, we shall see here-after; for it remained when the majesty and the sincerity of their worship had departed, and remains to this day. Mariolatry is no special characteristic of the Twelfth Century; on the outside of that very tribune of San Donato, in its central recess, is an image of the Virgin who receives the reverence once paid to the blue vision upon the inner dome. With rouged cheeks and painted brows, the frightful doll stands in wretchedness of rags, blackened with the smoke of the votive lamp at its feet; and if we would know what has been lost or gained by Italy in the six hundred years that have worn the marbles of Murano, let us consider how far the priests who set up this to worship, the populace who have this to adore, may be nobler than the men who conceived that lonely figure standing on the golden field, or than those to whom it seemed to receive their prayer at evening, far away, where they only saw the blue clouds rising out of the burning sea.

THE PALACE OF THE POPES
CHARLES DICKENS

Hard by the cathedral stands the ancient Palace of the Popes, of which one portion is now a common jail, and another a noisy barrack: while gloomy suites of apartments, shut up and deserted, mock their own old state and glory, like the embalmed bodies of kings. But we neither went there to see state-rooms, nor soldiers’ quarters, nor a common jail, though we dropped some money into a prisoners’ box outside, whilst the prisoners themselves, looked through the iron bars, high up, and watched us eagerly. We went to see the ruins of the dreadful rooms in which the Inquisition used to sit.

THE PALACE OF THE POPES, FRANCE.

A little, old, swarthy woman, with a pair of flashing black eyes—proof that the world hadn’t conjured down the devil within her, though it had had between sixty and seventy years to do it in—came out of the Barrack Cabaret, of which she was the keeper, with some large keys in her hands, and marshalled us the way that we should go. How she told us, on the way, that she was a Government Officer (concierge du palais apostolique) and had been for I don’t know how many years; and how she had shown these dungeons to princes; and how she was the best of dungeon demonstrators; and how she had resided in the palace from an infant—had been born there, if I recollect right—I needn’t relate. But such a fierce, little, rapid, sparkling, energetic she-devil I never beheld. She was alight and flaming all the time. Her action was violent in the extreme. She never spoke without stopping expressly for the purpose. She stomped her feet, clutched us by the arms, flung herself into attitudes, hammered against the walls with her keys, for mere emphasis: now whispered as if the Inquisition were there still: now shrieked as if she were on the rack herself; and had a mysterious, hag-like way with her forefinger, when approaching the remains of some new horror—looking back and walking stealthily, and making horrible grimaces—that might alone have qualified her to walk up and down a sick man’s counterpane, to the exclusion of all other figures, through a whole fever.

Passing through the courtyard, among groups of idle soldiers, we turned off by a gate, which this She-Goblin unlocked for our admission, and locked again behind us: and entered a narrow court, rendered narrower by fallen stones and heaps of rubbish; part of it choking up the mouth of a ruined subterranean passage, that once communicated (or is said to have done so) with another castle on the opposite bank of the river. Close to this courtyard is a dungeon—we stood within it, in another minute—in the dismal tower des oubliettes, where Rienzi was imprisoned, fastened by an iron chain to the very wall that stands there now, but shut out from the sky which now looks down into it. A few steps brought us to the Cachots, in which the prisoners of the Inquisition were confined for forty-eight hours after their capture, without food or drink, that their constancy might be shaken, even before they were confronted with their gloomy judges. The day has not got in there yet, they are still small cells, shut in by four unyielding, close, hard walls; still profoundly dark; still massively doored and fastened as of old.

Goblin, looking back as I have described, went softly on, into a vaulted chamber, now used as a store-room: once the chapel of the Holy Office. The place where the tribunal sat was plain. The platform might have been removed but yesterday. Conceive the parable of the Good Samaritan having been painted on the wall of one of these Inquisition chambers! But it was, and may be traced there yet.

High up in the jealous wall are niches where the faltering replies of the accused were heard and noted down. Many of them had been brought out of the very cell we had just looked into, so awfully: along the same stone passage. We had trodden in their very footsteps.

I am gazing round me, with the horror that the place inspires, when Goblin clutches me by the wrist, and lays, not her skinny finger, but the handle of the key, upon her lips. She invites me, with a jerk, to follow her. I do so. She leads me out into a room adjoining—a rugged room, with a funnel-shaped, contracting roof, open at the top to the bright day. I ask her what it is. She folds her arms, leers hideously, and stares. I ask again. She glances round, to see that all the little company are there; sits down upon a mound of stones; throws up her arms, and yells out, like a fiend, “La Salle de la Question!”

The Chamber of Torture! And the roof was made of that shape to stifle the victim’s cries! Oh, Goblin, Goblin, let us think of this awhile in silence. Peace, Goblin! Sit with your short arms crossed on your short legs, upon that heap of stones, for only five minutes, and then flame out again.

Minutes! Seconds are not marked upon the Palace Clock, when, with her eyes flashing fire, Goblin is up in the middle of the chamber, describing, with her sunburnt arms, a wheel of heavy blows. Thus it ran round! cries Goblin. Mash, mash, mash! An endless routine of heavy hammers. Mash, mash, mash! upon the sufferer’s limbs. See the stone trough! says Goblin. For the water torture! Gurgle, swill, bloat, burst, for the Redeemer’s honour! Suck the bloody rag, deep down into your unbelieving body, Heretic, at every breath you draw. And when the executioner plucks it out, reeking with the smaller mysteries of God’s own Image, know us for His chosen servants, true believers in the Sermon on the Mount, elect disciples of Him who never did a miracle but to heal: who never struck a man with palsy, blindness, deafness, dumbness, madness, any one affliction of mankind; and never stretched His blessed hand out, but to give relief and ease!

See! cries Goblin. There the furnace was. There they made the irons red-hot. Those holes supported the sharp stake, on which the tortured persons hung poised: dangling with their whole weight from the roof. “But”—and Goblin whispers this—“Monsieur has heard of this tower? Yes? Let Monsieur look down then!”

A cold air, laden with an earthy smell, falls upon the face of Monsieur; for she has opened, while speaking, a trap-door in the wall. Monsieur looks in. Downward to the bottom, upward to the top, of a steep, dark, lofty tower: very dismal, very dark, very cold. The Executioner of the Inquisition, says Goblin, edging in her head to look down also, flung those who were past all further torturing down here. “But look! does Monsieur see the black stains on the wall?” A glance, over his shoulder, at Goblin’s keen eye, shows Monsieur—and would without the aid of the directing key—where they are. “What are they?” “Blood!”

In October, 1791, when the Revolution was at its height here, sixty persons: men and women (“and priests,” says Goblin, “priests”): were murdered, and hurled the dying and the dead, into this dreadful pit, where a quantity of quicklime was tumbled down upon their bodies. Those ghastly tokens of the massacre were soon no more; but while one stone of the strong building in which the deed was done remains upon another, there they will lie in the memories of men, as plain to see as the splashing of their blood upon the wall is now.

Was it a portion of the great schemes of Retribution that the cruel deed should be committed in this place? That a part of the atrocities and monstrous institutions, which had been, for scores of years, at work, to change men’s nature, should in its last service tempt them with the ready means of gratifying their furious and beastly rage! Should enable them to show themselves, in the height of their frenzy, no worse than a great, solemn, legal establishment in the height of its power? No worse! Much better. They used the Tower of the Forgotten in the name of Liberty—their liberty; an earth-born creature, nursed in the black mud of the Bastille moats and dungeons, and necessarily betraying many evidences of its unwholesome bringing-up—but the Inquisition used it in the name of Heaven.

Goblin’s finger is lifted; and she steals out again into the Chapel of the Holy Office. She stops at a certain part of the flooring. Her great effect is at hand. She waits for the rest. She darts at the Brave Courier, who is explaining something; hits him a sounding rap on the hat with the largest key: and bids him be silent. She assembles us all round a little trap-door in the floor as round a grave. “Voilà!” she darts down at the ring, and flings the door open with a crash, in her goblin energy, though it is no light weight. “Voilà les oubliettes! Voilà les oubliettes! Subterranean! Frightful! Black! Terrible! Deadly! Les oubliettes de l’Inquisition!”

My blood ran cold as I looked from Goblin, down into the vaults, where these forgotten creatures, with recollections of the world outside: of wives, friends, children, brothers: starved to death, and made the stones ring with their unavailing groans. But, the thrill I felt on seeing the accursed wall below, decayed and broken through, and the sun shining in through its gaping wounds, was like a sense of victory and triumph. I felt exalted with the proud delight of living, in these degenerate times, to see it. As if I were the hero of some high achievement! The light in the doleful vaults was typical of the light that has streamed in on all persecution in God’s name, but which is not yet at its noon! It cannot look more lovely to a blind man newly restored to sight, than to a traveller who sees it, calmly and majestically, treading down the darkness of that Infernal Well.

Goblin, having shown les oubliettes felt that her great coup was struck. She let the door fall with a crash, and stood upon it with her arms akimbo, sniffing prodigiously.

When we left the place, I accompanied her into her house, under the outer gateway of the fortress, to buy a little history of the building. Her cabaret, a dark low room, lighted by small windows, sunk in the thick wall—in the softened light, and with its forge-like chimney; its little counter by the door, with bottles, jars, and glasses on it; its household implements and scraps of dress against the wall; and a sober-looking woman (she must have a congenial life of it with Goblin) knitting at the door—looked exactly like a picture by Ostade.

I walked round the building on the outside, in a sort of dream, and yet with the delightful sense of having awakened from it, of which the light, down in the vaults, had given me the assurance. The immense thickness and giddy height of the walls, the enormous strength of the massive towers, the great extent of the building, its gigantic proportions, frowning aspect, and barbarous irregularity, awaken awe and wonder. The recollection of its opposite old uses; an impregnable fortress, a luxurious palace, a horrible prison, a place of torture, the court of the Inquisition: at one and the same time, a house of feasting, fighting, religion, and blood: gives to every stone in its huge form a fearful interest, and imparts new meaning to its incongruities. I could think of little, however, then, or long afterwards, but the sun in the dungeons. The palace coming down to be the lounging-place of noisy soldiers, and being forced to echo their rough talk and common oaths, and to have their garments fluttering from its dirty windows, was some reduction of its state, and something to rejoice at; but the day in its cells, and the sky for the roof of its chambers of cruelty—that was its desolation and defeat! If I had seen it in a blaze from ditch to rampart, I should have felt that not that light, nor all the light in all the fire that burns, could waste it, like the sunbeams in its secret council-chamber, and its prisons.

Before I quit this Palace of the Popes, let me translate from the little history I mentioned just now a short anecdote, quite appropriate to itself, connected with its adventures.

“An ancient tradition relates, that in 1441, a nephew of Pierre de Lude, the Pope’s legate, seriously insulted some distinguished ladies of Avignon, whose relations, in revenge, seized the young man and horribly mutilated him. For several years the legate kept his revenge within his own breast, but he was not the less resolved upon its gratification at last. He even made, in the fullness of time, advances towards a complete reconciliation; and when their apparent sincerity had prevailed, he invited to a splendid banquet, in this palace, certain families, whom he sought to exterminate. The utmost gayety animated the repast; but the measures of the legate were well taken. When the dessert was on the board, a Swiss presented himself, with the announcement that a strange embassador solicited an extraordinary audience. The legate, excusing himself for the moment to his guests, retired, followed by his officers. Within a few moments afterwards, five hundred persons were reduced to ashes; the whole of that wing of the building having been blown into the air with a terrible explosion!”

After seeing the churches (I will not trouble you with churches just now), we left Avignon that afternoon. The heat being very great, the roads outside the walls were strewn with people fast asleep in every little slip of shade, and with lazy groups, half asleep and half awake, who were waiting until the sun should be low enough to admit of their playing bowls among the burnt-up trees, and on the dusty road. The harvest here was already gathered in, and mules and horses were treading out the corn in the fields. We came, at dusk, upon a wild and hilly country, once famous for brigands; and travelled slowly up a steep ascent. So we went on until eleven at night, when we halted at the town of Aix (within two stages of Marseilles) to sleep.

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE. PALESTINE.

THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE
PIERRE LOTI

The rain is nearly over. The sky is drying sadly and shows the first blue spaces. It is damp and cold, and water runs all along the base of the old walls.

On foot, with an Arab for a guide, I escape alone from the hôtel to hurry at last to the Holy Sepulchre. It is in the opposite direction to that of the Dominicans, almost in the heart of Jerusalem through narrow winding streets between walls as old as the Crusades, without windows and without roofs. On the wet pavements and beneath a still dark sky, circulate Oriental costumes,—Turks, Bedouins, or Jews, and women draped like phantoms, Musulmans beneath dark veils and Christians beneath white veils.

The city has remained Saracen. Vaguely I notice that we pass an Oriental bazaar, where the stalls are occupied by merchants in turbans; in the shadow of the roofed streets there slowly passes a string of enormous camels, that obliges us to enter one of the doors. Now, we must get out of the way for a peculiar and long defile of Russian women, all sexagenarians at least, who walk rapidly leaning on walking-sticks; old faded dresses, old parasols, old touloupes of fur, with faces of fatigue and suffering framed in black handkerchiefs; a black and sorrowful ensemble in the midst of this Orient of colour. They walk rapidly with a movement at once excited and exhausted, all hustling along without seeing anything, like somnambulists, with anæstheticized eyes wide open in a celestial dream. And hundreds of moujiks, having the same look of ecstasy follow them; all of them old, sordid, with long grey beards and long grey hair escaping from their felt hats; on their breasts many medals, indicating that they are old soldiers. Having entered the holy city yesterday, they are returning from their first visit to that sacred spot where I am going in my turn; poor pilgrims who come here by the thousand, on foot, sleeping out of doors in the rain or the snow, suffering with hunger and dying on the way.

In proportion as you approach, the Oriental objects in the stalls give place to objects of an obscure Christian piety: thousands of chaplets, crosses, religious lamps, and images or icons. And the crowd is denser, and other pilgrims, old moujiks and old matouchkas plant themselves to buy cheap little wooden rosaries and cheap little crucifixes for two sous, which they will carry from here as relics to be considered as sacred for ever.

Finally, in an old and defaced wall resembling a rock, there opens a rude door, very low and narrow, and, by a series of descending steps, you arrive before a place jutting out from the high sombre walls, in front of the basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.

At this spot, it is customary to take off your hat, the very moment the Holy Sepulchre appears; every one passes bareheaded even if he is only going by on his way about Jerusalem. It is thronged with poor people who beg by singing; pilgrims who pray; sellers of crosses and chaplets who have their little booths on the ground upon the old and venerable flag-stones. Upon the pavement and among the steps there rise the still uprooted socles of columns that formally supported the basilicas, and that were razed, like those of St. Stephen, from far back and doubtful periods; everything is a collection of rubbish in this city which has been subjected to twenty sieges and which every kind of fanaticism has sacked.

The high walls, of reddish brown stone, forming the sides of this place, are convents or chapels—and it is said fortresses also. In the background, higher and more sombre than anything else rises that worn out and broken mass, which is the façade of the Holy Sepulchre and which has assumed the appearance and irregularities of a large rock; it has two enormous doors of the Twelfth Century framed with singularly archaic ornaments; one of them is walled up; the other is wide open permitting you to see thousands of little flames in the shadowy interior. Songs, cries and discordant lamentations, lugubrious to hear, escape through it with the perfume of incense.

Passing through the door, you find yourself in the venerable shadow of a kind of vestibule that reveals magnificent depths beyond, where innumerable lamps are burning. Some Turkish guards, armed as if for a massacre, occupy this entrance in a military fashion; seated like sovereigns on a large divan, they watch the devotees passing this place, which is always, from their point of view, the opprobrium of Musulman Jerusalem and which the most savage of them have never ceased to call El Komamah (ordure).

Oh! the unexpected and imperishable impression when you enter here for the first time. A maze of sombre sanctuaries, of all periods and of all aspects connected by openings, doors and superb columns,—and also by little gloomy doors, air-holes and cavernous hollowings. Some of these are elevated like high tribunals, where you perceive, in the remote distance, groups of women in long veils; others are subterranean, where you are jostled by shadows, between walls of rock that have remained intact, dripping and black.—All this, in a twilight where a few rays of light fall and accentuate the surrounding darkness; all this, starry with an infinite number of little flames in lamps of silver and gold, hanging from the vaults by the thousand.—And everywhere a crowd moving about confusedly as if at Babel, or quite stationary, seeming to be grouped by nationalities around the golden tabernacles where somebody is officiating.

Psalmody, lamentations and joyful songs fill the high vaults, or echo in the sepulchral depths below; the nasal melopœia of the Greeks cut through by the howlings of the Copts. And, in all these voices, an exaltation of tears and prayers which produce dissonance and which unite them; the whole effect becoming I know not what strange thing that makes this place like a great wail from mankind and the supreme cry of distress before death.

The rotunda with a very high cupola, which you enter first and which allows you to divine between its columns the obscure chaos of the other sanctuaries, is occupied in the centre by the great marble kiosk, of a luxury that is half barbaric and overcharged with silver lamps, that encloses the stone of the sepulchre. All around this very sacred kiosk, the crowd surges or stands still: on the one side hundreds of moujiks and matouchkas are kneeling on the flag-stones; on the other, the women of Jerusalem, standing up, in long white veils—groups of ancient virgins, one would, say, in the dreamlike shadow; elsewhere Abyssinians and turbaned Arabs prostrated with foreheads to the earth; Turks with sabre in hand; people of all communions and all languages.

You do not stay long in this habitation of the Holy Sepulchre, which is really the very heart of this mass of basilicas and chapels, people pass by one by one; lowering your head you enter it by a very little door of marble carved and festooned; the sepulchre is within, encased in marble and surrounded by gold icons and gold lamps. There entered at the same time as I did a Russian soldier, a poor old woman in rags, an Oriental woman in rich brocade; all kissed the cover of the tomb and wept. And others followed, and others eternally follow, to touch, embrace and wet with tears these same stones.

There is no plan of unity in this collection of churches and chapels which crowd close around this very holy kiosk; there are some large ones that are marvellously sumptuous and some little ones that are humble and primitive, crumbling away with age in these sinister nooks dug out of the natural rock and dark as night. And, here and there, the rock of Calvary, left bare, appears in the midst of richness and archaic gold work. The contrast is strange between so many collected treasures,—icons of gold, crosses of gold and lamps of gold,—and the rags of the pilgrims and the decay of the walls and the pillars, worn, corroded, shapeless and greasy from the rubbing of so many human bodies.

All the altars and all the different confessionals are so mingled here that it results in a continual displacing of priests and processions; they cleave through the crowds, carrying remonstrances and preceded by armed Janizaries who knock upon the resonant flag-stones with the hilts of their halberds. Make room! here are some Latins who pass in golden chasubles. Make room again! here is the Syrian bishop with a long white beard under a black cagoule, who issues from his little subterranean chapel. Then here are some Greeks still Byzantine in adornment, and Abyssinians with black faces. Quickly, quickly they walk by in their sumptuous vestments whilst before them the silver censers swung by children knock against the crowd which is thrown into confusion and separates. In this human sea there is a continuous rumbling and an incessant noise of psalmody and sacred bells. Almost everywhere it is so dark that in order to walk about, it is necessary to have a candle in your hand, and, beneath the high columns and in the dark corridors thousands of little flames follow or cross each other. Men praying in a loud voice, weeping and sobbing, run from one chapel to another, here to kiss the rock where the Cross was planted, there to prostrate themselves where Mary and Magdalen wept; some priests, crouching in the shadows, beckon to you to lead you through the funereal little doors in the holes of the tombs; old women with wild eyes and tears running down their cheeks come up from the subterranean blackness to kiss the stones of the sepulchres.

In black darkness, you descend to the chapel of Saint-Helena, by a wide stairway of about thirty steps, worn, broken, dangerous as falling into ruin and bordered with squatting spectres. In passing, our candles illumined the vague motionless creatures, of the same colour as the side of the rock, who are afflicted beggars, lunatics covered with ulcers, sinister all of them, with their chins in their hands and long hair falling over their faces.—Among these ghastly creatures, there is a blind young man, with magnificent blonde curls enveloping him like a mantle, who is as beautiful as the Christ whom he resembles.

Down below, the chapel of Saint-Helena, after that night, with its two rows of phantoms that you have passed through, is illumined by daylight, whose rays arrive pale and bluish through the loop-holes of the vault. Assuredly this is one of the strangest places in all that medley that calls itself the Holy Sepulchre; it is there that one experiences in the most distressing manner, the sentiment of the terrible Past.

It is silent when I arrive and it is empty, beneath the half dead gaze of those phantoms that guard the stairway at the entrance; you hear with difficulty the indistinct noise of bells and chants from above. Behind the altar, still another stairway, bordered with the same long-haired individuals, descends lower into a still darker night.

You would think this a heathen temple. Four enormous, dumpy pillars, of a primitive Byzantine type and exceedingly heavy, sustain the surbased cupola, from which hang ostrich eggs and a thousand uncouth pendants. Remains of painting on the walls indicating saints with nimbuses of gold in naïve and stiff attitudes are being effaced by the dampness and ancient dust. Everything is decaying through neglect with the sweat of water and saltpetre.

From the depths of the lower subterranean vaults suddenly ascend some Abyssinian priests, who suggest the ancient Magi-Kings, issuing from the bowels of the earth; black faces under large golden tiaras formed like turbans, long robes of cloth of gold sprinkled with imaginary red and blue flowers. Quickly, quickly, with that kind of excited haste which is universal here, they cross the crypts of Saint-Helena and mount towards the other sanctuaries by the big stairway in ruins,—illuminated at first by the light falling from the loop-holes of the vault, splendidly archaic in their golden robes in the midst of the gnomes squatting against the walls,—then, they suddenly disappear above in the distant shadows.

Some distance away, in the sanctuaries at the entrance and near the kiosk of the Sepulchre, the rock of Calvary rises: it supports two chapels to which you ascend by twenty stone steps and which are the veritable place of prostrations and sobs for the crowd.

From the peristyle of these chapels, like an elevated balcony the view commands a confused mass of tabernacles, a maze of churches, where the hypnotized crowd moves about. The most splendid of the two is that of the Greeks; under a nimbus of silver, as resplendent as a rainbow, stand out in human grandeur the pale images of the three crucified ones, Christ and the two thieves; the walls are hidden by icons of silver, gold and precious stones. The altar is erected on the very place of the crucifixion; under the retable a silver lattice lets you see in the black rock the hole where the Cross was planted,—and it is there that you walk on your knees, wetting these sombre stones with tears and kisses, whilst a lulling noise of chants and prayers ascends incessantly from the churches below.

And, for two thousand years, here it has ever been thus; under divers forms, in the different basilicas, with interruptions of sieges, battles, and massacres, but with renewals still more passionate and universal, here the same concert of prayers, the same great chorus of desperate supplications or triumphant thanksgiving have always resounded.

They are somewhat idolatrous, these adorations, for those who say: “God is a Spirit and those who adore Him should adore Him in spirit and in truth.” But they are so human, they respond so well to our instincts and our misery. Surely, the first Christians in the purely spiritual flight of their faith, and when the teaching of the master was still fresh in their souls, did not encumber themselves with magnificence, symbols and images. Above all it was not terrestrial memories—the place of a martyr and an empty sepulchre—that preoccupied them; their Redeemer, they did not dream of seeking Him here, as they had seen Him detached forever from transitory things and hovering above in the serene light. But we—all of us, people of the West and North—are some centuries nearer to simple barbarism than the ancient society out of which the early Christians arose; in the Middle Ages, when the new faith penetrated our forests, it overshadowed a thousand primitive beliefs; let us acknowledge it is a small minority that is freed from those accumulated traditions to come again to an evangelical cult in spirit and in truth. And, moreover, when faith is extinguished in our modern souls it is still by that so human veneration for places and memories, that unbelievers like myself are affected with the touching regret for the lost Saviour.

Oh! Christ, for whom all these crowds gather and weep; Christ, for whom this poor old woman, prostrated near me, licks the pavement, leaning against the flags her miserable heart whilst weeping delicious tears of hope; Christ, who holds me, me also, in this place, like her, in a vague, yet very sweet meditation. Oh if He was merely one of our brothers in suffering, now vanished in death, may His memory be adored, even so, for His long illusion of love, meeting again, and eternity. And may this place be also blessed, this unique and strange place which is called the Holy Sepulchre—even contestable, even fictitious if you please—but whither, for fifteen centuries afflicted multitudes have run, where hardened hearts have melted like the snows, and where now my eyes are ready to veil themselves in a last rapture of prayer—very illogical I know—but ineffable and infinite.

In the evening, at nightfall, after I have wandered for a long while in the melancholy little streets, through the Saracen city, where the crowns of fire of the Ramadan begin to flame around the minarets of the mosques,—an attraction draws me slowly towards the Holy Sepulchre.

There reigns here a different darkness to that of the daytime; the rays of white light have ceased to descend by the loop-holes of the vaults; but the lamps that are lighted are more numerous, lamps of silver and lamps of gold, and coloured lamps studding the darkness with little flames of blue, red, or white. A kind of calm rests in this labyrinth of high vaults, like a rest after the exhausting ardour of the day. The noises are nothing more than the buzzing of prayers uttered very low and upon the knee, only the murmurings in the sonorous caves, where dominate the poor raucous voices of the moujiks, and, every now and then their deep coughs. It is nearly time to close the doors and the crowd has melted away; but some groups of people, prostrated in the shadows with faces to the ground, are still kissing the holy flag-stones.

LA GRANDE CHARTREUSE
WILLIAM BECKFORD

I rested a moment, and looking against the stout oaken gate, which closed up the entrance to this unknown region, felt at my heart a certain awe, that brought to my mind the sacred terror of those in ancient days going to be admitted into the Eleusinian mysteries.

My guide gave two knocks; after a solemn pause, the gate was slowly opened, and all our horses having passed through it, was again carefully closed.

I now found myself in a narrow dell, surrounded on every side by peaks of the mountains, rising almost beyond my sight, and shelving downwards till their bases were hidden by the foam and spray of the water, over which hung a thousand withered and distorted trees. The rocks seemed crowding upon me, and, by their particular situation, threatened to obstruct every ray of light; but, notwithstanding the menacing appearance of the prospect, I still kept following my guide up a craggy ascent, partly hewn through a rock, and bordered by the trunks of ancient fir-trees, which formed a fantastic barrier, till we came to a dreary and exposed promontory, impending directly over the dell.

The woods are here clothed with darkness, and the torrents rushing with additional violence are lost in the gloom of the caverns below; every object, as I looked downwards from my path, that hung midway between the base and the summit of the cliff, was horrid and woeful. The channel of the torrent sunk deep amidst frightful crags, and the pale willows and wreathed roots spreading over it, answered my ideas of those dismal abodes, where, according to the Druidical mythology, the ghosts of conquered warriors were bound. I shivered whilst I was regarding these regions of desolation, and, quickly lifting up my eyes to vary the scene, I perceived a range of whitish cliffs glistening with the light of the sun, to emerge from these melancholy forests.

On a fragment that projected over the chasm, and concealed for a moment its terrors, I saw a cross, on which was written Via coeli. The cliffs being the heaven to which I now aspired, we deserted the edge of the precipice, and, ascending, came to a retired nook of the rocks, in which several copious rills had worn irregular grottoes. Here we reposed an instant, and were enlivened with a few sunbeams, piercing the thickets and gilding the waters that bubbled from the rock, over which hung another cross, inscribed with this short sentence, which the situation rendered wonderfully pathetic, O Spes unica! the fervent exclamation of some wretch disgusted with the world whose only consolation was found in this retirement.

We quitted this solitary cross to enter a thick forest of beech trees, that screened in some measure the precipices on which they grew, catching, however, every instant terrifying glimpses of the torrent below. Streams gushed from every crevice in the cliffs, and falling over the mossy roots and branches of the beech, hastened to join the great torrent, athwart which I every now and then remarked certain tottering bridges, and sometimes could distinguish a Carthusian crossing over to his hermitage, that just peeped above the woody labyrinths on the opposite shore.

It was now about ten o’clock, and my guide assured me I should soon discover the convent. Upon this information I took new courage, and continued my route on the edge of the rocks, till we struck into another gloomy grove. After turning about it for some time, we entered again into the glare of daylight, and saw a green valley skirted by ridges of cliffs and sweeps of wood before us. Towards the farther end of this inclosure, on a gentle acclivity, rose the revered turrets of the Carthusians, which extend in a long line on the brow of the hill; beyond them a woody amphitheatre majestically presents itself, terminated by spires of rock and promontories lost among the clouds.

The roar of the torrent was now but faintly distinguishable, and all the scenes of horror and confusion I had passed were succeeded by a sacred and profound calm. I traversed the valley with a thousand sensations I despair of describing, and stood before the gate of the convent with as much awe as some novice or candidate newly arrived to solicit the holy retirement of the order.

As admittance is more readily granted to the English than to almost any other nation, it was not long before the gates opened, and whilst the porter ordered our horses to the stable, we entered a court watered by two fountains and built round with lofty edifices characterized by a noble simplicity.

The interior portal opening discovered an arched aisle, extending till the perspective nearly met, along which windows, but scantily distributed between the pilasters, admitted a pale solemn light, just sufficient to distinguish the objects with a picturesque uncertainty. We had scarcely set our feet on the pavement when the monks began to issue from an arch, about half-way down, and passing in a long succession from their chapel, bowed reverently with much humility and meekness, and dispersed in silence, leaving one of their body alone in the aisle.

The father Coadjutor (for he only remained) advanced towards us with great courtesy, and welcomed us in a manner which gave me far more pleasure than all the frivolous salutations and effected greetings so common in the world below. After asking us a few indifferent questions, he called one of the lay brothers, who live in the convent under less severe restrictions than the fathers whom they serve, and ordering him to prepare our apartment, conducted us to a large square hall with casement windows, and, what was more comfortable, an enormous chimney whose hospitable hearth blazed with a fire of dry aromatic fir, on each side of which were two doors that communicated with the neat little cells destined for our bed-chambers.

Whilst he was placing us round the fire, a ceremony by no means unimportant in the cold climate of these upper regions, a bell rang which summoned him to prayers. After charging the lay brother to set before us the best fare their desert afforded, he retired, and left us at full liberty to examine our chambers.

The weather lowered, and the casements permitted very little light to enter the apartment: but on the other side it was amply enlivened by the gleams of the fire, that spread all over a certain comfortable air, which even sunshine but rarely diffuses. Whilst the showers descended with great violence, the lay brother and another of his companions were placing an oval table, very neatly carved and covered with the finest linen in the middle of the hall; and, before we had examined a number of portraits which were hung in all the panels of the wainscot, they called us to a dinner widely different from what might have been expected in so dreary a situation. Our attendant friar was helping us to some Burgundy, of the happiest growth and vintage, when the Coadjutor returned, accompanied by two other fathers, the Secretary and Procurator, whom he presented to us. You would have been both charmed and surprised with the cheerful resignation that appeared in their countenances, and with the easy turn of their conversation.

In the course of our conversation they asked me innumerable questions about England, where formerly, they said, many monasteries had belonged to their order; and principally that of Witham, which they had learnt to be now in my possession.

The Secretary, almost with tears in his eyes, beseeched me to revere these consecrated edifices, and to preserve their remains, for the sake of St. Hugo, their canonized prior. I replied greatly to his satisfaction, and then declaimed so much in favour of St. Bruno and the holy prior of Witham, that the good fathers grew exceedingly delighted with the conversation, and made me promise to remain some days with them. I readily complied with their request, and, continuing in the same strain, that had so agreeably affected their ears, was soon presented with the works of St. Bruno, whom I so zealously admired.

After we had sat extolling them, and talking upon much the same sort of subjects for about an hour, the Coadjutor proposed a walk amongst the cloisters and galleries, as the weather would not admit of any longer excursion. He leading the way, we ascended a flight of steps, which brought us to a gallery, on each side of which a vast number of pictures, representing the dependent convents were ranged; for I was now in the capital of the order, where the general resides, and from whence he issues forth his commands to his numerous subjects, who depute the superiors of their respective convents whether situated in the wilds of Calabria, the forests of Poland, or in the remotest districts of Portugal and Spain, to assist at the grand chapter, held annually under him, a week or two after Easter.

Having amused myself for some time with the pictures, and the descriptions the Coadjutor gave me of them, we quitted the gallery and entered a kind of chapel, in which were two altars with lamps burning before them, on each side of a lofty portal. This opened into a grand coved hall, adorned with historical paintings of St. Bruno’s life, and the portraits of the generals of the order since the year of the great founder’s death (1085) to the present time. Under these portraits are the stalls for the superiors who assist at the grand convocation. In front, appears the general’s throne; above, hangs a representation of the canonized Bruno, crowned with stars.

The Coadjutor seemed charmed with the respect with which I looked round on these holy objects; and if the hour of vespers had not been drawing near, we should have spent more time in the contemplation of Bruno’s miracles, portrayed on the lower panels of the hall. We left that room to enter a winding passage (lighted by windows in the roof) that brought us to a cloister six hundred feet in length, from which branched off two others, joining a fourth of the same most extraordinary dimensions. Vast ranges of slender pillars extend round the different courts of the edifice, many of which are thrown into gardens belonging to particular cells. We continued straying from cloister to cloister, and wandering along the winding passages and intricate galleries of this immense edifice, whilst the Coadjutor was assisting at vespers.

In every part of the structure reigned the most death-like calm: no sound reached my ears but the “minute drops from off the eaves.” I sat down in a niche of the cloister, and fell into a profound reverie, from which I was recalled by the return of our conductor, who, I believe, was almost tempted to imagine from the cast of my countenance, that I was deliberating whether I should not remain with them for ever.

But I soon roused myself, and testified some impatience to see the great chapel, at which we at length arrived after traversing another labyrinth of cloisters. The gallery immediately before its entrance appeared quite gay, in comparison with the others I had passed, and owes its cheerfulness to a large window (ornamented with slabs of polished marble) that admits the view of a lovely wood, and allows a full blaze of light to dart on the chapel door, which is also adorned with marble, in a plain but noble style of architecture.

The father sacristan stood ready on the steps of the portal to grant us admittance; and, throwing open the valves, we entered the chapel and were struck by the justness of its proportions, the solemn majesty of the arched roof and the mild solemn light equally diffused over every part of the edifice. No tawdry ornaments, no glaring pictures disgraced the sanctity of the place. The high altar, standing distinct from the walls which were hung with a rich velvet, was the only object on which many ornaments were lavished; and, it being a high festival, was clustered with statues of gold, shrines, and candelabra of the stateliest shape and most delicate execution. Four of the latter, of a gigantic size, were placed on the steps; which, together with part of the inlaid floor within the choir, were spread with beautiful carpets.

The illumination of so many tapers striking on the shrines, censers and pillars of polished jasper, sustaining the canopy of the altar, produced a wonderful effect; and, as the rest of the chapel was visible only by the faint external light admitted from above, the splendour and dignity of the altar was enhanced by contrast. I retired a moment from it, and seating myself in one of the furthermost stalls of the choir, looked towards it, and fancied the whole structure had risen by “subtle magic,” like an exhalation.

Here I remained several minutes breathing nothing but incense, and should not have quitted my station soon, had I not been apprehensive of disturbing the devotions of two aged fathers who had just entered, and were prostrating themselves before the steps of the altar. These venerable figures added greatly to the solemnity of the scene; which as the day declined increased every moment in splendour; for the sparkling of several lamps of chased silver that hung from the roofs, and the gleaming of nine huge tapers which I had not before noticed, began to be visible just as I left the chapel.

Passing through the sacristy, where lay several piles of rich embroidered vestments, purposely displayed for our inspection, we regained the cloister which led to our apartment, where the supper was ready prepared. We had scarcely finished it, when the Coadjutor and the fathers who had accompanied us before, returned, and ranging themselves round the fire, resumed the conversation about St. Bruno.

It grew rather late before my kind hosts had finished their narrations and I was not sorry, after all the exercise I had taken, to return to my cell, where everything invited to repose. I was charmed with the neatness and oddity of my little apartment; its cabin-like bed, oratory and ebony crucifix; in short, everything it contained; not forgetting the aromatic odour of the pine, with which it was roofed, floored and wainscoted. The night was luckily dark. Had the moon appeared, I could not have prevailed upon myself to have quitted her till very late; but, as it happened, I crept into my cabin, and was by “whispering winds soon lulled asleep.”

Eight o’clock struck next morning before I awoke; when, to my great sorrow, I found the peaks, which rose above the convent, veiled in vapours, and the rain descending with violence.

After we had breakfasted by the light of our fire (for the casements admitted but a very feeble gleam), I sat down to the works of St. Bruno; of all medleys one of the strangest. Allegories without end; a theologico-natural history of birds, beast and fishes; several chapters on paradise; the delights of solitude; the glory of Solomon’s temple; the new Jerusalem; and numberless other wonderful subjects, full of the loftiest enthusiasm.

I had scarcely finished taking extracts from the writings of this holy and highly-gifted personage when the dinner appeared, consisting of everything most delicate which a strict adherence to the rules of meagre could allow. The good fathers returned as usual before our repast was half over, and resumed as usual their mystic discourse, looking all the time rather earnestly into my countenance to observe the sort of effect their most marvellous narrations produced upon it.

Our conversation, which was beginning to take a gloomy and serious turn, was interrupted, I thought very agreeably, by the sudden intrusion of the sun, which, escaping from the clouds, shone in full splendour above the highest peak of the mountains, and the vapours fleeting by degrees discovered the woods in all the freshness of their verdure. The pleasure I received from seeing this new creation rising to view was very lively, and, as the fathers assured me the humidity of their walks did not often continue longer than the showers, I left my hall.

Crossing the court, I hastened out of the gates, and running swiftly along a winding path on the side of the meadow, bordered by the forests, enjoyed the charms of the prospect, inhaled the perfume of the woodlands, and now turning towards the summits of the precipices that encircle this sacred inclosure, admired the glowing colours they borrowed from the sun, contrasted by the dark hues of the forest. Now, casting my eyes below, I suffered them to roam from valley to valley, and from one stream (beset with tall pines and tufted beech trees) to another. The purity of the air in these exalted regions, and the lightness of my own spirits, almost seized me with the idea of treading in that element.

The tranquillity of the region, the verdure of the lawn, environed by girdles of flourishing wood, and the lowing of the distant herds filled me with the most pleasing sensations. But when I lifted my eyes to the towering cliffs and beheld the northern sky streaming with ruddy light, and the long succession of misty forms hovering over the space beneath, they became sublime and awful. The dews which began to descend, and the vapours which were rising from every dell, reminded me of the lateness of the hour; and it was with great reluctance that I turned from the scene which had so long engaged my contemplation, and traversed slowly and silently the solitary meadows, over which I had hurried with such eagerness an hour ago.

We had hardly supped before the gates of the convent were shut, a circumstance which disconcerted me not a little, as the full moon gleamed through the casements, and the stars, sparkling above the forests of pines, invited me to leave my apartment again, and to give myself up entirely to the spectacle they offered.

The Coadjutor perceiving that I was often looking earnestly through the windows, guessed my wishes, and calling a lay-brother, ordered him to open the gates, and wait at them till my return. It was not long before I took advantage of this permission, and escaping from the courts and cloisters of the monastery, all hushed in death-like stillness, ascended a green knoll, which several ancient pines strongly marked with their shadows: there, leaning against one of their trunks, I lifted up my eyes to the awful barrier of the surrounding mountains, discovered by the trembling silver light of the moon shooting directly on the woods which fringed their acclivities.

The lawns, the vast woods, the steep descents, the precipices, the torrents, lay all extended beneath, softened by a pale bluish haze, that alleviated, in some measure, the stern prospect of the rocky promontories above, wrapped in dark shadows. The sky was of the deepest azure, innumerable stars were distinguished with unusual clearness from this elevation, many of which twinkled behind the fir-trees edging the promontories. White, grey, and darkish clouds came marching towards the moon that shone full against a range of cliffs, which lift themselves far above the others. The hoarse murmur of the torrent, throwing itself from the distant wilderness into the gloomy vales, was mingled with the blast that blew from the mountains.

It increased. The forests began to wave, black clouds rose from the north, and, as they fleeted along, approached the moon whose light they shortly extinguished. A moment of darkness succeeded; the gust was chill and melancholy; it swept along the desert, and then subsiding, the vapours began to pass away, and the moon returned; the grandeur of the scene was renewed, and its imposing solemnity was increased by her presence. Inspiration was in every wind.

I followed some impulse, which drove me to the summit of the mountains before me; and there, casting a look on the whole extent of wild woods and romantic precipices, thought of the days of St. Bruno. I eagerly contemplated every rock that formerly might have met his eyes; drank of the spring which tradition says he was wont to drink of; and ran to every pine, whose withered appearance bespoke the most remote antiquity, and beneath which, perhaps, the saint had reposed himself, when worn with vigils, or possessed with the sacred spirit of his institutions. It was midnight before I returned to the convent and retired to my quiet chamber, but my imagination was too much disturbed, and my spirits far too active, to allow me any rest for some time.

THE TEMPLES OF HATCHIMAN
ΑΙΜÉ HUMBERT

The Temples of Hatchiman are approached by long lines of those great cedar-trees which form the avenues to all places of worship in Japan. As we advance along the avenue on the Kanasawa side, chapels multiply themselves along the road, and to the left, upon the sacred hills, we also come in sight of the oratories and commemorative stones which mark the stations of the processions; on the right the horizon is closed by the mountain, with its grottos, its streams, and its pine groves. After we have crossed the river by a fine wooden bridge, we find ourselves suddenly at the entrance of another alley, which leads from the seaside, and occupies a large street. This is the principal avenue, intersected by three gigantic toris, and it opens on the grand square in front of the chief staircase of the main building of the Temple. The precinct of the sacred place extends into the street, and is surrounded on three sides by a low wall of solid masonry, surmounted by a barrier of wood painted red and black. Two steps lead to the first level. There is nothing to be seen there but the houses of the bonzes, arranged like the side-scenes of a theatre, amid trees planted along the barrier-wall, with two great oval ponds occupying the centre of the square. They are connected with each other by a large canal crossed by two parallel bridges, each equally remarkable in its way. That on the right is of white granite, and it describes an almost perfect semicircle, so that when one sees it for the first time one supposes that it is intended for some sort of geometrical exercise; but I suppose that it is in reality a bridge of honour, reserved for the gods and the good genii who come to visit the Temple. The bridge on the left is quite flat, constructed of wood covered with red lacquer, with balusters and other ornaments in old polished copper. The pond crossed by the stone bridge is covered with magnificent white lotus flowers,—the pond crossed by the wooden bridge with red lotus flowers. Among the leaves of the flowers we saw numbers of fish, some red and others like mother of pearl, with glittering fins, swimming about in waters of crystal clearness. The black tortoise glides among the great water-plants and clings to their stems.

THE DAÏBOUDHS OF KAMAKOURA, JAPAN.

After having thoroughly enjoyed this most attractive spectacle, we go on towards the second enclosure. It is raised a few steps higher than the first, and, as it is protected by an additional sanctity, it is only to be approached through the gate of the divine guardians of the sanctuary. This building, which stands opposite the bridges, contains two monstrous idols, placed side by side in the centre of the edifice. They are sculptured in wood, and are covered from head to foot with a thick coating of vermilion. Their grinning faces and their enormous busts are spotted all over with innumerable pieces of chewed paper, which the native visitors throw at them when passing, without any more formality than would be used by a number of schoolboys out for a holiday. Nevertheless, it is considered a very serious act on the part of the pilgrims. It is the means by which they make the prayer written on the sheet of chewed paper reach its address, and when they wish to recommend anything to the gods very strongly indeed, they bring as an offering a pair of straw slippers plaited with regard to the size of the feet of the Colossus, and hang them on the iron railings within which the statues are enclosed. Articles of this kind, suspended by thousands to the bars, remain there until they fall away in time, and it may be supposed that this curious ornamentation is anything but beautiful.

Here a lay brother of the bonzes approached us, and his interested views were easily enough detected by his bearing. We hastened to assure him that we required nothing from his good offices, except access to an enclosed building. With a shake of his head, so as to make us understand that we were asking for an impossibility, he simply set himself to follow us about with the mechanical precision of a subaltern. He was quite superfluous, but we did not allow his presence to interfere with our admiration. A high terrace, reached by a long stone staircase, surmounted the second enclosure. It is sustained by a Cyclopean wall, and in its turn supports the principal Temple as well as the habitations of the bonzes. The grey roofs of all these different buildings stand out against the sombre forest of cedars and pines. On our left are the buildings of the Treasury; one of them has a pyramidal roof surmounted by a turret of bronze most elegantly worked. At the foot of the great terrace is the Chapel of the Ablutions. On our right stands a tall pagoda, constructed on the principle of the Chinese pagodas, but in a more sober and severe style. The first stage, of a quadrangular form, is supported by pillars; the second stage consists of a vast circular gallery which, though extremely massive, seems to rest simply upon a pivot. A painted roof, terminated by a tall spire of cast bronze, embellished with pendants of the same metal, completes the effect of this strange but exquisitely proportioned building.

All the doors of the buildings which I have enumerated are in good taste. The fine proportions, the rich brown colouring of the wood, which is almost the only material employed in their construction, is enhanced by a few touches of red and dragon green, and the effect of the whole is perfect;—add to the picture a frame of ancient trees and the extreme brilliancy of the sky, for the atmosphere of Japan is the most transparent in the world.

We went beyond the pagoda to visit a bell-tower, where we were shown a large bell beautifully engraved, and an oratory on each side containing three golden images, a large one in the centre, and two small ones on either side. Each was surrounded by a nimbus. This beautiful Temple of Hatchiman is consecrated to a Kami; but it is quite evident that the religious customs of India have supplanted the ancient worship;—we had several proofs of this fact. When we were about to turn back we were solicited by the lay brother to go with him a little further. We complied, and he stopped us under a tree laden with ex-votos, at the foot of which stands a block of stone, surrounded by a barrier. This stone, which is probably indebted to the chisels of the bonzes for its peculiar form, is venerated by the multitude, and largely endowed with ex-voto offerings. Like all peoples of the extreme East the Japanese are very superstitious; a fact of which we had abundant evidence on this and other occasions.

The Temple towards which we directed our steps on leaving the avenue of the Temple of Hatchiman, immediately diverted our thoughts from the grandeur of this picture. It is admirably situated on the summit of a promontory, whence we overlook the whole Bay of Kamakoura; but it is always sad to come, in the midst of beautiful nature, upon a so-called holy place which inspires nothing but disgust. The principal sanctuary, at first sight, did not strike us as remarkable. Insignificant golden idols stand upon the high altar; and in a side chapel there is an image of the God of Wealth, armed with a miner’s hammer. But when the bonzes who received us conducted us behind the high altar, and thence into a sort of cage as dark as a prison and as high as a tower, they lighted two lanterns, and stuck them at the end of a long pole. Then, by this glimmering light, which entirely failed to disperse the shades of the roof, we perceived that we were standing in front of an enormous idol of gilt wood, about twelve yards high, holding in its right hand a sceptre, in its left a lotus, and wearing a tiara composed of three rows of heads representing the inferior divinities. This gigantic idol belongs to the religion of the auxiliary gods of the Buddhist mythology: the Amidas and the Quannons, intercessors who collect the prayers of men and transmit them to heaven. By means of similar religious conceptions, the bonzes strike a superstitious terror into the imaginations of their followers and succeed in keeping them in a state of perpetual fear and folly.

We then went to see the Daïboudhs, which is the wonder of Kamakoura. This building is dedicated to the Daïboudhs, that is to say, to the great Buddha, and may be regarded as the most finished work of Japanese genius, from the double points of view of art and religious sentiment. The Temple of Hatchiman had already given us a remarkable example of the use which native art makes of nature in producing that impression of religious majesty which in our northern climates is effected by Gothic architecture. The Temple of Daïboudhs differs considerably from the first which we had seen. Instead of the great dimensions, instead of the illimitable space which seemed to stretch from portal to portal down to the sea, a solitary and mysterious retreat prepares the mind for some supernatural revelation. The road leads far away from every habitation; in the direction of the mountain it winds about between hedges of tall shrubs. Finally, we see nothing before us but the high road, going up and up in the midst of foliage and flowers; then it turns in a totally different direction, and all of a sudden, at the end of the alley, we perceive a gigantic brazen Divinity, squatting with joined hands, and the head slightly bent forward in an attitude of contemplative ecstasy. The involuntary amazement produced by the aspect of this great image soon gives place to admiration. There is an irresistible charm in the attitude of the Daïboudhs, as well as in the harmony of its proportions. The noble simplicity of its garments and the calm purity of its features are in perfect accord with the sentiment of serenity inspired by its presence. A grove, consisting of some beautiful groups of trees, forms the enclosure of the sacred place, whose silence and solitude are never disturbed. The small cell of the attendant priest can hardly be discerned among the foliage. The altar, on which a little incense is burning at the feet of the Divinity, is composed of a small brass table ornamented by two lotus vases of the same metal, and beautifully wrought. The steps of the altar are composed of large slabs forming regular lines. The blue of the sky, the deep shadow of the statue, the sombre colour of the brass, the brilliancy of the flowers, the varied verdure of the hedges and the groves, fill this solemn retreat with the richest effect of light and colour. The idol of the Daïboudhs, with the platform that supports it, is twenty yards high; it is far from equal in elevation to the statue of St. Charles Borromeo, which may be seen from Arona on the borders of Lake Maggiore, but which effects the spectator no more than a trigonometrical signal-post. The interiors of these two colossal statues have been utilized. The European tourists seat themselves in the nose of the holy cardinal. The Japanese descend by a secret staircase into the foundations of their Daïboudhs, and there they find a peaceful oratory, whose altar is lighted by a ray of sunshine admitted through an opening in the folds of the mantle at the back of the idol’s neck. It would be idle to discuss to what extent the Buddha of Kamakoura resembles the Buddha of history, but it is important to remark that he is conformable to the Buddha of tradition.

CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF WELLS
EDWARD AUGUSTUS FREEMAN

In every place which boasts of a cathedral church, that cathedral church is commonly the chief object of interest, alike as its present ornament and as the chief centre of its past history. But in Wells the cathedral church and its appurtenances are yet more. Their interest is not only primary, but absorbing. They are not only the chief ornament of the place; they are the place itself. They are not only the centre of the past history of the city; their history is the history of the city. Of our other cities some can trace up a long history as cities independent of their ecclesiastical foundations. Some were the dwelling-places of Kings in days before England became one kingdom. Some have been for ages seats of commerce or manufactures; their history is the history of burghers striving for and obtaining their freedom, a history which repeats in small that same tale of early struggles and later abuses which forms the history of so many greater commonwealths. Others have a long military history; their name at once suggests the memory of battles and sieges, and they can still show walls and castles as the living memorials of the stirring scenes of bygone times. In others even the ecclesiastical pre-eminence of the cathedral church may be disputed by some other ecclesiastical building. The bishoprick and its church may be comparatively modern institutions, and they may be altogether eclipsed by some other institution more ancient in date of foundation, perhaps more ancient in its actual fabric. Thus at Oxford the cathedral church is well-nigh lost among the buildings of the University and its greatest college. At Chester its rank may be disputed by the majestic fragments of the older minster of Saint John. At Bristol the cathedral church, even when restored to its old proportions, will still have at least an equal rival in the stateliest parish church in England. In these cities the bishoprick, its church and its chapter, are institutions of yesterday; the cities themselves were great and famous for ages before they were founded. So at Exeter, though the bishoprick is of far earlier date, yet Exeter was a famous city, which had played its part in history, long before Bishops of Exeter were heard of. Even at Winchester the overwhelming greatness of the old minster has to compete with the earlier and later interests of the royal palace, of the fallen Abbey, of the unique home of noble poverty and of the oldest of the great and still living schools of England. Salisbury alone in our own part of England, and Durham in the far north, have a history which in some measure resembles that of Wells. Like Wells, Salisbury and Durham are cities which have grown up around the cathedral church. Wells stands alone among the cities of England proper as a city which exists only in and through its cathedral church, whose whole history is that of its cathedral church. The bishoprick has been to us what the Abbey has been to our neighbours at Glastonbury, which the church first of Abbots and then of Bishops has been elsewhere to Ely and Peterborough. The whole history of Wells is, I say, the history of the bishoprick and of its church. Of the origin and foundation of the city, as distinguished from that of the church, nothing is known. The name of Wells is first heard of as the place where the church of St. Andrew was standing and its name seldom appears in later history except in connection with the affairs of its church. It was never a royal dwelling-place; it was never a place of commercial importance; it was never a place of military strength. Like other cities, it has its municipal history, but its municipal history is simply an appendage to its ecclesiastical history; the franchises of the borough were simply held as grants from the Bishop. It has its parochial church, a church standing as high among the buildings of its own class as the cathedral church itself. This parochial church has a parochial constitution which is in some points unique. But the parochial church is simply an appendage to the cathedral church; it is the church of the burghers who had come to dwell under the shadow of the minster and the protection of its spiritual lord. And it has ever retained a close, sometimes perhaps a too close, connexion with the cathedral and its Chapter. Thus the history of the church is the history of the city; no battles, no sieges, no parliaments, break the quiet tenor of its way; the name of the city has hardly found its way into our civil and military history. Its name does appear among the troubles of the Seventeenth Century, in the pages of Clarendon and Macaulay, but it appears in connexion with events whose importance was mainly local. And even here the ecclesiastical interest comes in; the most striking event connected with Wells in the story of Monmouth’s rebellion is the mischief done to the cathedral, and the way in which further damage and desecration was hindered by Lord Grey. And in our own times, when the parliamentary existence of this city became the subject of an animated parliamentary discussion, even then the ecclesiastical interest was still uppermost. The old battle of the regulars and seculars was fought again over the bodies of two small parliamentary boroughs. I need not remind you that the claims of the old secular foundation were stoutly pressed by one of our own members. But the monastic influence was too strong for us; the mantle of Dunstan and Æthelwald had fallen on the shoulders of Sir John Pakington, and the claims of the fallen Abbey of Evesham were preferred to those of the existing Cathedral of Wells.

CATHEDRAL OF WELLS, ENGLAND.

The whole interest, then, of the city is ecclesiastical; but its ecclesiastical interest in one point of view surpasses that of every church in England,—I am strongly tempted to say, every church in Europe. The traveller who comes down the hill from Shepton Mallet looks down, as he draws near the city, on a group of buildings which, as far as I know, has no rival either in our island or beyond the sea. To most of these objects, taken singly, it would be easy to find rivals which would equal or surpass them. The church itself, seen even from that most favourable point of view, cannot, from mere lack of bulk, hold its ground against the soaring apse of Amiens, or against the windows ranging, tier above tier, in the mighty eastern gable of Ely. The cloister cannot measure itself with Gloucester or Salisbury; the chapter-house lacks the soaring roofs of York and Lincoln; the palace itself finds its rival in the ruined pile of St. David’s. The peculiar charm and glory of Wells lies in the union and harmonious grouping of all. The church does not stand alone; it is neither crowded by incongruous buildings, nor yet isolated from those buildings which are its natural and necessary complement. Palace, cloister, lady chapel, choir, chapter-house, all join to form one indivisible unique bridge which by a marvel of ingenuity connects the church itself with the most perfect of buildings of its class, the matchless Vicars’ close. Scattered around we see here and there an ancient house, its gable, its window, or its turret falling in with the style and group of greater buildings, and bearing its part in producing the general harmony of all. The whole history of the place is legibly written on that matchless group of buildings. If we could fancy an ecclesiastical historian to have dropped from the clouds, the aspect of the place would at once tell him that he was looking on an English cathedral church, on a cathedral church which had always been served by secular canons, on a church of secular canons which had preserved its ancient buildings and ancient arrangements more perfectly than any other in the island.

The whole history of Wells before the time of Edward the Elder is excessively obscure, and much of it is undoubtedly fabulous. There is a story about King Ine planting a Bishoprick at Congresbury, which was presently moved to Wells, and a list of Bishops is given between Ine and Edward. There is also a document which professes to be a charter of King Cynewulf in 766, which does not speak of any Bishop at Wells, but which implies the existence of an ecclesiastical establishment of some kind. But unluckily the Congresbury story rests on no good authority, and the charter of Cynewulf is undoubtedly spurious. But because a charter is spurious in form, it does not always follow that its matter is unhistorical and I am the more inclined to attach some value to it, because, while implying the existence of some ecclesiastical establishment, it does not imply the existence of a bishoprick. Putting all things together, and remembering the strong and consistent tradition which connects the name of Ine with the church of Wells, I am inclined to think that there must have been some body of priests, probably of Ine’s foundation, existing at Wells before the foundation of the bishoprick by Edward. If then Ine did, somewhere about the year 705, found a church at Wells with a body of priests attached to it, we can well understand why Wells should be chosen as the seat of the new bishoprick in 909.

We have here in Wells the finest collection of domestic buildings surrounding a cathedral church to be seen anywhere. There is no place where so many ancient houses are preserved and are mainly applied to their original uses. The Bishop still lives in the Palace; the Dean still lives in the Deanery; the Canons, Vicars, and other officers still live very largely in the houses in which they were meant to live. But this is because at Wells there always were secular priests, each man living in his own house. In a monastery I need hardly say it was quite different. The monks did not live each man in his own house; they lived in common, with a common refectory to dine in and a common dormitory to sleep in. Thus when, in Henry the Eighth’s time, the monks were put out and secular canons put in again, the monastic buildings were no longer of any use, while there were no houses for the new canons. They had therefore to make houses how they could out of the common buildings of the monastery. But of course this could be done without greatly spoiling them as works of architecture. Thus while at Ely, Peterborough, and other churches which were served by monks, there are still very fine fragments of the monastic buildings, there is not the same series of buildings each still applied to its original use which we have at Wells. I wish that this wonderful series was better understood and more valued than it is. I can remember, if nobody else does, how a fine prebendal hall was wantonly pulled down in the North Liberty not many years ago. Some of those whose duty it was to keep it up said that they had never seen it. I had seen it, anybody who went by could see it, and every man of taste knew and regretted it. Well, that is gone, and I suppose the organist’s house, so often threatened will soon be gone too. Thus it is that the historical monuments of our country perish day by day. We must keep a sharp eye about us or this city of ours may lose, almost without anybody knowing it, the distinctive character which makes it unique among the cities of England.

It is then in this way that Wells became, what it still is, the seat of the Somersetshire Bishoprick. The Bishop had his throne in the church of St. Andrew, and the clergy attached to church were his special companions and advisers, in a word his Chapter. We have thus the church and its ministers, but the church had not yet assumed its present form, and its ministers had not yet assumed their present constitution. Of the fabric, as it stood in the Tenth Century, I can tell you nothing. There is not a trace of building of anything like such early date remaining: while in other places we have grand buildings of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, at Wells we have little or nothing earlier than the Thirteenth. But it is quite a mistake to fancy that our forefathers in the Tenth Century were wholly incapable of building, or that their buildings were always of wood. We have accounts of churches of that and of still earlier date which show that we then had buildings of considerable size and elaboration of plan. And we know that in the course of the same century Saint Dunstan built a stone church at Glastonbury to the east of the old wooden church of British times. The churches both of Wells and Glastonbury must have been built in the old Romanesque style of England which prevailed before the great improvements of Norman Romanesque were brought in in the Eleventh Century. You must conceive this old church of Saint Andrew as very much smaller, lower, and plainer than the church we now have, with massive round arches and small round-headed windows, but with one or more tall, slender, unbuttressed towers, imitating the bell-towers of Italy. I do not think that we have a single tower of this kind in Somersetshire, but in other parts of England there are a good many. There is a noble one at Earls Barton in Northamptonshire, and more than one in the city of Lincoln.

After about two hundred years from the beginning of the present building in the days of Jocelin, we may look on the cathedral church of Saint Andrew as at last finished. It was finished, in a sense, before the end of the Thirteenth Century, when everything had been built which was needed for its ecclesiastical completeness. But it was in the course of the Fifteenth Century that it finally assumed the shape with which we are all familiar, and which has from that time remained unchanged. Now then we have reached the point at which we can estimate the place which fairly belongs to the church of Wells among the other churches of England and of Christendom. As it seems to me, that position, as I began by saying, is a special and remarkable one; I need not say that in point of size and splendour, the church of Wells has no claim to a place in the first rank of European, or even English churches. Setting aside the Welsh churches, and the churches which have become cathedral without being originally meant for this rank, Wells is one of the very smallest of English episcopal churches. It is hardly fair to compare it with Carlisle, which is a mere fragment, or with Hereford, which has lost its western tower, and with it a part of its nave. But it is, in point of scale, with Carlisle, Hereford, Lincoln, and Rochester, or again with non-cathedral churches like Southwell, Beverley, and Tewkesbury, that Wells must fairly be compared, not with churches like Canterbury and York, or even like Salisbury and Gloucester. And among churches of its own class it certainly ranks high.

I have seen many fine churches both in our own country and abroad, many of them of course on a scale which might seem to put Wells out of all comparison. But I can honestly say that I know of no architectural group which surpasses the harmony and variety of our own cathedral, as seen by the traveller as he first enters the city from Shepton Mallet.

From the outside we turn to that of which the outside is after all the mere shell. When we enter the church we find ourselves in a building which can fairly hold its own against competitors of its own class. The nave has a distinct character of its own: there may be differences of taste as to its merit, but it has a character, and that character is clearly the result of design. The main lines of the interior are horizontal rather than vertical. We can hardly say that there is any division into bays; no vaulting-shafts run up from the ground, nor does the triforium take, as usual, the form of a distinct composition over each arch. In short, we cannot, as we can in most churches, take each arch with the triforium and clerestory over it as a thing existing by itself. One would rather say that three horizontal ranges, one over the other, all converged to the centre, without thinking of what was above or below them. Now tastes may differ as to whether this is a good arrangement or not, but there is no doubt that it is in its way an effective arrangement; there is no nave in which the eye is so irresistibly carried eastward as in that of Wells. And it is worth notice that this arrangement, in its fullness, is confined to the nave; in the transepts the bays are much more clearly marked. The idea of producing this marked horizontal effect was clearly one which came into the heads of the designers as they were working westwards.

It might have been expected that the marked prominence which is thus given to the horizontal line might have gone far to destroy all effect of height in the interior; but it is not so. There is no special feeling of height in Wells Cathedral—not so much, for instance, as there is in the church of St. Mary Redcliff; but there is no such crushing feeling of lowness as there is in Lincoln. This I imagine to be mainly owing to the form of the arch chosen for the vaulting, one boldly but not actually pointed, and to the way in which the lantern-arches fit into the vault. Contrast this with the far larger and loftier nave of York. In that nave the positive height is second only to Westminster among English churches, and the design of the separate bays can hardly be surpassed in its soaring effect. But in the direct eastern or western view the nave of York loses almost its whole effect, partly, no doubt, from the excessive breadth, but partly also from the flat and crushing shape of the vaulting-arch. The nave of Wells makes the most of its small actual height: so do the choir and the presbytery also; for, though I cannot at all admire the kind of vault which is there used, the shape of the arch is as judiciously chosen as it is in the nave. In the presbytery we also get the vaulting-shafts rising from the ground, so as to give the vertical division, and the consequent effect of height, in its highest perfection. Of the exquisite beauty of the Lady Chapel, looked on, as it should be, not as a part of the whole, but as a distinct and almost detached building, I have already spoken. In short, the internal effect of the church, whether looked at as a whole or taken in its several parts if not of the highest order, which its comparatively small scale forbids, may claim a high place among churches of its own class.

I think then on the whole that, even looking at the church by itself, we have every reason to be thankful for what we have got. We have not a church of the first order; but we have a church whose several parts fit very well together, all whose parts have been finished, and of which no part has been destroyed. And I may add that we may be thankful for another thing, for the goodness of the stone of which the greater part of the church is built. The sculpture of the west front indeed has crumbled away; but elsewhere at Wells, as at Glastonbury, wherever the work has not been wantonly knocked away, it is as good as when it was first cut. Now we might have had a church like Chester or Coventry, where the whole surface of the stone has crumbled away, and where the whole ornamental design has become unintelligible. I have said that the church of Wells forms a harmonious whole, that it was perfectly finished, and that no part has been destroyed; and this is a great thing to say. Let me compare the good fortune of Wells in this respect with the cathedral church of a much more famous city at the other end of England. At Carlisle there is a noble choir, ending in what is probably the grandest window in England. If that choir only had transepts, nave, and towers to match it, the church of Carlisle would be a splendid church indeed. But the choir is built up against a little paltry transept and central tower, and nothing remains by way of nave but two bays of the original small Norman church, the rest having utterly vanished. Here then is a church which does not form a harmonious whole, a church which remains utterly unfinished, and of which one essential part has been destroyed. Or, without taking such an extreme case as this, we may compare our church with some of those of which I have already spoken, with Hereford, Southwell, Beverley and Tewkesbury. In all of these some important feature has either never been finished or has been destroyed at a later time. The Church of Wells then, simply taken by itself, claims a high place among buildings of its own class, that is, among minsters of the second order. But the real charm of Wells does not lie in the church taken by itself, but in the church surrounded by its accompanying buildings. Some of them are inseparably connected both with the fabric and with the foundation of the Cathedral. And it is the preservation of them which gives Wells its peculiar character. Each part may easily be equalled or surpassed, but the whole has no rival in England, and I cannot think that it has many in Christendom.

THE COLISEUM, ITALY.

THE COLISEUM
EDWARD GIBBON

Whatever is fortified will be attacked: and whatever is attacked may be destroyed. Could the Romans have wrested from the popes the Castle of St. Angelo, they had resolved by a public decree to annihilate that monument of servitude. Every building of defence was exposed to a siege; and in every siege the arts and engines of destruction were laboriously employed. After the death of Nicholas the Fourth, Rome, without a sovereign or a senate, was abandoned six months to the fury of civil war. “The houses,” says a cardinal and poet of the times, “were crushed by the weight and velocity of enormous stones; the walls were perforated by the strokes of the battering-ram; the towers were involved in fire and smoke; and the assailants were stimulated by rapine and revenge.” The work was consummated by the tyranny of the laws; and the factions of Italy alternately exercised a blind and thoughtless vengeance on their adversaries, whose houses and castles they razed to the ground. In comparing the days of foreign, with the ages of domestic, hostility, we must pronounce, that the latter have been far more ruinous to the city; and our opinion is confirmed by the evidence of Petrarch. “Behold,” says the laureat, “the relics of Rome, the image of her pristine greatness! neither time, nor the barbarian, can boast the merit of this stupendous destruction: it was perpetrated by her own citizens, by the most illustrious of her sons, and your ancestors (he writes to a noble Annibaldi) have done with the battering-ram, what the Punic hero could not accomplish with the sword.” The influence of the two last principles of decay must in some degree be multiplied by each other; since the houses and towers, which were subverted by civil war, required a new and perpetual supply from the monuments of antiquity.

These general observations may be separately applied to the amphitheatre of Titus, which has obtained the name of the Coliseum, either from its magnitude, or from Nero’s colossal statue: an edifice, had it been left to time and nature, which might perhaps have claimed an eternal duration. The curious antiquaries, who have computed the numbers and seats, are disposed to believe, that above the upper row of stone steps, the amphitheatre was encircled and elevated with several stages of wooden galleries, which were repeatedly consumed by fire, and restored by the emperors. Whatever was precious, or portable, or profane, the statues of gods and heroes, and the costly ornaments of sculpture, which were cast in brass, or overspread with leaves of silver and gold, became the first prey of conquest or fanaticism, of the avarice of the barbarians or the Christians. In the massy stones of the Coliseum, many holes are discerned; and the two most probable conjectures represent the various accidents of its decay. These stones were connected by solid links of brass or iron, nor had the eye of rapine overlooked the value of the baser metals; the vacant space was converted into a fair or market; the artisans of the Coliseum are mentioned in an ancient survey; and the chasms were perforated or enlarged to receive the poles that supported the shops or tents of the mechanic trades. Reduced to its naked majesty, the Flavian amphitheatre was contemplated with awe and admiration by the pilgrims of the north; and the rude enthusiasm broke forth in a sublime proverbial expression, which is recorded in the Eighth Century, in the fragments of the venerable Bede: “As long as the Coliseum stands, Rome shall stand; when the Coliseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, the world will fall.” In the modern system of war, a situation commanded by three hills would not be chosen for a fortress; but the strength of the walls and arches could resist the engines of assault; a numerous garrison might be lodged in the enclosure; and while one faction occupied the Vatican and the Capitol, the other was entrenched in the Lateran and the Coliseum.

The abolition at Rome of the ancient games must be understood with some latitude; and the carnival sports, of the Testacean mount and the Circus Agonalis, were regulated by the law or custom of the city. The senator presided with dignity and pomp to adjudge and distribute the prizes, the gold ring, or the pallium, as it was styled, of cloth or silk. A tribute on the Jews supplied the annual expense; and the races, on foot, on horseback, or in chariots, were ennobled by a tilt and tournament of seventy-two of the Roman youth. In the year one thousand three hundred and thirty-two, a bull-feast, after the fashion of the Moors and Spaniards, was celebrated in the Coliseum itself; and the living manners are painted in a diary of the times. A convenient order of benches was restored; and a general proclamation, as far as Rimini and Ravenna, invited the nobles to exercise their skill and courage in this perilous adventure. The Roman ladies were marshalled in three squadrons, and seated in three balconies, which on this day, the third of September, were lined with scarlet cloth. The fair Jacova di Rovere led the matrons from beyond the Tiber, a pure and native race, who still represent the features and character of antiquity. The remainder of the city was divided as usual between the Colonna and Ursini: the two factions were proud of the number and beauty of their female bands: the charms of Savella Ursini are mentioned with praise; and the Colonna regretted the absence of the youngest of their house, who had sprained her ancle in the garden of Nero’s tower. The lots of the champions were drawn by an old and respectable citizen: and they descended into the arena, or pit, to encounter the wild bulls, on foot as it should seem, with a single spear. Amidst the crowd, our annalist has selected the names, colours, and devices, of twenty of the most conspicuous knights. Several of the names are the most illustrious of Rome and the ecclesiastical state; Malatesta, Polenta, della Valle, Cafarello, Savelli, Capoccio, Conti, Annabaldi, Altieri, Corsi; the colours were adapted to their taste and situation; the devices are expressive of hope or despair, and breathe the spirit of gallantry and arms. “I am alone, like the youngest of the Horatii,” the confidence of an intrepid stranger: “I live disconsolate,” a weeping widower: “I burn under the ashes,” a discreet lover: “I adore Lavinia or Lucretia,” the ambiguous declaration of a modern passion: “My faith is as pure,” the motto of a white livery: “Who is stronger than myself?” of a lion’s hide: “If I am drowned in blood, what a pleasant death,” the wish of ferocious courage. The pride or prudence of the Ursini restrained them from the field, which was occupied by three of their hereditary rivals, whose inscriptions denoted the lofty greatness of the Colonna name: “Though sad I am strong:” “Strong as I am great:” “If I fall,” addressing himself to the spectators, “you fall with me:”—intimating (says the contemporary writer) that while the other families were the subjects of the Vatican, they alone were the supporters of the capitol. The combats of the amphitheatre were dangerous and bloody. Every champion successively encountered a wild bull; and the victory may be ascribed to the quadrupeds, since no more than eleven were left on the field, with the loss of nine wounded and eighteen killed on the side of their adversaries. Some of the noblest families might mourn, but the pomp of the funerals, in the churches of St. John Lateran and St. Maria Maggiore, afforded a second holiday to the people. Doubtless it was not in such conflicts that the blood of the Romans should have been shed; yet, in blaming their rashness we are compelled to applaud their gallantry; and the noble volunteers, who display their magnificence, and risk their lives, under the balconies of the fair, excite a more generous sympathy than the thousands of captives and malefactors who were reluctantly dragged to the scene of slaughter.

This use of the amphitheatre was a rare, perhaps a singular, festival: the demand for the materials was a daily and continual want, which the citizens could gratify without restraint or remorse. In the Fourteenth Century, a scandalous act of concord secured to both factions the privilege of extracting stones from the free and common quarry of the Coliseum; and Poggius laments, that the greater part of these stones had been burnt to lime by the folly of the Romans. To check this abuse, and to prevent the nocturnal crimes that might be perpetrated in the vast and gloomy recess, Eugenius the fourth surrounded it with a wall; and, by a charter long extant, granted both the ground and edifice to the monks of an adjacent convent. After his death, the wall was overthrown in a tumult of the people; and had they themselves respected the noblest monument of their fathers, they might have justified the resolve that it should never be degraded to private property. The inside was damaged; but in the middle of the Sixteenth Century, an æra of taste and learning, the exterior circumference of one thousand six hundred and twelve feet was still entire and inviolate; a triple elevation of fourscore arches, which rose to the height of one hundred and eight feet. Of the present ruin, the nephews of Paul the Third are the guilty agents; and every traveller who views the Farnese Palace may curse the sacrilege and luxury of these upstart princes. A similar reproach is applied to the Barberini; and the repetition of injury might be dreaded from every reign, till the Coliseum was placed under the safeguard of religion by the most liberal of the pontiffs, Benedict the Fourteenth, who consecrated a spot which persecution and fable had stained with the blood of so many Christian martyrs.

When Petrarch first gratified his eyes with a view of those monuments, whose scattered fragments so far surpass the most eloquent descriptions, he was astonished at the supine indifference of the Romans themselves; he was humbled rather than elated by the discovery, that, except his friend Rienzi and one of the Colonna, a stranger of the Rhone was more conversant with these antiquities than the nobles and natives of the metropolis.

THE COLISEUM
CHARLES DICKENS

When we came out of the church again (we stood nearly an hour staring up into the dome: and would not have “gone over” the Cathedral then for any money), we said to the coachman, “Go to the Coliseum.” In a quarter of an hour or so, he stopped at the gate, and we went in.

It is no fiction but plain, sober, honest Truth, to say: so suggestive and distinct is it at this hour: that, for a moment—actually in passing in—they who will, may have the whole great pile before them, as it used to be, with thousands of eager faces staring down into the arena, and such a whirl of strife, and blood, and dust, going on there, as no language can describe. Its solitude, its awful beauty, and its utter desolation, strike upon the stranger, the next moment, like a softened sorrow; and never in his life, perhaps, will he be so moved and overcome by any sight, not immediately connected with his own affections and afflictions.

To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds, who build their nests within its chinks and crannies; to see the Pit of Fight filled up with earth, and the peaceful Cross planted in the centre; to climb into its upper halls, and look down on ruin, ruin, ruin, all about it; the triumphal arches of Constantine, Septimus Severus, and Titus; the Roman Forum; the Palace of the Cæsars; the temples of the old religion, fallen down and gone; is to see the ghost of old Rome, wicked, wonderful old city, haunting the very ground on which its people trod. It is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight, conceivable. Never, in its bloodiest prime, can the sight of the gigantic Coliseum, full and running over with the lustiest life, have moved one heart, as it must move all who look upon it now, a ruin—God be thanked: a ruin!

As it tops the other ruins: standing there, a mountain among graves: so do its ancient influences outlive all other remnants of the old mythology and old butchery of Rome, in the nature of the fierce and cruel Roman people. The Italian face changes as the visitor approaches the city; its beauty becomes devilish; and there is scarcely one countenance in a hundred, among the common people in the streets, that would not be at home and happy in a renovated Coliseum to-morrow.

Here was Rome indeed at last; and such a Rome as no one can imagine in its full and awful grandeur.

GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS
G. W. STEEVENS

The Sikhs are the youngest of the great powers of India. A kind of Hindu Protestants, their Luther arose about 1500 to fulminate against caste and the worship of idols. Instead of Shiva and Kali, they worship their Bible, which is called the Granth. They abhor tobacco, and it is impiety to shave or cut the hair. Sometimes, when a Sikh plays polo, you may see it come undone and wave behind him like a horse-tail. From Puritans they turned to Ironsides, praying and fighting with equal fervour, wearing an iron quoit in their turbans, partly as a sign of grace, and partly as a defence against a chance sword-cut.

For some three hundred years they fought the Musulmans, Mogul or Afghan, for the dominion of the Punjab, and won it in the end. The Musulmans tortured the Sikh teachers to death with their families; the Sikhs sacked and massacred in return. The Musulmans took Amritsar, blew up the temple of the Granth, and washed its foundations in the blood of sacred cows; the Sikhs took Lahore, blew up the mosques, and washed their foundations in the blood of unclean swine. Fanatics and heroes, they lived only for the holy war, and became the barrier of India against the Musulman tribes of the North-West. At last, in 1823, the Sikhs were united under Ranjit Singh into the greatest power of India. But he died in 1839; four wives and seven concubines were burned with him, and you can see their tombs under marble lotuses in Lahore. Ten years later the second Sikh War was over, and the Punjab was British. If the Sikh rule was short, their battles have ever been long.

GOLDEN TEMPLE OF THE SIKHS, INDIA.

The later history of the Sikhs—how kindly they accepted British rule, which has still treated their religion with more than tolerant respect; how they supplied and supply to-day noble regiments to our army; the splendid services they rendered in the Mutiny, but a decade after their conquest; the unswerving gallantry and devotion which they have displayed on every field of honour,—all this is part of the military history of the Empire. The very officers of Gurkha and Pathan and Dogra regiments admit that the Sikh is the ideal of all that is soldierly.

Ranjit’s capital was Lahore, but the holy city has ever been Amritsar. “The Pool of Immortality,” it means, and here in the centre of the pool is the Golden Temple. In its present form it is not yet a century old—quite an infant in India. Amritsar, indeed, is full of new things; for, as it is the Mecca, it is also the Manchester of the Punjab. Carpets and shawls and silks are manufactured there, or brought in by merchants from Persia and Tibet, Bokhara and Yarkand. Here you can see modern native India untainted by Europe.

Amritsar wears an air of solid prosperity. Not in the least like the manufacturing towns we know, lacking the machinery of Bombay or Calcutta, it neither shadows its streets with many-storied factories nor defiles its air with smoke. But it wears a uniform and thriving aspect, as of a town with a present and a future rather than a past. The Bond Street of Delhi is a double row of decayed mansions propped up by tottering booths; the houses of Amritsar are middle-sized, regular, stably built of burned bricks, neither splendid nor ruinous. The looms clatter and whir in the factories, and the merchant bargains between the whiffs of his hookah in his shop, and Amritsar grows rich in a leisurely Indian way, unfevered by Western improvements.

To the Western eye it is unenterprising and rather shabby. The stable comfort of Amritsar stops short at the good brick walls; inside, the shops are bare brick and plaster. There is nothing in the least imposing about it. “Chunder Buksh, Dealer,” says one placard, and it would be hard to say what else he could call himself; for his stock seems to consist of one fine carpet, some brass pots, and a towel. Above him is “Ali Mohammed, Barrister-at-Law,” in a windowless, torn-blinded office, which you would otherwise take for the attic of Chunder Buksh’s assistant. But compared with the rest of India, Amritsar is a model of wellbeing. It is dusty, but otherwise almost clean; the streets, of course, are full of bullocks and buffaloes, but it seems rare that animals share their bed with men; there are plenty of people all but naked, but it is rather from choice or religious enthusiasm than of necessity. The trousered ladies, strolling with trousered babies on their hips or smoking hubble-bubbles on shop counters, wear silver in their blue-black hair, pearls in their noses, gold in their ears; they jingle with locked-up capital. Finally, there is a Jubilee statue of the Queen, and a clock-tower for all the world like an English borough’s. But besides these and the Government offices and the railway-station there is hardly a whisper from the West in the town; and in Amritsar you begin to conceive a new respect for India.

The stream in the streets sets steadily towards the Golden Temple. From the heavy-browed city gate to the holy pool the winding alleys are splashed with all the familiar hues—orange outshining lemon and emerald throttling ultramarine. Following the stalwart, bearded pilgrims, in the midst of the city of shopkeepers you suddenly break into a wide square: within it, bordered by a marble pavement—white, black, and umber—a green lake dances in the sunlight; and in the midst of that, mirrored in the pool—you look through your eyelashes, for the hot rays fling back sevenfold-heated, blinding—gleam walls and roofs and cupolas of sheer gold.

A minute or two you blink and stare, then you see that it is a small temple on an island with a causeway leading to it from under an arch. And after the first blink and stare your notions of beauty rise up and protest against it. The temple is neither imposing by size nor winsome by proportion. It has two stories—the lower of marble, inlaid, like the marble of Agra, with birds and beasts and flowers, but with none of Agra’s grace and refinement; all above it is of copper-gilt. Above the second story rises something half-cupola, half-dome, but it is not in the middle; there are smaller cupolas at the side overlooking the causeway, and others smaller still at the far side. The whole temple is smaller than St. Clement Danes, and a little building has no right to be irregular. If the Taj Mahal, you say, which is three times this size, can take the trouble to be symmetrical—well, if this is the masterpiece of modern India—as for the gold, it blinds you for the first moment and amuses you for the second; but you might as well ask beauty of a heliograph.

Nevertheless, do not go away, for you will hardly see anything more Indian. Outside the gate they show you a Government ordinance that everybody must either conform to the religious customs of the place or forbear to indulge his curiosity; you bow, and a bearded giant, who might be a high-priest for dignity, takes off your boots and ties on silk slippers instead. You leave your cigar-case behind you: tobacco must not defile the holy place. Then, behind a white-bearded policeman—who performs the triple function of guiding, preventing you from doing anything impious, and clearing worshippers out of the way before you—you start forth to see.

The pilgrims shuffle on eagerly round the pavement to the great gate before the causeway. On a gilt tablet, in English and Punjabi, stands the record of a miracle: how that a great light from heaven fell before the holy book, and then was caught up into heaven again, whence the learned augured much blessing upon the British Raj. Past the gate they press without turning the head, though it is carved and pictured over every inch. On one side of the entrance a marble tablet shows the legend XXXV Sikhs and something in Punjabi. From the gate you issue on to the causeway. It also is flagged with marble, and lined with gilded lamp-posts; but the lamps above the gold are that crass-blue and green-coloured glass of the suburban builder, and more than one hangs broken. So you come to the sanctuary itself—a lofty chamber with four open doors of chased silver. Within sit three priests on the floor, under a canopy of blue and scarlet, before a low ottoman draped in crimson and green and yellow. The high-priest, eagle-eyed and long black-bearded, reads continually in a loud voice from the Granth; beside him sits one with a gilt-handled wisk and fans the sacred book. At another side sit two musicians: one twangs a sort of one-stringed mandoline, one thrums a tom-tom. Before the Granth lies a cloth; and each believer, crouching in, flings on it flowers or cowries or copper coins for his offering. To the white man they bring what looks like a dry half-orange or candied citron, only white; it is made of sugar, and the white man responds with the offering of a rupee. The walls about this strange worship blaze with blue and red and gold in frets and scrolls and flower-tendrils; above are chambers and galleries of the same and studded mirrors; in one more than holy room are brooms made of peacocks’ feathers wherewith alone it may be swept.

That is the great shrine of all; but there is much else. All round the lake are palaces of stone and white marble belonging to the great Sikh chiefs who came here to worship. Before them, on the pavement, men squatting under canvas screens hawk flowers—lotus, jasmine, marigold, or scabious—to be offered before the Scripture. In one of the palaces, which matches the temple with a gilt dome of its own, you see a glass case; within it, under crimson silk, rest the sword and mace of some old Sikh Boanerges, mighty in prayer as in battle. Then there is a tower temple of eight stories, dedicated to a bygone saint and miracle-worker, the lower chamber aflame with paint and gold. As the policeman enters he touches the step with his finger; a woman in violet trousers flings a flower on to a cloth and ottoman like that of the central shrine; a woman in green-and-gold trousers places a bread-cake before it and lays her forehead on the marble sill; others grovel and shampoo it with their hands. The next thing you come to is a plain shed with a dynamo that supplies the shrines and gardens with electric light. After that a group of naked fakirs, powdered white with ashes, with long mud-matted hair and mad eyes. Then a door, fast closed and seeming to lead nowhither, with a tiny wreath of marigolds hung on it.

Everywhere the same grotesque contradictions—splendour and squalor, divinity and dirt, superstition and manliness. The Western mind can make nothing of it, cannot bring it into a focus. You simply hold your head, and say that this is the East, and you are of the West. In the treasury above the gate are silver staves and gilt maces, canopies of gold and diadems of pearls and diamonds. In the sacred, putrid lake rot flowers. A fakir standing before an enclosure drones in a full voice words you do not understand, like a psalm without any end to it: the refrain, after every half-dozen words, sounds like “Hullah hah leay.” Inside the shrine the high-priest never ceases to intone the Granth, nor the other priest to fan it, nor the musicians to tinkle and thrum; and in and out that holy place fly clouds of pigeons, perching on the canopy and fouling the growing pile of offerings before the ottoman. At every turn you come on little shrines with books on silken cushions and prostrate adorers. A calf, unchecked, is trying to lick the gold off the great gateway.

THE GIRALDA
ΤΗÉΟΡΗΙLΕ GAUTIER

The Giralda, which serves as a campanila to the cathedral, and rises above all the spires of the town, is an old Moorish tower, erected by an Arabian architect, named Geber or Guever, who invented algebra, which was called after him. The appearance of the tower is charming, and very original; the rose-coloured bricks and the white stone of which it is built, give it an air of gaiety and youth, which forms a strange contrast with the date of its erection, which extends as far back as the year 1000, a very respectable age, at which a tower may well be allowed to have a wrinkle or two and be excused for not being remarkable for a fresh complexion. The Giralda in its present state is not less than three hundred and fifty feet high, while each side is fifty feet broad. Up to a certain height the walls are perfectly even; there are then rows of Moorish windows with balconies, trefoils, and small white marble columns, surrounded by large lozenge-shaped brick panels. The tower formerly ended in a roof of variously coloured varnished tiles, on which was an iron bar, ornamented with four gilt metal balls of a prodigious size. This roof was removed in 1568 by the architect Francisco Ruiz, who raised the daughter of the Moor Guever one hundred feet higher in the pure air of heaven, so that his bronze statue might overlook the sierras, and speak with the angels who passed. The feat of building a belfry on a tower was in perfect keeping with the intentions of the members composing that admirable chapter who wished posterity to imagine they were mad. The additions of Francisco Ruiz consist of three stories; the first of these is pierced with windows, in whose embrasures are hung bells; the second, surrounded by an open balustrade, bears on the cornice of each of its sides, these words—Turris fortissima nomen Domini; and the third is a kind of cupola or lantern, on which turns a gigantic gilt bronze figure of Faith, holding a palm in one hand and a standard in the other, and serving as a weathercock, thereby justifying the name of Giralda given to the tower. This statue is by Bartholomew Morel. It can be seen at a very great distance; and when it glitters through the azure atmosphere, really looks like a seraph lounging in the air.

THE GIRALDA, SEVILLE, SPAIN.

You ascend the Giralda by a series of inclined ramps, so easy and gentle, that two men on horseback could very well ride up to the summit, whence you enjoy an admirable view. At your feet lies Seville, brilliantly white, with its spires and towers, endeavouring, but in vain, to reach the rose-coloured brick girdle of the Giralda. Beyond these stretches the plain, through which the Guadalquiver flows, like a piece of watered silk, and scattered around are Santiponce, Algaba, and other villages. Quite in the background is the Sierra Morena, with its outlines sharply marked, in spite of the distance, so great is the transparency of the air in this admirable country. On the opposite side, the Sierras de Gibram, Zaara and Moron, raise their bristling forms, tinged with the richest hues of lapis lazuli and amethyst, and completing this magnificent panorama, which is inundated with light, sunshine and dazzling splendour.

A great number of fragments of columns, shaped into posts and connected with each other by chains, except where spaces are left for persons to pass, surround the cathedral. Some of these columns are antique, and come either from the ruins of Italica, or from the remains of the ancient mosque, whose former site is now occupied by the cathedral, and of which the only remaining vestiges are the Giralda, a few old walls, and one or two arches, one of which serves as the entrance to the courtyard de los Nanjeros. The Longa (Exchange) is a large and perfectly regular edifice, built by the heavy and wearisome Herrera, that architect of ennui, to whom we owe the Escurial, which is decidedly the most melancholy building in the world; the Longa, also, like the cathedral, is surrounded by the same description of posts. It is completely isolated and presents four similar façades; it stands between the cathedral and the Alcazar. In it are preserved the archives of America, and the correspondence of Christopher Columbus, Pizarro and Fernando Cortez; but all these treasures are guarded by such savage dragons, that we were obliged to content ourselves with looking at the outside of the pasteboard boxes and portfolios, which are stowed away in mahogany compartments, like the goods in a drapers’ shop. It would be a most easy thing to place five or six of the most precious autographs in glass cases, and thus satisfy the very legitimate curiosity of travellers.

THE CATHEDRAL OF MONREALE, ITALY.

THE CATHEDRAL OF MONREALE
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

Sicily under the Normans offered the spectacle of a singularly hybrid civilization. Christians and Northmen, adopting the habits and imbibing the culture of their Musulman subjects, ruled a mixed population of Greeks, Arabs, Berbers, and Italians. The language of the princes was French; that of the Christians in their territory, Greek and Latin; that of their Mahommedan subjects, Arabic. At the same time the Scandinavian Sultans of Palermo did not cease to play an active part in the affairs, both civil and ecclesiastical, of Europe. The children of the Vikings, though they spent their leisure in harems, exercised, as hereditary Legates of the Holy See, a peculiar jurisdiction in the Church of Sicily. They dispensed benefices to the clergy, and assumed the mitre and dalmatic, together with the sceptre and the crown, as symbols of their authority in Church as well as State. As a consequence of this confusion of nationalities in Sicily, we find French and English ecclesiastics mingling at court with Moorish freedmen and Oriental odalisques, Apulian captains fraternizing with Greek corsairs, Jewish physicians in attendance on the person of the prince, and Arabian poets eloquent in his praises. The very money with which Roger subsidized his Italian allies, was stamped with Cuphic letters, and there is reason to believe that the reproach against Frederick of being a false coiner arose from his adopting the Eastern device of plating copper pieces to pass for silver. The commander of Roger’s navies and his chief minister of state was styled, according to Oriental usage, Emir or Ammiraglio. George of Antioch, who swept the shores of Africa, the Morea, and the Black Sea, in his service, was a Christian of the Greek Church, who had previously held an office of finance under Temim Prince of Mehdia. The workers in his silk factories were slaves, from Thebes and Corinth. The pages of his palace were Sicilian or African eunuchs. His charters ran in Arabic as well as Greek and Latin. His jewellers engraved the rough gems of the Orient with Christian mottoes in Semitic characters.[5] His architects were Musulmans who adapted their native style to the requirements of Christian ritual, and inscribed the walls of cathedrals with Catholic legends in the Cuphic language. The predominant characteristic of Palermo was Orientalism. Religious toleration was extended to the Musulmans, so that the two creeds, Christian and Mahommedan, flourished side by side.

At Palermo, Europe saw the first instance of a court not wholly unlike that which Versailles afterwards became. The intrigues which endangered the throne and liberty of William the Bad, and which perplexed the policy of William the Good, were court-conspiracies of a kind common enough at Constantinople. In this court life men of letters and erudition played a part three centuries before Petrarch taught the princes of Italy to respect the pen of a poet. King Roger, of whom the court geographer Edrisi writes that “he did more sleeping than any other man waking,” was surrounded during his leisure moments, beneath the palm-groves of Favara, with musicians, historians, travellers, mathematicians, poets, and astrologers of Oriental breeding.

The architectural works of the Normans in Palermo reveal the same ascendancy of Arab culture. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, with its low white rounded domes, is nothing more or less than a little mosque adapted to the rites of Christians. The country palaces of the Zisa and the Cuba, built by the two Williams, retain their ancient Moorish character, standing beneath the fretted arches of the hall of the Zisa, through which a fountain flows within a margin of carved marble, and looking on the landscape from its open porch, we only need to reconstruct in fancy the green gardens and orange-groves, where fair-haired Normans whiled away their hours among black-eyed odalisques and graceful singing boys from Persia. Amid a wild tangle of olive and lemon trees overgrown with scarlet passion-flowers the pavilion of the Cubola, built of hewn stone and open at each of its four sides, still stands much as it stood when William II paced through flowers from his palace of the Cuba, to enjoy the freshness of the evening by the side of its fountain. The views from all these Saracenic villas over the fruitful valley of the Golden Horn, and the turrets of Palermo, and the mountains and the distant sea, are ineffably delightful. When the palaces were new—when the gilding and the frescoes still shone upon their honeycombed ceilings, when their mosaics glittered in noonday twilight, and their amber-coloured masonry was set in shade of pines and palms, and the cool sound of rivulets made music in their courts and gardens, they must have well deserved their Arab titles of “Sweet Waters” and “The Glory” and “The Paradise of Earth.”

But the true splendour of Palermo, that which makes this city one of the most glorious of the South, is to be sought in its churches—in the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina founded by King Roger, in the vast aisles and cloisters of Monreale built by King William the Good at the instance of his Chancellor Matteo,[6] in the Cathedral of Palermo begun by Offamilio, and in the Martorana dedicated by George the Admiral. These triumphs of ecclesiastical architecture, none the less splendid because they cannot be reduced to rule or assigned to any single style, were the work of Saracen builders assisted by Byzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen. The genius of Latin Christianity determined the basilica shape of the Cathedral of Monreale. Its bronze doors were wrought by smiths of Trani and Pisa. Its walls were incrusted with the mosaics of Constantinople. The woodwork of its roof, and the emblazoned patterns in porphyry and serpentine and glass and smalto, which cover its whole surface, were designed by Oriental decorators. Norman sculptors added their dog-tooth and chevron to the mouldings of its porches; Greeks, Frenchmen, and Arabs may have tried their skill in turn upon the multitudinous ornaments of its cloister capitals. “The like of which church,” says Lucius III in 1182, “hath not been constructed by any king even from ancient times, and such an one as must compel all men to admiration.” These words remain literally and emphatically true. Other cathedrals may surpass that of Monreale in sublimity, simplicity, bulk, strength, or unity of plan. None can surpass it in the strange romance with which the memory of its many artificers invests it. None again can exceed it in richness and glory, in the gorgeousness of a thousand decorative elements subservient to one controlling thought. “It is evident,” says Fergusson in his history of architecture, “that all the architectural features in the building were subordinate in the eyes of the builders to the mosaic decorations, which cover every part of the interior, and are in fact the glory and the pride of the edifice, and alone entitle it to rank among the finest of mediæval churches.” The whole of the Christian history is depicted in this series of Mosaics; but on first entering, one form alone compels attention. The semi-dome of the eastern apse above the high altar is entirely filled with a gigantic half-length figure of Christ. He raises His right hand to bless, and with His left holds an open book on which is written in Greek and Latin, “I am the Light of the World.” His face is solemn and severe, rather than mild or piteous; and round His nimbus runs the legend Ἰησους χριστὸς ὁ παντοκράτωρ. Below Him on a smaller scale are ranged the archangels and the mother of the Lord, who holds the child upon her knees. Thus Christ appears twice upon this wall, once as the Omnipotent Wisdom, the Word by whom all things were made, and once as God deigning to assume a shape of flesh and dwell with men. The magnificent image of supreme Deity seems to fill with a single influence and to dominate the whole building. The house with all its glory is His. He dwells there like Pallas in her Parthenon or Zeus in his Olympian temple. To left and right over every square inch of the cathedral blaze mosaics, which portray the story of God’s dealings with the human race from the Creation downwards, together with those angelic beings and saints, who symbolize each in his own degree some special virtue granted to mankind. The walls of the fane are therefore an open book of history, theology, and ethics for all men to read.

The superiority of mosaics over fresco as an architectural adjunct on this gigantic scale is apparent at a glance at Monreale. Permanency of splendour and glowing richness of tone are all on the side of the mosaics. Their true rival is painted glass. The jewelled churches of the south are constructed for the display of coloured surfaces illuminated by sunlight falling on them from narrow windows, just as those of the north—Rheims, for example, or Le Mans—are built for the transmission of light through a variegated medium of transparent hues. The painted windows of a northern cathedral find their proper counterpart in the mosaics of the south. The Gothic architect strove to obtain the greatest amount of translucent surface. The Byzantine builder directed his attention to securing just enough light for the illumination of his glistening walls. The radiance of the northern church was similar to that of flowers or sunset clouds or jewels. The glory of the southern temple was that of dusky gold and gorgeous needlework. The north needed acute brilliancy as a contrast to external greyness. The south found rest from the glare and glow of noonday in these sombre splendours. Thus Christianity, both of the south and of the north, decked her shrines with colour. Not so the Paganism of Hellas. With the Greeks, colour, though used in architecture, was severely subordinated to sculpture; toned and modified to a calculated harmony with actual nature, it did not, as in a Christian church, create a world beyond the world, a paradise of supersensual ecstasy, but remained within the limits of the known. Light falling upon carved forms of gods and heroes, bathing clear-cut columns and sharp bas-reliefs in simple lustre, was enough for the Phœbian rights of Hellas. Though we know that red and blue and green and gilding were employed to accentuate the mouldings of Greek temples, yet neither the gloomy glory of mosaics nor the gemmed fretwork of storied windows was needed to attune the souls of Hellenic worshippers to devotion.

THE LUXEMBOURG PALACE
AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE

The Rue de la Seine will bring us to the Palace of the Luxembourg, now the Palace of the Senate (open from nine to four in winter, nine to five in summer), built by Marie de’ Medici on the site of a hotel erected by Robert de Harlay de Saucy early in the Sixteenth Century, which was bought by the Duc de Pincy-Luxembourg. The queen employed Jacques Debrosses as her architect in 1615, and his work was completed in 1620. The ground floor, in the Tuscan style, was intended to convey a reminiscence of the Florentine Palazzo Pitti, in which Marie de’ Medici was born: the upper stories are Grecian.

The queen intended to call the palace Palais Medicis, though the name has always clung to it which is derived from François de Luxembourg, Prince de Tingry, who owned the site in 1570. The palace was bequeathed by Marie de’ Medici to her youngest son Gaston, Duc d’Orléans, from whom it came to his two daughters, who each held half of the Luxembourg—“La Grande Mademoiselle,” and the pious Duchesse de Guise (whose mother, sister of the Duc de Lorraine, had clandestinely become the second wife of Monsieur), who was terribly tyrannized over by her rich half sister. It was here that Mademoiselle received the visits of M. de Lauzun, whilst La Fosse was painting the loves of Flore and Zephyr, and here that she astonished Europe by the announcement of her intended marriage, to which—for a few days—Louis XIV. was induced to give his consent.

THE LUXEMBOURG PALACE, FRANCE.

At her death, Mademoiselle bequeathed her right in the Luxembourg to her Cousin Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIV. During the Regency, the palace was the residence of the Duchesse de Berry (daughter of the Regent Philippe d’Orléans), who by her orgies here rivalled those of her father at the Palais Royal. The Luxembourg was bought by Louis XV., and given by Louis XVI. to his brother “Monsieur,” who resided in it till his escape from Paris at the time of the flight to Varennes.

Treated as national property during the Revolution, the Luxembourg became one of the prisons of the Reign of Terror. Amongst other prisoners, comprising the most illustrious names in France, were the Vicomte de Beauharnais and his wife Josephine, afterwards Empress of the French: “De quoi se plaignent donc ces damnés aristocrates?” cried Montagnard; “nons les logeons dans les châteaux royaux.” David, the painter, designed his picture of the Sabines during his imprisonment at the Luxembourg, in a little room on the second floor. Here also in a different category, were imprisoned Hébert, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Philippeaux, Lacroix, Hérault de Séchelles, Payne, Bazire, Chabot, and Fabre d’Eglantine. In 1793, people used to come and stand for hours in the garden in the hope of being able to have a last sight of their friends, from their being allowed to show themselves at the windows.

It was at the Luxembourg that (December 10, 1797), Bonaparte presented the treaty of the peace of Campo Formio to the Directory, after returning from his first campaign in Italy. At the end of 1799, the palace became for a time Le Palais du Consulat: Le Palais du Sénat, then de la Pairie. Marshal Ney was condemned to death here, under the Restoration (November 21, 1815), and was executed in the Allée de l’Observatoire, at the end of the garden on December 7. The iron wicket still remains in the door of his prison, opening west at the end of the great gallery of archives. The ministers of Charles X. were also judged at the Luxembourg, and Fieschi and the other conspirators of July, 1835, were condemned here; as was Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, after the attempt at Bologne in 1840.

The Luxembourg is only shown when the Senate is not sitting. The apartments best worth seeing are the Chapel of 1844, decorated with modern paintings; and the Ancienne Salle du Livre d’or, where the titles and arms of peers were preserved under the Restoration and Louis Philippe, adorned with the decorations of the apartment of Marie de’ Medici. The ceiling of the gallery, which forms part of the hall, represents the Apotheosis of Marie. The arabesques in the principal hall are attributed to Giovanni da Udine: the ceiling represents Marie de’ Medici reestablishing the peace and unity of France. The first floor is reached by a great staircase which occupies the place of a gallery once filled with the twenty-four great pictures of the life of the Regent Marie by Rubens, now in the Louvre. The oratory of the queen and another room are now united to form the Salle des Gardes, her bedroom is the Salle des Messagers d’état and her reception-room is known as the Salon de Napoléon I. The cupola of the Salle du Trône by Alaux represents the Apotheosis of the first Emperor.

The Hôtel du Petit Luxembourg is a dependency of the greater palace, and was erected about the same time by Richelieu, who resided here till the Palais Royal was built. When he moved thither, he gave this palace to his niece, the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, from whom it passed to Henri Jules de Bourbon-Condé, after which it received the name of Petit Bourbon. Anne, Palatine of Bavaria, lived here, and added a hôtel towards the Rue Vaugirard to accommodate her suite. Under the First Empire the Luxembourg was occupied for some time by Joseph Bonaparte. It is now the official residence of the President of the Senate. The cloister of the former convent of the Filles du Calvaire, whom Marie de Medici established near her palace, is now a winter garden attached to the Petit Luxembourg. The chapel, standing close to the grill of the Rue de Vaugirard, is an admirable specimen of the end of the Sixteenth Century; on the summit of its gable is a symbolical Pelican nourishing its young.

Beyond the Petit Luxembourg is a modern building containing the Musée du Luxembourg. The collection now in the galleries of the Louvre was begun at the Luxembourg and only removed in 1779, when Monsieur came to reside here. In 1802 a new gallery was begun at the Luxembourg, but, in 1815, its pictures were removed to the Louvre to fill the places of those restored to their rightful owners by the Allies. It was Louis XVIII. who ordered that the Luxembourg should receive such works of living artists as were acquired by the State. The collection, recently moved from halls in the palace itself, is always interesting, but as the works of each artist are removed to the Louvre ten years after his death, the pictures are constantly changing.

THE GREAT LAMA TEMPLE
C. F. GORDON-CUMMING

This morning soon after 5 A. M. Dr. Dudgeon took me to see the Yung-ho-kung, a very fine old Lama temple, just within the wall, at the north-east corner of the Tartar city. It contains about 1,300 monks of all ages, down to small boys six years old, under the headship of a Lama, who assumes the title of “The Living Buddha.”

These monks are Mongol Tartars of a very bad type, dirty and greedy of gain; and, moreover, are known to be grossly immoral. They are generally offensively insolent to all foreigners, many of whom have vainly endeavoured to obtain access to the monastery,—even the silver key, which is usually so powerful in China, often failing to unlock the inhospitable gates.

That I had the privilege of entrance was solely due to the personal influence of Dr. Dudgeon, whose medical skill has happily proved so beneficial to the “Living Buddha,” and several of the priests, as to ensure him a welcome from them. It was not, however, an easy task to get at these men, as a particularly insolent monk was acting as door-keeper, and attempted forcibly to prevent our entrance. That, however, was effected by the judicious pressure of a powerful shoulder, and after a stormy argument, the wretch was at length overawed, and finally reduced to abject humility by threats to report his rudeness to the head Lama.

At long last, after wearisome expostulation and altercation, every door was thrown open to us, but the priest in charge of each carefully locked it after us, lest we should avoid giving him an individual tip, or kum-sha, as it is here called. Happily I had a large supply of five and ten cent silver pieces, which the Doctor’s knowledge of Chinese custom compelled our extortioners to accept. At the same time, neither of us could avoid a qualm as each successive door was securely locked, and a vision presented itself of possible traps into which we might be decoyed.

Every corner of the great building is full of interest, from the brilliant yellow china tiles of the roof to the yellow carpet in the temple. The entrance is adorned with stone carvings of animals, and the interior is covered with a thousand fantastic figures carved in wood—birds, beasts, and serpents, flowers and monstrous human heads mingle in grotesque confusion. It is rich in silken hangings, gold embroidery, huge picturesque paper lanterns of quaint form, covered with Chinese characters and grotesque idols, canopied by very ornamental baldachinos.

Conspicuous amongst these idols is Kwang-ti, who was a distinguished warrior at the beginning of the Christian era, and who about eight hundred years later was deified as the God of War, and State temples were erected in his honour in every city of the Empire. So his shrine is adorned with all manner of armour, especially bows and arrows—doubtful votive offerings. He is a very fiercelooking god, and is attended by two colossal companions, robed in the richest gold embroidered silk. Another gigantic image is that of a fully armed warrior leading a horse. I believe he is Kwang-ti’s armour bearer. In various parts of the temple hang trophies of arms and military standards, which are singular decorations for a temple wherein Buddha is the object of supreme worship.

But the fact is, that though Kwang-ti is the God of War, he is also emphatically “Protector of the Peace,” and his aid is invoked in all manner of difficulties, domestic or national. For instance, when the great salt wells in the Province of Shansi dried up, the sorely perplexed Emperor was recommended by the Taouist High Priest to lay the case before Kwang-ti. The Emperor, therefore, wrote an official despatch on the subject, which was solemnly burnt, and thus conveyed to the spirit-world, when, lo! in answer to the Son of Heaven, the Warrior-god straightway appeared in the clouds, mounted on his red war-horse, and directed the Emperor to erect a temple in his honour. This was done, and the salt springs flowed as before.

Kwang-ti again appeared in 1855, during the Taiping rebellion, to aid the Imperial troops near Nankin, for which kind interposition, Hien-feng, the reigning Emperor (whose honour-conferring power extends to the spirit-world), promoted him to an equal rank with Confucius! So here we find him reverenced alike by Taouists and Buddhists!

All the altar-vases in this temple are of the finest Pekin enamel—vases, candlesticks, and incense-burners, from which filmy clouds of fragrant incense float upward to a ceiling panelled with green and gold. Fine large scroll paintings tempted me to linger at every turn, and the walls are encrusted with thousands of small porcelain images of Buddha.

In the main temple, which is called the Foo-Koo, or Hall of Buddha, stands a cyclopean image of Matreya, the Buddha of Futurity. It is seventy feet in height, and is said to be carved from one solid block of wood, but it is coloured to look like bronze. Ascending a long flight of steps, we reached a gallery running round the temple about the level of his shoulders. I found that this gallery led into two circular buildings, one on each side, constructed for the support of two immense rotating cylinders, about seventy feet in height, full of niches, each niche containing the image of a Buddhist saint.

They are rickety old things, and thickly coated with dust, but on certain days worshippers come and stick on strips of paper, bearing prayers. To turn these cylinders is apparently an act of homage to the whole saintly family, and enlists the good-will of the whole lot. Some Lama monasteries deal thus with their 128 sacred books and 220 volumes of commentary, placing them in a huge cylindrical bookcase, which they turn bodily, to save the trouble of turning individual pages—the understanding having apparently small play in either case.

It was nearly 6 A. M. ere we reached the Lama Temple, so that we were too late to see the grand morning service, as that commences at 4 A. M., when upwards of a hundred mats are spread in the temple, on each of which kneel ten of the subordinate Lamas, all wearing their yellow robes and a sort of classical helmet of yellow felt, with a very high crest like that worn by Britannia. They possess red felt boots, but can only enter the temple barefooted. The Great Lama wears a violet-coloured robe and a yellow mitre. He bears a sort of crozier, and occupies a gilded throne before the altar: a cushion is provided for him to kneel upon. The whole temple is in darkness or dim twilight save the altar, which is ablaze with many tapers.

When the copper gong sounds its summons to worship, they chant litanies in monotone, one of the priests reading prayers, from a silken scroll, and all joining in a low murmur, while clouds of incense fill the temple. A peculiarity of this chant is, that while a certain number of the brethren recite the words, the others sing a continuous deep bass accompaniment. Again the gong marks the change from prayer to sacred chants, and after these comes a terrible din of instrumental music—a clatter of gongs, bells, conch-shells, tambourines, and all manner of ear-splitting abominations. Then follows a silence which may be felt, so utter is the stillness and so intense the relief.

HADDON HALL
JOHN LEYLAND

When the Derbyshire Wye has pursued its winding way from its source in the millstone grit, and between the wooded steeps and precipitous limestone cliffs that curb and shape its course towards Bakewell, the hills on either bank recede, and the river flows through pleasant alluvial meadows, overlooked by occasional rocky scars, and by woods of fir, ash, beech, and oak, to its confluence with the Derwent at Rowsley. Some two miles below Bakewell, shortly before the stream of the Lathkil comes down from its enchanting valley on the right, with its narrow tributary, the Bradford, to swell the waters of the Wye, the limestone crops out as a platform on the opposite bank, and there, half-concealed by the umbrageous woodland, stand the time-worn towers and walls of Haddon. Whether we approach the spot from the direction of Rowsley or of Bakewell, the prospect can scarcely be surpassed in its kind, either for the wondrous grouping of the grey towers and battlements on the slope of the hill, or for the rich beauties of the varied foliage on the height beyond, and the flower-decked meads and pellucid stream below. These charms of a truly English landscape, and an old English mansion, have long had, and must continue to have, a spell of fascination for the artist and lover of the picturesque; but it is not only for them that visitors come in a ceaseless stream to Haddon. What other place can wake such impressions of old-time greatness touched by the witchery of bygone romance? It is here—better, perhaps, than any other spot in England—that we can grasp the conditions of life of the mediæval and Tudor gentlemen. The long line of the Vernons passes before us. We witness them, generation by generation adding to the majestic pile; the vacant chambers are peopled with stately ladies and mail-clad knights, the bowmen are ranged in the courtyard, and the sentinel keeps watch from the tower. We see the knight in anxious deliberation on questions of State and wonder what answer shall be returned to the King-maker’s letter. We partake of the bounteous hospitality of the Knight of the Peak, as many strangers have done before, bethinking ourselves anon of his daughter, fair Dorothy, and how that Manners is concealed in the woods, watching the light in her chamber. Then the sounds of revelry strike upon the ear, the door opens and she steals down the steps, and presently we hear the clang of hoofs upon the road. It is, indeed, such impressions as these that have given to the external beauties of Haddon Hall the additional charm of legend, poetry and romance, and have contributed to make it a place to which visitors from afar will always delight to come.

HADDON HALL. ENGLAND.

Although the various parts of the celebrated hall have been built at widely different periods, and upon a sloping and irregular rocky platform, its plan is very easy to understand, and it may be well, at the outset, to explain the disposition of the buildings as clearly as may be. They surround two courtyards—the lower one, to the west, on the river front, and the upper one, separated from the first by the great hall and domestic offices, rising up to the east on the hill-side behind it. The visitor enters the lower quadrangle at its north-western angle, placing his foot, as he passes the postern, in a hole which has been worn deeply by unnumbered strangers before him. He notices, on his right, beneath the archway, the porter’s room, with a bedstead that may well have kept that functionary wakeful; and beyond it, still on the right hand and western side, the so-called Chaplain’s Room—with its hunting-horn, old musket, Seventeenth Century boots, service of pewter platters, and other miscellaneous contents—as well as two other chambers, before the domestic chapel is reached. This edifice occupies the south-western angle, and extends about half-way up the southern side of the lower courtyard. Being not at right angles with the other portions of this quadrangle, it gives, with its picturesque bell-turret, a pleasing variety to the buildings within; and, externally, its east window and the angles of its chancel and southern aisle, with the heavy buttress at the western end, add materially to the picturesque effect of the hall. The chapel, moreover, contains, with some of the foundation walls, the oldest portions of the edifice, and the round column and chalice-like font are anterior, perhaps, to the coming of the Vernons to Haddon. The south side of the western quadrangle is completed by a range of constructions, including passages to the private apartments, and a turret stair to the battlemented wall; and leading up to the doorway is a flight of steps—added in the Sixteenth Century—which projects into the area of the courtyard. This space is further broken up by the three steps which extend across it from north to south, dividing it into an upper and a lower platform. Standing upon the slight elevation thus gained, the chapel, the buildings opposite on the western side, the entrance gateway, with the very curious corbelling and constructive ties over it in the angle, and the offices on the western side, with the turret, have a most pleasing and varied effect.

The main block of buildings, lying between the two quadrangles, is now entered by the porch, which leads into a lobby or passage separating the great hall on the right from the kitchen and its offices on the left. This arrangement was general in mediæval dwelling-places, and may be seen in many of the timber manor-houses of Lancashire and Cheshire, where, as we see it at Haddon, the Minstrel’s Gallery is usually over the entrance passage, at the end of the hall opposite to the daïs. At Haddon, the table at the upper end still remains, supported on its three pedestal legs, and we think of the time when the King of the Peak held festival there, as we look upon its time-worn board. It is to be observed that the constructional conditions of the hall rendered it impossible to add the great bay, which was a chief feature of mediæval banqueting-rooms—one that may be seen in its perfection in the magnificent, but roofless hall of Wingfield, a few miles away. In the manor-houses of Lancashire and Cheshire, to which allusion has been made, the withdrawing-room lies in general immediately behind the great hall, and adjacent to the daïs, but at Haddon we find, in that position, a private dining-room, with a fine recessed window; and the drawing-room, which is above it, is approached by a flight of stone steps. The drawing-room at Haddon is a beautiful tapestried chamber, with fine views from its bay window over the gardens and down the valley of the Wye; and from it access is had to the Earl’s Bedroom and the Page’s Room. On the other side of the lobby from which the hall is entered is a sloping passage leading down to the kitchen, with its huge fireplace and curious culinary appliances, and other doors from the same passage open into the buttery, wine-cellar, add sundry offices. The great hall, and the domestic offices described, complete the enclosure of the first courtyard and form the western side of the second. The northern side of this upper quadrangle is formed of a series of small chambers; and a staircase from the hall-passage leads up to the quaint tapestried rooms above them, which, if tradition may be believed, were the nursery and the rooms of Dorothy Vernon, of Lady Cranborne, daughter of John Manners, eighth Earl of Rutland, and of Roger Manners. By the same staircase from the passage, access is had to the Minstrel’s Gallery, as well as to the gallery on the eastern side of the hall (a later addition), which brings the visitor to the top of the stone steps by which the drawing-room is reached. At that place are the segmental steps of solid oak, whereby the magnificent Long Gallery or Bedroom is entered. This great chamber, which is a chief glory of Haddon, will be alluded to later. It occupies the whole length of the southern side of the upper courtyard, and projects picturesquely at its eastern end upon the terrace, where a window affords a view of the winter garden towards Dorothy Vernon’s Walk. From the Long Gallery a door leads into the range of buildings enclosing the second quadrangle on its eastern side. These are the anteroom, with Dorothy Vernon’s Steps leading down to the Terrace; the State Bedroom, with its Gobelin tapestry, its strange bas-relief of Orpheus taming the Beasts; its huge bed and ancient hangings, and its mirror called “Queen Elizabeth’s Looking-glass;” the Ancient Stateroom, a chamber coeval with the angle tower; and the little passage-room over the gateway—the original entrance to the castle—whence the winding-stair is reached, leading up to the Peveril Tower, which dominates the whole range of buildings. From this elevation the visitor sees the two courtyards below him, with the woods and terraces, and the upper and lower gardens on the south side, as well as the way leading down to the footbridge over the Wye, and a fine prospect of the winding vale of that river, and of many a distant hill.

Having thus before us the general plan of the buildings of Haddon Hall, we may proceed to consider the historical, legendary, and other considerations to which the venerable edifice very naturally leads us. There have been those who have chosen to see, in the lower parts of its construction, the evidences of Saxon work, and, indeed, very likely Haddon was a location in Saxon times. However, that may be, we find it mentioned in Domesday Book as a berewick of the Manor of Bakewell, and the first possessor of whom we have authentic knowledge was that same William Peveril, a natural son of the Conqueror, to whom he granted “Peveril’s Place in the Peke,” and who also had custody of the Manor of Chatsworth. Thus, at this very early period, we find Haddon associated in ownership with two of the most interesting places in the Peak district. The Peverils did not long enjoy their possessions, for William Peveril, probably a grandson of the first possessor, having, it was alleged, poisoned Ranulph, Earl of Chester, who supported Matilda, took to ignominious flight in order to avoid punishment, and his possessions fell to Henry II. It is possible that some parts of the foundations of Haddon belong to the time of the Peverils, but, at any rate, the memory of their association with it is preserved in the name of the north-eastern tower. At the date of their fall, Haddon—or, to speak more precisely, Nether Haddon, for Over Haddon lies some two miles away on the hills—was held by William de Avenell in knight’s-service, and the King thus became direct lord of his fee. Towards the close of the Twelfth Century, Haddon came to the Vernons by the marriage of Richard de Vernon with Avicia, a daughter and one of the co-heiresses of William de Avenell, the other being married to Sir Simon Bassett. This Richard de Vernon was descended from the Barons of Shipbroke, the first of whom, William de Vernon, came over with the Conqueror, and received his barony at the hands of Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester. The Vernon name is derived from the Lordship which the family held in what is now the Department of the Eure and Arrondissement of Evreux.

We now reach the celebrated episode of Dorothy Vernon, upon which the fate of Haddon hung and which has lent the glamour of romance to the scenes in which she moved. Sir George Vernon, her father, the last heir male of the Haddon line, was twice married, and his effigy now lies in Bakewell Church, with those of his two wives, Margaret, daughter of Sir Gilbert Tayleboys, and Maude, daughter of Sir Ralph Langford. Of his two daughters, Margaret, the elder, was married to Sir Thomas Stanley of Winwick, in Lancashire, son of the third Earl of Derby; and Dorothy, the younger—who ultimately became sole heiress—to John Manners, the second son of Sir Thomas Manners, first Earl of Rutland. It is not easy to say at this date what could have been the strong objection which the “King of the Peak” is averred to have had to his daughter’s marriage with John Manners, whose father was of high descent, and died, covered with honours, in 1543, having had a royal augmentation granted to his arms, by reason of his descent from Anne Plantagenet, sister of Edward IV. It may, indeed, be that Sir George had planned some great alliance for his daughter, and was ill content with a younger son, or perhaps differences of religion were at the root of his objection, or, we may suppose again, that some personal antipathy, of which there is no record, was felt by the knight to his daughter’s lover. However this may be, tradition tells us that the attachment was a secret one, or, at least, that the meeting of Manners and Dorothy Vernon was under her father’s ban. Legend has grown up about the episodes, and it is related that Manners lingered in the woods of Haddon disguised as a forester or a hunter, gaining speech at times with the lady, and watching the light in her window. As to the actual circumstances of the elopement—if elopement there was, which seems probable—we have tradition alone to guide us. It is said that, on the occasion of certain festivities at the Hall—held, as some aver, in honour of the marriage of her elder sister—Dorothy stole away from the gay scene, ran down to the terrace by the steps from the anteroom which now bear her name, and joined her lover, who had horses waiting near. The pair then mounted, and galloped, as the story goes, all through the night, until they reached Aylston, in Leicestershire, where they were married on the morrow. The memory of Dorothy Vernon will linger long about the tapestried chambers and sweet-scented gardens of Haddon, and whatever there may be of truth or falsehood in the story of her elopement, the visitor who passes down the steps and walks beneath the low-hanging boughs of the yew-trees on the terrace, or is shadowed by the limes and sycamores in Dorothy Vernon’s Walk, where the banks are carpeted with flowers in the spring-time, will do well to cherish this legendary history, which has given an unfailing charm to Haddon. In Bakewell Church, moreover, where both Dorothy and her husband lie buried, he may see her kneeling effigy, and, if her features should strike him as homely, and somewhat unattractive withal, he will bethink him what profound depths of feeling, and what strange capacities for romance, exist unsuspected in the life of every day. It will be of interest here to record the fact that, in the year 1841, when the church of Bakewell was being restored, excavations were made on the site of the monument of John Manners and his wife, and remains believed to be theirs were found in wooden coffins. “The head of the female,” we read, “was still covered with hair, cut short on the forehead, but long behind, extremely friable, remarkably soft, and of a beautiful auburn colour, and in it were found six brass pins.” The wife of John Manners died on Midsummer Day, 1584, but her husband survived many years, and died on the 4th of June, 1611. He continued to reside at Haddon, and showed no lack of interest in the great house that had become his own. There can be no reasonable doubt that the Long Gallery was built by him, and thus one of the chief beauties of the Hall is attributed to its first possessor of the Manners’ name. Both within and without, the three great bays relieve it from all monotony, and the first impression on entering it is of its grandeur and dignity. The Long Gallery or Ball-Room was a customary feature in great houses of Tudor and Stuart times, and may yet be seen in many places—as, for example, in very stately form at Belvoir, and characteristically at Astley Hall, in Lancashire, but nowhere more attractively than at Haddon. There its length is more than one hundred and nine feet, its width eighteen feet, and its height fifteen feet. The heavy steps of solid oak by which it is entered, and the whole flooring of the room are said to have been cut from one gigantic oak which grew in the woods. The wainscot is divided by fluted pilasters into panels, which have arched tops, and, above, the boar’s-head crest of the Vernons, and the Manners’ peacock, with roses and thistles, are alternated. In the windows also there is blazonry of the arms of Rutland and Shrewsbury, with the royal shield of England; and over the mantel hangs a very remarkable picture, representing Thomyris, Queen of the Massagetae, victorious over Cyrus, whose head is being presented to her.

The subsequent relation of the Manners family with Haddon Hall need not occupy us very long, for the building itself was completed, and the addition of the terraces and some features of the gardens left it as we see it now, save that its chambers were not yet bare. John, the eighth Earl, who lived at Belvoir and Haddon alternately, espoused the cause of the Parliament, and took the Solemn League and Covenant. Belvoir Castle was captured by the Royalists, and suffered sadly in the subsequent troubles, the Earl meanwhile living mostly at Haddon, where his magnificence, it would seem, rivalled that of the “King of the Peak.” He shared in the Restoration; and, as we read in Lysons, between 1660 and 1670, although the family were then living mostly at Belvoir, there was a prodigious consumption of beeves and sheep at Haddon, and particularly that an open Christmas was held there in 1663, when, as appears by the bailiff’s charges, outlay was made for much work in the kitchen, and for pipers and dancers to make the guests merry withal. John, the ninth Earl, was created Marquis of Granby and Duke of Rutland by Queen Anne, and was succeeded, upon his death at Belvoir in 1711, by his son John, the second Duke, who died in 1721, and he again by his son, also named John, the third Duke, who lived occasionally at Haddon. It was, however, during his lifetime that the family finally quitted their ancient home by the Wye, and the Hall was dismantled about the year 1740. Yet, ever since that time, the successive Dukes of Rutland have safeguarded the venerable edifice, and, without attempting restoration, by structural supports and careful watching, have preserved it from decay. It is to them that the public owe the inestimable privilege of being allowed to linger within the time-worn walls and chambers, which, besides being of abounding interest in themselves, awaken so many delightful memories of history and romance.

When the Hall ceased to be a place of residence not all its adornments were removed. The tapestry deserves special attention, there being, in several of the rooms, some fine remains of Gobelins and other work. The graceful drawing-room is partially hung with it, as was customary, in such manner as to conceal the entrance to the Earl’s dressing-room, and there are curious iron hooks for holding it back. The Earl’s bedroom itself is tapestried with representations of the chase. One of the rooms in the western range, as well as several small chambers on the north side, including Dorothy Vernon’s room, and others not usually shown to visitors, contain much good work of Flemish and French manufacture. In addition to the large picture in the Long Gallery, and the portraits in the dining-room which have been alluded to, there are many paintings in various parts of the house. A number of them are in the anteroom leading from the Long Gallery, including portraits of Queen Elizabeth and Charles I. There is a portrait, also, in the drawing-room, of the sixth Earl of Rutland, who died in 1632, and several of less importance are in the great hall. Many of the pictures are Italian, and little seems to be known about them; but they are thought to have been brought or sent to England by Sir Oliver Manners, a younger brother of Dorothy’s husband.

The visitor to Haddon will notice some other objects of curiosity and interest, and he will do well not to hurry through the vacant rooms, for, if the plan of the house be understood, and something of the several dates of its erection, very much may be learned of the ways, manners, and surroundings of mediæval and Tudor gentlemen. Then, passing down through the pleasant gardens, and recrossing the River Wye, the stranger will look back gratefully upon the grey towers, lighted perchance by the setting sun, and will bear away with him an impression of beauty, grandeur, and romance which surely will never fade.

CATHEDRAL OF PALERMO, ITALY.

CATHEDRAL OF PALERMO
JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

While treating of Palermo, we are bound to think again of the Emperor who inherited from his German father the ambition of the Hohenstauffens and from his Norman mother the fair fields and Oriental traditions of Sicily. The strange history of Frederick—an intellect of the Eighteenth Century born out of date, a cosmopolitan spirit in the age of Saint Louis, the Crusader who conversed with Moslem sages on the threshold of the Holy Sepulchre, the Sultan of Lucera who presented Paterini while he respected the superstition of Saracens, the anointed successor of Charlemagne, who carried his harem with him to the battle-fields of Lombardy, and turned Infidels loose upon the provinces of Christ’s Vicar—would be inexplicable, were it not that Palermo still reveals in all her monuments the genius loci which gave spiritual nurture to this phœnix among kings. From his Mussulman teachers Frederick derived the philosophy to which he gave a vogue in Europe. From his Arabian predecessors he learned the arts of internal administration and finance, which he transmitted to the princes of Italy. In imitation of Oriental courts, he adopted the practice of verse composition, which gave the first impulse to Italian literature. His Grand Vizier, Piero Delle Vigne, set an example to Petrarch, not only by composing the first sonnet in Italian, but also by showing to what height a low-born secretary versed in art and law might rise. In a word, the zeal for liberal studies, the luxury of life, the religious indifferentism, the bureaucratic system of state government, which mark the age of the Italian Renaissance, found their first manifestation within the bosom of the Middle Ages in Frederick. While our King John was signing the Magna Charta, Frederick had already lived long enough to comprehend, at least in outline, what is meant by the spirit of modern culture. It is true that the so-called Renaissance followed slowly and by tortuous paths upon the death of Frederick. The Church obtained a complete victory over his family, and succeeded in extinguishing the civilization of Sicily. Yet the fame of the Emperor who transmitted questions of sceptical philosophy to Arab sages, who conversed familiarly with men of letters, who loved splendour and understood the arts of refined living, survived both long and late in Italy. His power, his wealth, his liberality of soul and lofty aspirations, formed the theme of many a tale and poem. Dante places him in hell among the heresiarchs; and truly the splendour of his supposed infidelity found for him a goodly following. Yet Dante dates the rise of Italian literature from the blooming period of the Sicilian Court. Frederick’s unorthodoxy proved no drawback to his intellectual influence. More than any other man of mediæval times he contributed, if only as the memory of a mighty name, to the progress of civilized humanity.

Let us take leave both of Frederick and of Palermo, that centre of converging influences, which was his cradle, in the cathedral where he lies gathered to his fathers. This church, though its rich sun-browned yellow[7] reminds one of the tone of Spanish buildings, is like nothing one has seen elsewhere. Here even more than at Monreale, the eye is struck with a fusion of styles. The western towers are grouped into something like the clustered sheafs of the Caen churches: the windows present Saracenic arches; the southern porch is covered with foliated incrustations of a late and decorative Gothic style; the exterior of the apse combines Arabic inlaid patterns of black and yellow with the Greek honeysuckle; the western door adds Norman dog-tooth and chevron to the Saracenic billet. Nowhere is any one tradition firmly followed. The whole wavers and yet is beautiful—like the immature eclecticism of the culture which Frederick himself endeavoured to establish in his southern kingdoms. Inside there is no such harmony of blended voices: all the strange tongues, which speak together on the outside, making up a music in which the far North, and ancient Byzance, and the delicate East sound each a note, are hushed. The frigid silence of the Palladian style reigns there—simple indeed and dignified, but lifeless as the century in which it flourished. Yet there, in a side chapel near the western door, stand the porphyry sarcophagi which shrine the bones of the Hautevilles and their representatives. There sleeps King Roger—“Dux Strenuus et primus Rex Siciliæ”—with his daughter Constance in her purple chest beside him. Henry VI. and Frederick II. and Constance of Aragon complete the group, which surpasses for interest all sepulchral monuments—even the tombs of the Scaligers at Verona—except only, perhaps, the statues of the nave of Innsprück. Very sombre and stately are these porphyry resting-places of princes born in the purple, assembled here from lands so distant—from the craggy heights of Hohenstauffen, from the green orchards of Cotentin, from the dry hills of Aragon. They sleep, and the centuries pass by. Rude hands break open the granite lids of their sepulchres, to find tresses of yellow hair and fragments of imperial mantles, embroidered with the hawks and stags the royal hunter loved. The church in which they lie, changes with the change of taste in architecture and the manners of successive ages. But the huge stone arks remain unmoved, guarding their freight of mouldering dust beneath gloomy canopies of stone, that temper the sunlight as it streams from the chapel windows.

FORTRESS AND PALACE OF GWALIOR, INDIA.

THE FORTRESS AND PALACE OF GWALIOR
LOUIS ROUSSELET

The ancient city of Gwalior, which must not be confounded with the modern town of that name, nor with the Mahratta camp of the Scindias, is situated on the summit of a steep and isolated rock, 342 feet in height at the north end, where it is highest, and a mile and a half in length; its greatest breadth is 300 yards. Its position and the exterior appearance of its fortifications, behind which rise numerous monuments, remind one of Chittore, the famous capital of Meywar.

This rock, which is a block of basalt topped with sandstone, stands like a sentinel at the entrance of a valley; and above the slopes at its foot rise pointed cliffs, forming natural ramparts, on which are built the fortifications of the town.

Tradition places the date of the founding of Gwalior several centuries before the Christian era. The attention of the Aryan colonists from the valley of the Chumbul probably was early attracted by the admirable position of this rock. The first to establish themselves here were no doubt the Anchorites, who were sent forth in such numbers by the Indian schools of philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries before the Christian era, as is attested by the numerous caverns, formed by man, in the sides of the rock. In 773, Rajah Sourya Sena completed a system of defence round the plateau by constructing ramparts. The Kâchwas held the fortress until the reign of Tej Pal Doula, who, upon being expelled by the Chohans in 967, founded the dynasty of Ambîr. Sultan Shahab Oudin’s generalissimo, Koutub Eibeck, took it from the Chohans in 1196; and thirty-eight years later it was again taken by the Emperor Altamsh after a long siege. In 1410, the Touar Rajpoots got possession of it, and held it until 1519, when it was finally attached to the crown of Delhi by Ibrahim Lodi. At the dismemberment of the Mogul Empire, it fell alternately into the hands of the Jâts and Mahrattas. In 1779, it was garrisoned by Scindia, from whom it was taken by a British force under Major Popham, and it was again made over to Scindia by the treaty of 1805.

But the vicissitudes of the ancient fortress did not end here. In 1857, the Maharajah Scindia having refused to countenance the revolt, the rebels, under the command of one of Nana Sahib’s captains, took the place; but General Sir Hugh Rose dislodged them by planting his batteries on the surrounding heights, and, for the purpose of protecting the young king from his rebellious subjects, the English kept possession of the plateau.

The present town of Gwalior extends to the north and east of the fortress, being hemmed in between the rock and the river Sawunrika. It was a large and handsome settlement, containing thirty or forty thousand inhabitants; but the founding of a new capital by the Scindias, at a distance of about two miles was a death-blow to its grandeur, the higher branches of trade and the nobility having followed the Court to Lashkar. The architecture of its stone houses is, for the most part, handsome; but the streets are narrow and crooked. It is probable that at one time there was a large suburb round the foot of the ascent leading to the fortress, but it was not until the Sixteenth Century that the town assumed its present proportions. There are no monuments to be found of an earlier date; and the two worthy of remark are the Jummah Musjid, a handsome mosque, flanked by two lofty minarets, and the Hatti Durwaza, or “Gate of the Elephants,” a curious triumphal arch, situated on a mound at the entrance to the town.

The bazaars of Gwalior contain several manufactures peculiar to the place, such as silken fabrics, embroidered in gold, for turbans; saris, or cotton scarfs for women, and curious stuffs in the most brilliant colours. A very fair trade is carried on in these articles.

Two flights of steps, one on the east and the other on the west, lead up to the fortress; of which that on the east is a notable achievement, since it had to be cut out of the solid rock. It is the more ancient of the two; and, although on a very steep incline, it is practicable for horses and elephants.

In order to reach this elevation, you must traverse the whole length of the lower town; and the entrance to it is guarded by an embattled fortification and guard-houses. Hidden among the trees, at a short distance, stands a large palace, the exterior of which is ornamented with bright blue enamel. Five monumental gates, placed at intervals, and still armed with portcullis and heavy iron doors, guard the access to the fortress. From the first, which is a splendid triumphal arch with a Saracenic archway, and surmounted by a tier of small columns, commences the causeway, which, although wide and well kept, is a long and fatiguing ascent; and thence also commences a series of monuments, bas-reliefs, caverns, and cisterns, forming a natural museum of great interest to the archæologist. Even the rocks which overhang the road merit his attention, for they contain numerous chambers, altars and statues, which are reached by narrow paths, requiring a steady head and a sure and practised foot.

Between the third and fourth gate are some huge tanks, excavated out of the solid rock, and fed by springs. The capitals of the pillars which support the ceiling appear above the water, and one can scarcely distinguish the bottom in the obscurity. Near these tanks the surface of the rock, which has been made smooth and even, is covered with numerous bas-reliefs; one of the largest of which, representing an elephant and rider, still is easily distinguishable in spite of considerable mutilation; and further on is a head of Siva.

Opposite the fourth gate is a small monolith of great antiquity, supposed to date from the Fifteenth Century. It is a temple cut out of a single block of stone, and consists of a small square room, entered by a peristyle and crowned with a pyramidal spire. The upper portion of the latter, having been destroyed, has been replaced by a small dome in stonework; and a few sculptures surround the entrance to the sanctuary and the altar.

On the summit of the hill stands King Pal, which springs from the very brink of the precipice. It is supported by six towers, and pierced by only a few large windows ornamented with balconies and pilasters. Sculptured bands, Jaïn arches, and indented cordons relieve the monotony of the massive exterior, and give it a peculiarly light and graceful appearance. The spaces between the Jaïn arches of the gallery are filled in and covered with mosaics in enamelled bricks, representing palm-trees on a blue ground; and each tower is surmounted by a lantern with a double row of columns. It is difficult to imagine a grander or more harmonious effect than that produced by this gigantic edifice, combining rampart and palace in one.

At the south angle of the palace is a gateway, which gives access to the interior of the fortress, and through which you enter a narrow street that overlooks the lateral frontage of the palace. This is built on the same plan as the exterior, but here the stone is completely hidden by enamel. Bands of mosaics, representing candelabra, Brahma ducks, elephants and peacocks in blue, rose-colour, green and gold, give this immense blank wall an incomparably beautiful appearance. The bricks of which these mosaics are composed still retain their primitive brilliancy of colour and delicacy of shading, though ten centuries have passed over them. I know of no country in the world where an architect has succeeded so well in giving a graceful appearance to a heavy blank wall.

The exact date of the construction of these facings is unknown, though it is certain that they were the work of a Rajpoot prince of the name of Pal; but, as several Chandela and Kâchwa chiefs bore this name, it is difficult to fix the date more precisely than between the Eighth and Ninth Centuries.

The palace of the kings of Gwalior covers an immense area on the east of the plateau; but it was not the work of a single prince; the most ancient portions of it date back to the Sixteenth Century. Each dynasty enlarged the mass of buildings, and the Moguls themselves made considerable additions to it. The interior of the Palace of Pal is extremely simple in style. The various stories, which you enter through rows of square pillars, overlook the large paved courts; and the rooms are low with flat ceilings.

Among these ruins a portion of the ancient palace of the Vaïshnava kings may still be seen. The thick walls, pierced with triangular openings, are somewhat in the same style as the corridors of the Mexican temples. It is to be regretted that so much of this part of the Palace has already been destroyed.

The northern extremity of the plateau, which gradually becomes narrower and narrower, was entirely covered by the palaces of the Emperors Akbar and Jehanghir; but you do not find here the magnificent buildings of Agra or of Delhi. It is evident that these were mere provincial residences. There are nevertheless, a graceful dewani-khas and a small zenanah, containing some fine galleries.

THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO, ITALY.

THE HOLY HOUSE OF LORETTO
ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY

On the slope of the eastern Apennines, overlooking the Adriatic gulf, stands what may be called (according to the belief of the Roman Catholic Church) the European Nazareth. Fortified as if by the bastions of a huge castle, against the approach of Saracenic pirates, a vast church, even now gorgeous with the offerings of the faithful, contains the “Santa Casa,” the “Holy House,” in which the Virgin lived, and (as is attested by the same inscription as that at Nazareth) received the Angel Gabriel. Every one knows the story of the House of Loretto. The devotion of one-half the world, and the ridicule of the other half, has made us all acquainted with the strange story, written in all the languages[8] of Europe round the walls of that remarkable sanctuary: how the house of Nazareth was, in the close of the Thirteenth Century, conveyed by angels, first to the heights above Fiume, at the head of the Adriatic gulf, then to the plain and lastly to the hill, of Loretto. But this “wondrous flitting” of the Holy House is not the feature in its history which is most present to the pilgrims who frequent it. It is regarded by them simply as an actual fragment of the Holy Land, sacred as the very spot on which the mystery of the Incarnation was announced and begun. In proportion to the sincerity and extent of this belief is the veneration which attaches to what is undoubtedly the most frequented sanctuary of Christendom. The devotion of pilgrims even on week-days exceeds anything that is seen at any of the holy places in Palestine, if we except the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Easter.

Before the dawn of day the worship begins. Whilst it is yet dark, the doors are opened—a few lights round the sacred spot break the gloom, and disclose the kneeling Capuchins, who have been here throughout the night. Two soldiers, sword in hand, take their place by the entrance of the “House,” to guard against all injury. One of the hundred priests who are in daily attendance immediately begins mass at the high altar of the church, the first of a hundred and twenty that are repeated daily within its precincts. The “Santa Casa” itself is then opened and lighted, the pilgrims flock in; and, from that hour till sunset, come and go in a perpetual stream. The “House” is thronged with kneeling or prostrate figures, the pavement round it is deeply worn with the passage of pilgrims, who, from the humblest peasant of the Abruzzi up to the King of Naples, crawl round it on their knees; the nave is filled with the bands of worshippers, who, having visited the sacred spot, are retiring backwards from it, as from some royal presence.

On the “Santa Casa” alone depends the sacredness of the whole locality in which it stands. Loretto—whether the name is derived from the sacred grove (Lauretum) or the lady (Loreta) under whose shelter the house is believed to have descended—had no existence before the rise of this extraordinary sanctuary. The long street with its venders of rosaries, the palace of the governor, the strong walls built by Pope Sixtus IV., are all mere appendages to the humble edifice which stands within the Church. The “Santa Casa” is spoken of by them as a living person, a corporation sole on which the whole city depends, to which the whole property far and near over the rich plain which lies spread beneath it belongs forever.

No one who has ever witnessed the devotion of the Italian people on this singular spot, can wish to speak lightly of the feelings which it inspires. But a dispassionate statement of the real facts of the case may not be without use. Into the general question of the story we need not enter here. It has been ably proved elsewhere,[9] first, that of all the pilgrims who record their visit to Nazareth from the Fourth to the Sixteenth Century, not one alludes to any house of Joseph as standing there, or as having stood there, within human memory or record; secondly, that the records of Italy contain no mention of the House till the Fifteenth Century; thirdly, that the representation of the story as it now stands, with the double or triple transplantation of the sanctuary, occurs first in a bull of Leo X., in the year 1518. But it is the object of these remarks simply to confront the House as it stands at Loretto with the House as it appears at Nazareth. It has been already said that each professes to contain the exact spot of the Angelic visitation, to be the scene of a single event which can only have happened in one; each claims to be the very House of the Annunciation, and bases its claim to sanctity on that especial ground. But this is not all: even should either consent to surrender something of this peculiar sacredness, yet no one can visit both sanctuaries without perceiving that by no possibility can one be amalgamated with the other. The House of Loretto is an edifice of thirty-six feet by seventeen; its walls, though externally cased in marble, can be seen in their original state from the inside, and these appear to be of a dark red polished stone. The west wall has one square window, through which it is said the Angel flew; the east wall contains a rude chimney, in front of which is a mass of cemented stone, said to be the altar on which St. Peter said mass, when the Apostles, after the Ascension, turned the house into a church. On the north side is (or rather was) a door, now walled up. The monks of Loretto and of Nazareth have but a dim knowledge of the sacred localities of each other. Still, the monks of Nazareth could not be altogether ignorant of the mighty sanctuary which, under the highest authorities of their Church, professes to have once rested on the ground they now occupy. They show, therefore, to any traveller who takes the pains to inquire, the space on which the Holy House stood before its flight. That space is a vestibule immediately in front of the sacred grotto; and an attempt is made to unite the two localities by supposing that there were openings from the house into the grotto. Without laying any stress on the obvious variation of measurements, the position of the grotto is, and must always have been incompatible with any such adjacent building as that at Loretto. Whichever way the house is supposed to abut on the rock, it is obvious that such a house as has been described, would have closed up, with blank walls, the very passages by which alone the communication could be effected. And it may be added, that there is no traditional masonry of the “Santa Casa” left at Nazareth, there is the traditional masonry close by of the so-called workshop of Joseph of an entirely different character. Whilst the former is of a kind wholly unlike anything in Palestine, the latter is, as might be expected, of the natural grey limestone of the country, of which in all times, no doubt, the houses of Nazareth were built.

It may have seemed superfluous labour to have attempted any detailed refutation of the most incredible of Ecclesiastical legends. But Loretto is so emphatically the “Holy Place” of one large branch of Christendom—its claim has been so strongly maintained by French and Italian writers of our own times—and is, moreover, so deeply connected with the alleged authority of the Papal See—that an interest attaches to it far beyond its intrinsic importance. No facts are insignificant which bring to an issue the general value of local religion—or the assumption of any particular Church to direct the conscience of the world—or the amount of liberty within such a Church left on questions which concern the faith and practice of thousands of its members.

But the legend is also curious as an illustration of the history of “Holy Places” generally. It is difficult to say how it originated—or what led to the special selection of the Adriatic gulf as the scene of such a fable; yet, generally speaking, the explanation is easy and instructive. Nazareth was taken by Sultan Khalil in 1291, when he stormed the last refuge of the Crusaders in the neighbouring city of Acre. From that time, not Nazareth only, but the whole of Palestine, was closed to the devotions of Europe. The Crusaders were expelled from Asia, and in Europe the spirit of the Crusades was extinct. But the natural longing to see the scenes of the events of the Sacred History—the superstitious craving to win for prayer the favour of consecrated localities—did not expire with the Crusades. Can we wonder that, under such circumstances, there should have arisen the feeling, the desire, the belief, that if Mahomet could not go to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mahomet? The House of Loretto is the petrifaction, so to speak, of the “Last Sigh of the Crusades”; suggested possibly by the Holy House of St. Francis at Assisi, then first acquiring its European celebrity. It is indeed not a matter of conjecture that in Italy—the country where the passionate temperament of the people would most need such stimulants—persons in this state of mind did actually endeavour, so far as circumstances permitted, to reproduce the scenes of Palestine within their own immediate neighbourhood. One such is the Campo Santo of Pisa—“the Holy Field,” as this is “the Holy House”—literally a cargo of sacred earth from the Valley of Hinnom, carried, as is well known, not on the wings of angels, but in the ships of the Pisan Crusaders. Another example is the remarkable Church of St. Stephen’s at Bologna, within whose walls are crowded together various chapels and courts, representing not only, as in the actual Church of the Sepulchre, the several scenes of the Crucifixion, but the Trial and Passion also; and which is entitled, in a long inscription affixed to its cloister, the “Sancta Sanctorum”; nay, literally, “the Jerusalem” of Italy. A third still more curious instance may be seen at Varallo, in the kingdom of Piedmont. Bernardino Caimo, returning from a pilgrimage to Palestine at the close of the Fifteenth Century, resolved to select the spot in Lombardy most resembling the Holy Land, in order to give his countrymen the advantage of praying at the Holy Place without undergoing the privations which he had suffered himself. Accordingly, in one of the beautiful valleys leading down from the roots of Monte Rosa, he chose (it must be confessed that the resemblance is of the slightest kind) three hills, which should represent respectively Tabor, Olivet, and Calvary; and two mountain-streams, which should in like manner personate the Kedron and Jordan. Of these the central hill, Calvary, became the “Holy Place” of Lombardy. It was frequented by S. Carlo Barromeo; under his auspices the whole mountain was studded with chapels, in which the scenes of the Passion are represented in waxen figures of the size of life; and the whole country round now sends its peasants by thousands as pilgrims to the sacred spot. We have only to suppose these feelings existing as they naturally would exist in a more fervid state two centuries earlier, when the loss of Palestine was more keenly felt—when the capture of Nazareth especially was fresh in every one’s mind—and we can easily imagine that the same tendency, which by deliberate purpose produced a second Jerusalem at Bologna and a second Palestine at Varallo, would, on the secluded shores of the Adriatic, by some peasant’s dream, or the return of some Croatian chief from the last Crusade, or the story of some Eastern voyager landing on their coasts, produce a second Nazareth at Fiume and Loretto. What, in a more poetical and ignorant age was in the case of the Holy House ascribed to the hands of angels, was actually intended by Sixtus V. to have been literally accomplished in the case of the Holy Sepulchre by a treaty with the Sublime Porte for transferring it bodily to Rome, so that Italy might then have the glory of possessing the actual sites of the conception, the birth, and the burial of our Saviour.

THE ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE
EDMUNDO DE AMICIS

The Alcazar, an old palace of the Moorish kings, is one of the best preserved buildings in Spain. From the outside, it looks like a fortress, as it is completely surrounded by high walls, battlemented towers and old houses, which structures form two spacious courts in front of the façade. Like the other parts of this building, the façade is plain and severe. The door is ornamented with arabesques that are painted and gilded, and there is also a Gothic inscription recording the time when the Alcazar was restored by the order of the king Don Pedro.

In fact, although the Alcazar is an Arabian palace, it is the work of Christian rather than Arabian monarchs. The date that it was begun is not known, but it was rebuilt towards the end of the Twelfth Century by King Abdelasio. King Ferdinand took possession of it about the middle of the Thirteenth Century; it was altered again by Don Pedro in the next century, since when it was inhabited by nearly all the kings of Castile. Finally it was chosen by Charles V. for the celebration of his marriage with the Infanta of Portugal.

The Alcazar has witnessed the loves and crimes of three races of kings, and every one of its stones awakens some memory or holds some secret. After entering, you cross two or three rooms, in which there is nothing Arabian left except the ceiling and some mosaics upon the walls, and find yourself in a court that strikes you dumb with wonder. A gallery composed of elegant arches supported by small marble columns arranged in pairs runs along the four sides. The arches, walls, windows and doors are covered with mosaics, carvings and arabesques. The latter are delicate and intricate, in some places perforated like a veil, in others thick and close as woven carpets and elsewhere again hanging and jutting out like garlands and bunches of flowers. With the exception of the brilliantly coloured decorations everything is as white, clean and glistening as ivory. Four large doors, one in each side, lead into the royal rooms. Here you no longer wonder; you are enchanted. Every thing that the most ardent fancy could imagine in the way of wealth and splendour is to be found in these rooms. From the ceiling to the floor, around the doors, around the windows in the distant recesses, wherever the eye may please to wander, such a multitude of gold ornaments and precious stones, such a close network of arabesques and inscriptions, such a marvellous blending of designs and colours appear that, before you have gone twenty steps, you are overpowered and confused, and you glance here and there as if trying to find a piece of bare wall upon which to rest your eye.

THE ALCAZAR OF SEVILLE, SPAIN.

In one of the rooms, the custodian pointed out a reddish spot upon the marble pavement, and said very solemnly:

This is the stain caused by the blood of Don Fadrique, Grand Master of the Order of Santiago, who was killed here in the year 1358, by the order of the King Don Pedro, his brother.

When I heard this, I remember looking at the custodian as if to say: “Let us move on,” and the good man answered dryly:

“Caballero, if I were to tell you to believe this on my word you would be perfectly right to doubt it; but when you see the thing with your own eyes, it seems to me—I may be mistaken,—but——”

“Yes,” I hastily replied, “yes it is blood, I have no doubt of it; but don’t let us talk about it any more.”

Even if you are able to joke about a spot of blood, you cannot do so about the story of the crime. The place awoke in my mind all the most horrible facts. I seemed to hear Don Fadrique’s step echoing through these gilded rooms, as he was being pursued by the soldiers armed with clubs. The palace is shrouded in darkness; no noises are heard but those of the executioners and their victim. Don Fadrique tries to enter the court. Lopez de Padilla seizes him and he breaks away. Now he is in the court; he grasps his sword; he utters maledictions upon it for the cross of the hilt is entangled in the mantle of the Order of Santiago. Now the archers arrive; he cannot draw it from its sheath; he flies hither and thither as best he may. Fernandez de Roa overtakes him and fells him with a blow from his mace; the others approach and wound him and he expires in a pool of blood.

This sad memory soon vanishes amidst the thousand fancies of the delicious life of the Moorish kings. These lovely little windows at which the dreamy face of an Odalisk ought to appear at any moment; these secret doors before which you pause, despite yourself, as if you heard the rustling of a dress; these sleeping-rooms of princes enveloped in a mysterious gloom, where you fancy you hear the sighing of girls who lost in them their virginal purity; and the prodigious variety of colours and friezes resembling an ever-changing symphony excite your senses to such a degree that you are like one in a dream. The delicate and very light architecture, the little columns (which suggest the arms of a woman), the capricious arches, and the ceilings covered with ornaments that hang in the form of stalactites, icicles, and bunches of grapes,—all rouse in you the desire to seat yourself in the centre of one of these rooms, pressing to your heart a beautiful dark Andalusian head which will make you forget the world and lose all sense of time, and with one long kiss that drinks away your life, put you to sleep forever.