HE RAILWAY COMPANY'S TOUEIST-GUIDE TO! | THE CONTINENT. I B y P E R C Y LIJST D L E Y. With Illustrations by Birket Foster, J. Temple, Alfred Bryan, &c., A MAP. LONDON: TBLISHED FOR THE GREAT EASTERN RAILWAY COMPANY AT 125, FLEET STREET. — i_ Ak7^1 NTRODUCTIOM. In the modest compass of this 'Guide' no attempt lias been made to embody the minute first - to - the - right - and - second - to - the - left detail of the German * Baedeker/ or the historical amplitude of the insular 'Murray,' or the Scotch dulness of the blue-bound 'Black/. It has been prepared for the especial use of those seeking ji-est or recreation by the Harwich route to the Continent. It describes only the most interesting of the many routes in connection with the Great Eastern Railway. It may prove acceptable to the touri»c in guiding him as to the 'way he shall go' summer or autumn. And on his return again to 'the leagues lights, and the roaring of the wheels,' he may, perhaps, find in these simple pen and pencil sketches sufficient to recall some sunny memories and breezy recollections, which to many are as pleasing as were the sunny days themselves, spent amidst new scenes and strange people. The compiler is indebted for the chapter on North Holland to Mr. Thomas Purnell. ILLUSTEATED BOOKS OF TEAVEL. Imperial 8vo., 8s. each, elegantly bound, gilt edges. 1. French Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Rev. Samuel G. Gbeen, d.d. With upwards of 150 fine Engravings. '* One of the most sumptuous of Gift Books. The perfection of Wood Engraving &nd Descriptive Letterpress."—Court Journal. 2. English Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the, Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d., and the Bev. S. G. Green, d.d. With Coloured Frontispiece and Numerous Wood Engravings. "Next to seeing the beautiful places of the earth comes the delight of reading of them; and many a one who is doomed to begin and end his days within a * cribbed, cabined, and confined' circle can roam, guided by such a book, at the will of fancy, through sunny glades, by babbling streams, or over the breezy moorlands."—Times. 3. Swiss Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d. With Numerous Illustrations by Whympee and others. "In this third edition there are so many additions and improvements that this beautiful volume is still more attractive and beautiful than ever.' '—Standard. 4. Italian Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d. Profusely Illustrated. "The more we turn over the pages of this book the more we like it. Italy is the theme of a great deal of fine writing and fine painting, but the plain descrip- tions and accurate drawings here really tell us more about it than a library of inspired poems and a gallery of ideal paintings."—Times. 5. American Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d. Profusely Illustrated in the best style of Wood Engravings by eminent English and Foreign Artists. "Copiously and cleverly illustrated, and pleasantly written."—Daily News. G. "Those Holy Fields." Palestine Illustrated by Pen and Pencil. By the Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d. With Numerous Engravings. The work is executed with great ability; but the great charm of the book is the illustrations. Very simple, but executed with extreme fidelity, and a thoroughly artistic feeliug."—Graphic. 7. The Land of the Pharaohs. Egypt and Sinai Illustrated by Pen and Pencil. By the Bev., Samuel Manning, ll.d. With Numerous fine Engravings. "Dr. Manning wields a lively and graceful pen. The volume is full of spirited and highly-finisned engravings on wood."—Standard. 8. Spanish Pictures, Drawn with Pen and Pencil. By the Bev. Samuel Manning, ll.d. With Illustrations by Gustave I)or6, and other Eminent Artists. ** The letterpress is pleasant reading, and many of the sketches are of the highest excellence."—Times. THE BELIGIOUS TBACT SOCIETY. London: 56, Paternoster Bow; 65, St. Paul's Churchyard; and 164, Piccadilly, and of all Booksellers. All Buyers of Boohs for Presentation should apply for tke Societys Illustrated Catalogue, which will be forivarded, pmt-free, on application. €tA Rose by any other name would smell as sweet" But there is no other Preparation so sweet and sweeting for the Teeth,. Breath, Gums, and Mouth as CORNELL'S FRAGRANT CARBOLINE (begisteeed), Besides being the Best, most refreshing, and safest Liquid. Dentifrice, and Mouth Wash, Thoroughly Cleansing the Teeth, Preventing the accumulation of Tartar, Eradicating Scurvy in the Gums, and removing all un- pleasantness in the mouth and breath arising from Decayed Teeth, Smoking, Savoury Dishes, &c, it is useful for a great variety of purposes. Tourists will find it most invaluable against the bites of all kinds of insects. Testimonial in its favour. "From Charles Page Wood, Esq., J.P., "Scrips, Essex, 2\&t November, 1878. "Mr. C. P. Wood has used the * Fragrant Carholine Wash;' has found it wholesome and most agreeable, and strongly recommends it to everyone'1" Sold in Bottles 1\- & 2j~ each by all the London Patent Medicine Vendors. Neuralgia, Tic-Doloreux, Ague, Brow Ague, Face-ache, Nervous- Head-ache, Nervous and General Debility, effectually relieved and in most cases cured by "CORNELL'S NEURALGIC TINCTURE/' Of great service as a Tonic in General Debility, Nervousness, Rheu- matism, and Weakness left after attacks of Influenza, Colds, &c. Safe to use in all conditions of the System. Testimonial to its value. "Arthur Terrace, u Messrs. Cornell & Cornell, "Ipswich, June 14th, 1879«i "Gentlemen, "It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge the great value oft your 4 Neuralgic Tincture.' I feel that I am in a position to testily to its valuable effects, having recommended it to many of my friends, and im every instance where used it has given relief; really in some cases it a ted more as a charm in relieving pain almost immediately. I was formerly very often troubled with neuralgic pains in the back pa?t of my head and neck, but since using your Tincture these pains have departed, much to the relief of "Yours faithfully, "WILLIAM DAKING." Sold in Bottles & 2j9 each by all the London Patent Medialne Houses*. * T am told, sir, that you are preparing to travel, and that you X begin by Holland,' wrote my Lord Chesterfield in the first of the once famous * Letters to his Son.' The ill-fated son's letters to his father do not appear to have been so remarkable for their wit or wisdom as to have deserved being placed by the side of the elegant effusions of that exquisite nobleman; or we might have possessed the mature reflections of the son, then aged five, on a sea voyage from Harwich to Rotterdam, a hundred and fifty years ago. Oh, those bad old days! How Smollett must have raved, Gold- smith fretted, Richardson fumed, and other of the genus irritabile, who perforce had sometimes to brave the horrors of that journey ;— how they must have cursed those North Sea cockle boats, which carried the mails between the two ports, when they didn't carry them to the bottom. How the fine temper of clever Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was ruffled by the captain of a yacht, who 'pre- tended there was nothing easier than to tide it over, but after two- days' slow moving, the wind blew so hard that none of the sailors, could keep their feet, and,' she writes, * we were tossed all Sunday night very handsomely;' adding, with womanly satisfaction, 'I never saw a man more frightened than the captain.' How Dutch King William and the German Georges, who by this route made- frequent journeys to and fro, must have blessed England for being am island; as indeed other monarchs and dictators have been known to before and since. How different the way we travel now. What changes since George was king! The Rhine is nearer London to-day than was. Ramsgate forty years ago ; the Italian lakes are easier to reach than were the Cumberland lakes in Wordsworth's time. The recollections- of the one grande tour had to suffice a life-time two generations ago- Kow they are refreshed by a plus grande tour every season. Of t3ie many routes to the Continent, the Harwich route of the Great Eastern Railway Company specially recommends itself to the- travelling public. To Holland, Belgium, Germany, and the Rhine, it is the cheapest and most direct of all the first-class routes. To> Berlin the journey is travelled almost in a straight line. The Com- pany's steamers are the finest passenger boats running between 8 THE EOUTE. England and the opposite coasts. The shallow ports of France and South Belgium limit the steamers used in the South Coast routes to vessels of small tonnage and light draught. The ports of Harwich, -Rotterdam, and Antwerp will take ships drawing fourteen feet of water at all states of the tide. The comparison in favour of the Crreat Eastern route is clear. It has been taken advantage of to the full. The two latest additions to the Company's fleet are magnificent vessels,* in speed, comfort, and completeness of fitting, equal to the finest passenger vessel afloat—a Cunard Atlantic 'liner.' From the time of departure from the spacious new terminus at Liverpool Street until the passenger's arrival at Rotterdam or Antwerp he will find little to criticise. The Continental express runs to Harwich without stopping; there the boat, with steam up, is literally panting to be off. You have dined at your ease in town, you sup cosily on board in Harwich harbour, and you breakfast com- fortably on the placid waters of the Maas or the Scheldt. To save travellers, especially tourists, the constant worry and trouble of booking from place to place, the Great Eastern Company issue through tickets over the chief continental lines, and they have arranged a variety of attractive and comprehensive circular tours, which, with the cost and the length of time they are spread over, will be found in the Company's Penny Continental Time Booh. * The Company propose adding1 this year another new and powerful boat to the following vessels, forming their compact and efficient fleet. They are con- structing extensive works at Ray Island, close to Harwich, comprising a new station, quays, warehouses, customs' offices, &c, which, when complete, will afford ample accommodation both for their own vessels and for those of other lines. The Company's spacious and comfortable Hotel at Harwich invites the traveller to break his homeward journey at that bracing little watering place. Vessels' Name. "Princess of Wales" "Claud Hamilton" "Richard Young" "Avalon" "Zealous" "Rotterdam"......... "Harwich" "Pacific" Tonnage. 8? 1878 1875 I 1871 1865 1864 1864 1864 1864 962 717 670 613 756 749 575 a> s 1*1 W 647 565 405 488 454 556 549 514 400 350 220 240 220 220 220 175 »S CD W 1,800 1,596 950 1,000 950 1,060 980 70} Passenger Capacity. 264 225 212 8« I 92 I 200 |Tead-a-ay!' cries a hoarse voice from the bridge of the steamer. kJ 'Steady!' shrilly shouts the 'watch,' passing the order amid- ships. 1 Stead-a-ay!' sings back the helmsman, suiting action to* word and steering for a broken line of white surf, dimly seen through the half-lifted morning mist. Passengers, singly or by twos and threes, are straggling on deck. Fresh from cosy berths they regard with pity the few who, still swathed in rugs, had found sufficient attraction in the inconstant moon to 'keep watch' all night. The sleepers, chirpy and in the best of temper, are inclined to talk. The watchers, desperately tired and not in the best of temper, are inclined to nod. Sleepers, curious and loquacious, blissfully ignorant of where they are, want to know. Watchers, taciturn and curt, want to sleep. 'By Jove, look there!' cries the last arrival on deck. Eyes are turned and glasses levelled*in the direction indicated by the speaker, who nourishes his binocular and looks excited. 'A reef, isn't it?' he inquires, addressing one of the be-ruggedr and pointing to the distant line of broken water. 'No, sir, it is not a reef,' in a distinctly uncommunicative tone. 4 Oh! a sand-bank perhaps?' interrogatively. 6 No, sir, it is not a sand-bank,' viciously. 'Dear me,' exclaims the questioner, turning pale, 'then perhaps it's—it's—?' discern nothing on the horizon but a big, blood-red spot, and bank* of grey cloud barred and necked with crimson. 10 HOLLAND. Meanwhile, the good ship of the Great Eastern Company's fleet is apparently making for that thin white line with all convenient speed. The haze clears a little as the red blot spreads and glows, and the crimson light is reflected from cloud to cloud, and is again reflected from the water. Clears more as the blot bursts suddenly into a flood of flame that deluges the broad expanse of sea and sky with its warm, generous light. Its effect is magical. The be-rugged watchers throw away their wraps, tiny feet are tripping up the cabin steps, and the unsettled possessor of the binocular forgets to wonder over the invisible country with an imperceptible coast-line. Only one obstinate little cloud of mist which the bright sunbeams fail to pierce or scatter, still hangs sullenly upon the water. * Sta-a-arb'd!' cries the hoarse voice from the bridge. 1 Sta-a-arb'd!' sings the helmsman, and towards this patch of haze the course is altered. A sudden lurch, then a pitch, then a roll. 'Good gracious! what's'—another lurch and a heavier roll— * what's that?' cries a plaintive voice. 'Oh! there's mostways a bit of a swell on the bar,' replies a tar who is taking soundings. 4 Nothing to be afeard on. It won't last.' It doesn't last. Hardly has the awful oscillation commenced ere it ceases. Everybody laughs, and nobody would have minded had it rolled more—oh, much more! Then someone notices that the trans- parent green of the water has changed. to a muddy brown, and that where the approaching mist rests there is a break in the surf. Then amidst a flutter of excite- ment the puzzled owner of the binocular announces 'land.' And at last, stretching on either hand, a flat, shallow, shingly strand, with occasional incipient sand-hills, can be made out. In the haze, too, where the line of foam is broken, can be traced the mouth of a river. On one side juts a ragged ridge of sand forming a breakwater. By it, a clump of wooden huts, which look piratical, but turn out to be the coast-guard. On the opposite bank another spit of land, and the shadowy outline of a windmill. With its huge arms swaying1 . HOLLAND. 11 slowly round, it looks, in its big, unwieldly bulk, like a floundering giant taking an early swimming-lesson. The river entered, the scene is changed; but not much. For the wide waste of water, a waste of pasture as wide, as boundless, and as green. We know that this teas ocean once, and may and can be at the will of man again. Dead flat banks, fringed with waving grass, and sparsely dotted with stunted trees. Then a windmill or two. Then a stork, solemnly balancing himself on one leg, and gravely contemplating the airy prospect around him. Then more flat banks with waving grass THE MAAS, ABOVE EOTTEEDAM. more stunted trees, more windmills, and more storks. At last a cluster of trim cottages, with prim hedgerows and precisely cut trees, whereof the respective trunks, stems, and walls are coloured sky-blue, edged with white. The cattle grazing near look as if they, too, have been painted, for they are black and white to a cow. Away, on the right hand, under the shadow of that square church tower, nestles a town—quaint, famous, and fortified Beielle ; famous as the first town wrested by siege in the name of William of Orange, the saviour of Holland, from the bloody yoke of the Spaniards; famous as being held by England in the days of good^ Queen Bess; T2 BOTTEEDAM. famous as the birthplace of those redoubtable sea-dogs, Van Tromp ;astdDeWitt. Steaming along gaily now in bright sunshine, with the bluest of «Mes above and the greenest of landscapes beneath. On, past Vlaak- dingen, with its little fleet of round, brown tubby boats, the seat of the Dutch herring fishery. On, past other neat and trim houses and villages, and on, past a broad canal that leads to Schiedam, whence, from its two hundred and odd distilleries, comes the famous cordial which takes its name from the place. A sharp point in the river is rounded, the quiet pastoral sur- roundings cease, and in their place the hum and movement of a l^reat city. A vision of trees, tall and overshadowing the water's -edge, of gabled houses still taller overshadowing them, of these again topped by spires and sails and masts, of windmills in the •distance, and steamers in the foreground slowly threading their way through a multitude of strangely-shaped boats- and barges, mnfolds itself. On board, officers and men are alert; passengers deeply interested in the prospect and their baggage. The steam whistle blows a last mournful blast, and the good ship is lying quietly alongside the Great Eastern Company's landing stage within a few minutes of the hour she is timed to arrive from Harwich. A minute or two more and you are standing safely upon the straight, shady world-renowned Boompjes of EOT TEED AM. "Rotterdam, although the second city of Holland, and containing snore than 122,000 souls, is not a city of 'sights.' It boasts few buildings of artistic beauty or historic interest. Its picture gallery is insignificant; its great Church, with the famous organ, unattractive. The 'sights' of Rotterdam must be sought in its streets, along its canals, among its people. The best and most delightful way to see these is to wander forth in whatsoever direc- tion fancy leads you, and, when having observed as much of Dutch domestic architecture and customs as you care for, and having hope- lessly lost yourself into the bargain, to summon the first cab (called vigilant and pronounced feshelant), and be driven to your hotel again. Guides in perambulations of this sort are intolerable. As a city, Rotterdam is more picturesque than Venice, less picturesque than Amsterdam. And Dutch picturesqueness is the cleanest in the world, as Italian—well, is not. In wandering for , the first time through Dutch streets, with their straight rows of EOTTEEDAJC. 13 Mgh, thin, red-bricked, sometimes slanting, always gabled, narrow- windowed, and brightly-painted houses on one side, and rows of trees fringing canals, clear and cool, upon the other, you may, perhaps, feel a twinge of disappointment. There is something wanting. To complete the picture, a big, burly, solid, stolid figure, puffing slowly from a great pipe, waddling lazily along, or regarding passers-by with a heavy stare from the casement, is looked for. Where is Mynheer Van Dunck, who drinks brandy and water gaily, quenching his thirst with a quart of the first to a pint of the latter daily? Where, in a word, is the worthy Dutchman familiar in print and in picture? Alas! he is a creature of fiction. The typical Hollander must be» sought elsewhere than in Holland. Your Dutchman of fact is a suave, slight, sleek little man, neither picturesque nor phlegmatic, but shrewd, and with an eye keen to business. Mark him as he watches the rich freight of spices from the Indies brought in his own ship, per- chance from his own plantation, to the very door of his own ware- house. This in the heart of the town, too, and the vessel of a goodly number of tons burden. What wonder he blesses the hour he was born a putchman? To-night, perhaps, he may be persuaded to take one, just one, glass of schnapps, but brandy and water gaily— necn mynheer! The countless canals, crossed by numberless drawbridges, are crammed with craft. You know at a glance those which are Dutch handiwork. They are so substantial, so square, and so clean. Not that all of them carry merchandise. It is the fashion here, among many families of modest means, to take unto themselves a barge; to live in it, to work in it, to move from place to place during all the days of their life in it, and finally to close this earthly, or watery, career, by dying in it. The amount of soap and paint expended by these water-gipsies upon their floating homes is marvellous; the pride they take in the little garden of potted plants adorning the scrubbed and spotless deck is prodigious, and their simple customs and life are, as far as you can catch a glimpse of them, delightful. Was there ever such a nation for scrubbing as the Dutch? Every day is washing day, but Saturday is the day solemnly dedicated to SS. Soap and Water. Then are hand-pumps, and the whole para- phernalia of ingenious housewifery brought into requisition, until, with much squirting, swashing, and scrubbing the paths are flooded, and the very gutters run over with soap suds. And the people, to the poorest, are as faultlessly clean as their houses. Let us stroll on to the market-place, close to the great Chtjech of St. Lawrence, out of the Hooo Steaat, the chief shopping street of the city, called 14 EOTTEEDAM. the Gboote Mabkt. Note the delightful freshness of the serving- maidens and matrons, standing by the tempting piles of rosy apples, luscious pears, delicious grapes, rolls of fresh butter, baskets of new-laid eggs, and other morning displays of country produce. Remark the stiffness of their prim print dresses, the whiteness of their dainty aprons and high muslin caps. Observe the brightness of* the astonishing brass-gilt helmet head-dresses worn by some, the more astonishing pro- jecting horns of gold or silver, standing out- several inches from the- face, and half hiding itr worn by others, and the bright, ponderous ear- rings worn by all. These are given by mother to daughter, and descend as heirlooms from generation to gen- eration. Anft observe the diminutive carts,, drawn by dogs, singly and in pairs, heavily laden with the daily necessaries of this life and driven by women 7 preparing to go their daily rounds through the city, seeking and supplying custom. In the market-place- stands the bronze Statue, of Erasmus, erected by his fellow-citizens in 1662. Facing it is a curious old corner house, known as the House of the Thousand Tebeoes. Record hath it that when, by treachery, the Spaniards entered the town in 1572,and butchered in cold blood thousands of the inhabitants, some hundreds took refuge here. Closing the shutters* and barricading the door, they killed a Md, letting the blood trickle- out under the doorway. The Spanish fiends, seeing the red stream, concluded the work of murder had been finished, and passed on, and house of the thowsand tebeoes. BOTTERDaUI. 15 "the inmates were saved, feucn is tne probable story of The House of the Thousand Terrors. During your walks you may meet any day a startling figure— the figure of a gaunt, cadaverous man of sallow countenance, with & hungry eye. As he stalks solemnly along, he mysteriously vanishes in a ghostly way and appears again before you have time to say * Oh \' His habiliments are of sable hue, from the THE 'UNDERTAKER'S MAX.' "top of %ls cocked hat, whence gauzy streamers flutter, to the soles of his black buckled pumps. As he approaches, you find he holds a number of cards, the leaving of which at certain houses accounts for his periodical disappearance. This woe-begone apparition is no other than the 'undertaker's man.' His mission in Hfe is to announce death; by distributing invitations to friends and relatives -to participate in the final rites and funeral baked meats over the lamented deceased. 16 BOTTEBDAM. Before leaving Rotterdam an excursion should be made up the Maas by one of the small steamers that start several times a day from the Boompjes to Doedeecht, or Dort, as it is commonly called. Centuries ago a terrible inundation devastated the whole country about Dort, sweeping away seventy thriving towns and villages, and destroying 100,000 of their people. The smiling land was reduced to the vast silent waste of swamp and brake, called the Biesboch, that still sur- rounds Dordrecht. The town of Dort gives, perhaps, a more perfect idea of an ancient Dutch city, as it looked in its old nourishing days, than any in Holland. A new building is so rare that when met with among the antique houses, nodding to each other in the narrow streets and leaning over the quiet canals, with apparent suicidal intent, it quite startles by its strangeness. Dort is historically interesting from the first assembly of the States of Holland which resulted in the Dutch Bepublic, having been convoked there, and artistically interesting as the birthplace of Cuyp and the spiritual Ary Sehefi3 er. In the middle ages the wealthiest and most powerful of all the Dutch cities, it exists now by its timber trade. The huge rafts seen floating down the Rhine from the dark forests of Germany and the mountain sides of Switzerland find their resting- place at Dort, and are sawn up in the horizon of wmdmills that surrounds the old town. Due north, from Rotterdam, the Dutch railway runs to Amstee- dam, passing through Delft, the Hague, Leyden, and Haablem (pp. 18-23). Due north again, from Amsterdam, on that lake-ocean, are the Dead Cities of the Zuydeb Zee. These old cities are not so dead but the salt breezes that blow through their placid places will fail to brace the weariest 'weariness of the flesh'; not so dead but the tourist, be he of a curious, artistic, or antiquarian turn of mind, will find much to admire, much to wonder at, and plenty of material for pleasing recollections in after years. An interesting little 'Circular Tour' may be made by returning from Amsterdam to Rotterdam by Uteecht and Gottda. Utrecht, a direct point of departure for Ger- many and the Rhine, resembles no other Dutch city. It has a university with eminent professors, but its essential character is not academical; it sends throughout the world the famous velvets called after itself, but there are no manufactories to be seen. It is the abode of people of means and people of leisure, but it has not that fashion- able air which the Hague boasts. After the busy rush and noisy bustle of Amsterdam it is refreshing to wander, especially on some moonlight night in autumn, in one of the shady groves to be found near the cathedral, and, as the melody of the chimes fills the air, to- EOTTEKDAM. 17 call up memories of the past in which the city played a noble and heroic part. Utrecht is the Trajectum ad Ehcnum of the Romans, and ever since the last of the legionaries were recalled from the banks of the Old Rhine, which finds its way through the city 4- to the sea, it has been the scene of notable events. f ^ There the first Christian Church was established by c . - Dagobert. Utrecht had to take part in the Spanish ^' Invasion, and it was here the Phantom Battle, so <^ admirably recorded by Motley , was said to have been seen. Utrecht was the head quarters of the Jan- senists, the sect which in the time of Pascal gave such trouble to their rivals the Jesuits, the Bull Unigenitus notwithstanding. At Utrecht was ac- complished, in 1579, the Union of the Seven United Provinces, a cardinal event in the history of the Netherlands. There, too, the 'high and mighty representatives of the different Powers met and settled the ever-memorable Treaty known as the Treaty of Utrecht, which, among other things, secured the Protestant Succession in England and the separation of Prenoh and Spanish crowns, It will be seen, therefore, that Utrecht has claims upon the attention of the tourist other than what are derived from its University, its Mint, its Cathedral, and the modern in- stitutions it possesses. "".'if MINE BAFT BOUND FOB DOET. 18 EOTTEEDAM TO AMSTEEDAM. 4 Vast green flats, speckled with spotted cows, and bound by a grey -frontier of windmills; shining canals stretching through the .^green; odours like those exhaled by the Thames in the dog-days, and a fine pervading smell of cheese; little trim houses with tall roofs, and great windows of many panes; gazebos, or summer-houses, hanging over pea-green canals; kind - looking, dumpling - faced, farmers' women, with laced caps and golden frontlets and earrings; .about the houses and towns which we pass a great air of comfort and neatness; a queer feeling of wonder that you can't understand what your fellow-passengers are saying, the tone of whose voices, and a -certain dowdiness of dress, are so like our own;—whilst we are remarking on these sights, sounds, and smells, the little railway journey, from Rotterdam to the Hague, comes to an end.' But in Mr. Thackeray's cheerful company, about half-way, the little town of Delft has been passed. Delft has not been favoured by fortune. Once its canals were crowded, and above the noise of its busy streets was heard the sound of the potter's wheel. But its trade is long since dead. Delf-ware ^conies from Delft no longer. Grass grows in its silent ways, and little else floats on its clear canals but the leaves that fall from the fragrant old limes fringing their banks. The quiet is well-attuned to the memories of the place. It seems as though the old town were grieving always for the tragedy which here, nearly three hundred j-ears ago, bereft Holland of the founder of its liberty, ''Father "William," Prince of Orange. The house in which the prince was -assassinated, at the instigation of his anointed Catholic Majesty, Philip II., of Spain, is called the Peinsenhof (Palace). It faces the Oude Keek (Old Church) which contains a monument to the doughty Van Tromp, who died fighting his favourite enemy the English. The palace is now a barracks. A trusty sergeant of the guard will show all that may be shown. He will point reverently to the spot where the prince fell, and to the marks left by the fatal bullet where it ^struck the wall. On the 10th July, 1584, in the early afternoon, the prince was passing from th§ dining-room to his private apartments above. The dining-room, which was on the ground floor, opened into a little square vestibule, on the left side of which was an obscure arch let deep into the wall. The prince had only reached the second iStair when a man emerged from the arch, and standing within a foot or two of him, discharged a pistol full at his heart. Three balls entered liis body, one of which, passing quite through him, struck with violence THE HAGUE. the wall beyond. He exclaimed as he felt the wound 'Oh, my God! have mercy upon my soul! Oh, my God! have mercy upon this- poor people.' He ceased to breathe a few minutes after, expiring in the arms of his wife and sister. The choir of the Nieitwe Keek (New Church) in the Geoote Maezt contains the costly marble monument to the memory of this patriot-prince, who lies surrounded by departed- princes of his illustrious house. Tlie Hague.—' The most delightful village in Europe,' affirms- my Lord Chesterfield, writing to his son. 'The prettiest little brick- city; the pleasantest little park to ride in; the neatest, most comfort- able people walking about; the canals not unsweet, and busy and picturesque with old world life. Rows upon rows of houses built with the neatest little bricks, with windows fresh painted, and tall- doors polished and carved to a nicety. . . I feel that a Dutchman is- a man and a brother. . . Sure it is the neatest, gayest little city,' says Mr* Roundabout, writing a century later. The Hague is the Court capital, as Amsterdam is the commercial capital. Its popula- tion of nearly a hundred thousand includes the rank, fashion, and pre- sumably the beauty, of Holland. The 'gayest little city' is full of all the quiet bustle and demure giddiness becoming a prosperous little Court. It has its New Palace and Old Palace, and Houses of Parlia- ment; its Belgravian quarter and its aristocratic squares; its French opera, and its fashionable English church; its Zoological and Botanic Gardens, its shady promenades and open-air concerts; its wooded, park, where you meet costumes that suggest the Bois de Boulogne, and equipages that recall the Row in the season; and it has its favourite little neighbouring watering*-place, Schevening-en, the Brighton of Holland. In the centre of the town is a miniature lake- oalled the Vijvee, with its tree-covered island and the inevitable- swans. Here are the Old Palace, an interesting turreted, gabled, and drawbridged mediseval pile on one side, and leafy avenues of lofty trees flanked by stately houses on the other. Here fashion abides. Near the palace is the Maueitshuis, a seventeenth-century buildingr with its crowded Museum of Miscellaneous Curiosities, containing the model of a Dutch house made for Peter the Great, which took twenty-five years to finish, and its Pictuee Galleey. Young Paul Potter's famous * Bull,' and Rembrandt's 'Anatomical Lecture' and 4 Presentation in the Temple,' are pictures which no one omits seeing. But the gallery is intrinsically interesting, and ranks with that at Amsterdam as one of the finest existing collections of the Dutch school. Pleasantly and profitably can a few days be spent in this { gayest little city,' where our Merry Monarch, who never said- 20 LEYDEN. a foolish thing and never did a wise one, passed the greater part of lis exile. • Ten miles by rail from the Hague is Xieyden.—'Breathes there a man with soul so dead' who, reading the story of the famous siege, has not felt his cheeks glow and his pulse quicken—let him take the express from the Hague to Amsterdam, and omit Leyden. Of the siege itself: how, for four long months, in spite of plague and famine, the brave burghers held heroically out until six thousand of their number had succumbed; how, when bread and all wholesome food was exhausted, they existed upon any garbage that could alleviate their cravings, while they watched eagerly for the help that could not come; how, at last, their succourers, hopeless of breaking through the iron girdle of the besiegers, cut the dykes, inundating and devastating their own lands, and attempted to reach the city by boats, but were foiled by contrary winds blowing the waters from the city; how some of the starving inhabitants, maddened and despairing at this, called in their agony upon the burgomaster for bread or capitulation; how he, not having one and refusing the other, offered his body for food if they would take it; how, fired with new resolution, starving but still trusting, they manned the walls, repaired the ramparts—men, women, and children —and died, like the heroes they were, at their posts; how, after weeks of weary watching, their gladdened eyes beheld the wind veering to the point that should bring salvation; how a great storm rose and drove the foe before the fury of the flood, which brought death to the besiegers while it brought life to the very gates of the desperate city; how the storm which had saved them and broken the Spanish host ceased, and the waters subsided; how, finally, the whole people assembled in the great church, and, after solemn prayer, offered up a Thanksgiving Hymn in voices so broken by sobs and long-pent emotion that it could not be continued to the end;—all this, and every detail of the heartmoving and splendid story is too well known to need repeating. The citizens in 1574 who, for conscience and country, fought the good fight so well, were the same simple folk as those seen in the half-deserted streets of the Leyden of to-day. The same simple service is still held in the great fourteenth-century church of St. Petee. In the centre of the town stands the restored church of St. Pangeas, in front of which the stout burgomaster, Van der Werff, when called upon by some weaker spirits to surrender, spake: 'What would ye, my friends? Why do ye murmur that we do not break our vows and surrender the city to the Spaniards ?—a fate more horrible than the agony she now endures! . . . My own fate is indifferent to 21 me! Your menaces move me not! My life is at your disposal! Here is my sword, plunge it in my breast, and divide my flesh among you; take my body to appease your hunger, but expect no surrender as long as I remain alive.' When the heroic Van der Werff died, full of years, they fittingly buried him in this church, where his modest tomb may be seen. Near the church, crowning a high mound of earth, is the Burg, a restored tower of unknown antiquity, whence during those dreadful summer days eyes were ever eagerly scanning the coast line, to see 'if yet the ocean had begun to roll over the land.' * Go up to the tower, ye beggars,' cried the few desponding ones; 4 go up to the tower; and tell us if ye can see the ocean coming over the dry land to .your relief!' As a reward for its heroism the State founded a university in Ley den, which has since become world famous. It has had Grotius, Descartes, Arminius, Linnaeus, among its professors; and our Gold- smith, Fielding, and Bichardson among its students. Of the things worth seeing while in this old town, broken up into fifty islands by one of the sluggish arms of the Rhine, are its Natural History Museum, one of the completest collections of the kind in the world, its Botanic Gardens, arranged after the system of Linnaeus, and the picturesque sixteenth-century Town Hall. Distant half-an-hour's railway journey is Haarlem.—The country about Haarlem is the Arcadia of Hol- land; the Blinkert, the highest point of the Dunes near the town, its Olympus. The view from its summit will repay the weary climb. Before you in the valley nestles the city with its tall cathedral; ten miles beyond is Amsterdam, with its crowd of vessels. To the right is the distant tower of Utrecht Cathedral. At your back, behind the bleak, barren sand-hills, the North Sea. By some optical freak the osean appears higher than the sandy barriers themselves. Grotesque sand-hills to the right of you; grotesque sand-hills to the left. Before you a green and smiling oasis, with its gardens, villages, canals, wind-mills, and historic towns. The ruins of the castle of Brederode, by whose stout lord many a Castilian bit the dust, peep out there, to the eastward. A small branch of the old Rhine wound its way by the castle centuries ago, and a tiny pool yet shows where once this little Rhine flowed towards the sea. Further eastward runs the river T, connected with the Zuyder Zee, and flowing towards Spaardam, a spot that has been the forlorn hope in time of storm and tempest to save the country from inundation. The Y, backed by the Zuyder Zee and the Northern Ocean, ever so furious, finds itself baffled by the mighty sluices of Spaardam, and the dykes that stretch far away to Amsterdam. 22 HAABT.EK. Entering the Zyl or Leyden Poort (gate) over a bridge, across the wide moat that girdles the town, and leaving the vegetable market on the left, in a few minutes the G-eoote Marxt is reached. In the centre, fronting the cathedral, is the bold, bronze Statue of Latteens Kostee, the inventor of printing in movable types, whom Haarlem claims for its own. The fine old Town Hall, opposite the cathedral, possesses a small but interesting gallery of paintings; its- secret chamber of rare curiosities and antiquities; and a grim collection of instruments of torture that once agonised false confessions from the innocent in the hands of Philip's ferocious generals. In the adjacent quaint old Fleshee's Hall, English prisoners-of-war were housed during the Napoleon dynasty. To hear the world-famed organ in the Cathedral, the visit should be made on Tuesday or Friday,, when there are recitals between 1 and 2 o'clock. The fee for a special performance is equal to an English pound. In the church, hanging- between two pillars in a side aisle, are three wooden models of the vessels with which Count Floris of Holland with his Haarlemmen broke the chain slung across the river Nile, and took the town of Damiete during the Crusade of 1188. In memory of this bold deed two small bells are hurriedly tolled every night, from nine till half- past, and people say then, 'The Damietyes are tolling.' In one of the flagstones, near the eastern door, is inserted a small piece of brass, the size of a finger-top. The story is that an interesting boy was buried there, who in life had an amiable weakness of beating his mother. He had not been buried long before a living finger was seen piercing the gravestone. It was cut off, but to no purpose~ The finger grew again with provoking unconcern. Counsel was taken, and a piece of blessed brass was drilled into the hole made by the resurrecting finger. Prom that hour it never rose again. One interesting jaunt is by boat round the town by the outer moat; where once fortifications bristled with guns, peeping from high brick walls, there are now breezy boulevards. Going out of the Nieuw Poort, east, on the high road leading to Alkmaae, are seen the scant ruins of the Hens te Kleef, in a meadow; once the stronghold of the Brederodes. From this quarter it was that the Spaniards bombarded the town in the memorable siege of 1572. Following this road you come to the Peincenbosch (Princes' Wood) —a country-seat. Here, in a small room, "William III. secretly deliberated on the invasion of England. The ten miles of country passed through between Haarlem and Amsterdam was, until some forty years ago, a vast sheet of water known as the Haarlem Lake, spreading almost as far south as- AMSTERDAM. 23 AMSTERDAM. I know a city,' said Erasmus, * whose inhabitants dwell in the tops of trees, like rooks.' The city at which the mild Reformer poked his milder fun was the capital of Holland. He was only a little more than correct. The city is built, truly, upon the tops of trees. Every church, house, bridge, wall, and warehouse rests not on the sandy soil beneath, but on forests of piles, driven closely and deeply down until they reach earth of harder nature. And so one of the first commercial places in the world, with a population of nearly 300,000 souls, rests securely on the tree-tops. After the repose and quiet of the other Dutch towns, its feverish new-world life, in its picturesque old-world frame, comes with a pleasant shock. 4 Amsterdam is as good as Venice, with a superadded humour and grotesqueness which gives the sightseer the most singular jsest and pleasure. A run through PeMn one could hardly fancy to be more odd, strange, and yet familiar. This rush and crowd and 24 AMSTERDAM. prodigious vitality; this immense swarm of life; these busy waters, crowding barges, swinging drawbridges, piled ancient gables, spacious* markets teeming with people; that ever-wonderful Jews' quarter; that dear old world of painting and the past, yet alive and throbbing and palpable—actual and yet passing before you swiftly and strangely as a dream!' Of its life, sights, and business, the large square called the Dam is. the centre, as it is the centre of the city. Here is the Palace of the Marble Halls. Square and sombre outside, it is coldly sumptuous and icily splendid within, with its white gleaming galleries, its dazzling rooms, its shadowless corridors, all marble; and the great, ghostly Marble Hall, desolate in its glittering glory, and its empty throne hung round with tattered flags and grim crumbling trophies of many an old Dutch battle-field. The palace, which dates from 1648, when it was built for a town hall, rests on 13,659 piles, and cost nearly a million pounds sterling. King Louis Napoleon was pleased to take up his abode here, when his brother annexed Holland, on the plea that it had been formed by the mud of French rivers. Adjoining the palace is the New Church, one of the finest of the generally uninteresting Dutch churches. It possesses a marvellously carved pulpit, and is the resting-place of many an old fighting Dutch admiral. De Ruyter, who in 1654 startled London by dashing with his fleet into the very mouth of the Thames, lies here. Opposite the palace is the Exchange, where, daily between the hours of one and two, the rich merchants of Amsterdam most do congregate. The canal north of the exchange, called the Damrak, leads to the Old Church (Oude Kerk), which has some magnificent sixteenth century stained-- glass windows. "West from the New Church, by the Post Office and Lilie Ghracht, is the Western Church (Wester Kerk), which contains the Tomb of Rembrandt. His Statue is in the Boter Markt. Now, to reach the famous Picture Gallery from the Dam requires a little care. One is so easily lost in Amsterdam. Pacing the Palace runs a narrow street called the Damstraat, which take. Having crossed the third bridge, turn to the left. No. 293, KLoveniers Burgwal, is Buks Museum—the Dutch National Gallery. Of the 450 pictures, 340 are by native artists. The two gems of the collec- tion face each other. One is the * Night Watch,' by Bembrandt, the other, i The Banquet of the Arquebusiers,' by Van der Heist. 'They say he was a moody, ill-conditioned man-—the old tenant of the mill. What does he think of the "Van der Heist" which hangs opposite his "Night Watch," and which is one of the greatest pictures in the world? It is not painted by so great a man as- N0ETH HOLLAND. 25 Rembrandt; but there it is—to see it is an event of your life. Having beheld it, you have lived in the year 1648, celebrated the Treaty of Minister; you have shaken the hands of the Dutch Guardsmen; •eaten from their platters; drunk their Rhenish; heard their jokes, as they wagged their jolly beards.* Amsterdam is rich in art. The Museum Van dee, Hoop, The Eodoe Museum, and the peivate collection of the Six Van Hilligom family, each and all are worth seeing. Amsterdam has for its other attractions its spacious glass Industeial Palace with concerts and YOUNG HOLLAND. operas, its fine Zoological G-abdens, its Docks, and its many charitable institutions. When Louis XIV.'s armies threatened the city, and ruin was prophesied, Charles II. said, 'I believe that Providence will protect Amsterdam, if it were only for the great charity they have for the poor.' NORTH HOLLAND. The guide books declare that North Holland is uninteresting, except in an agricultural point of view. i The ordinary tourist,' we are assured, 'may well leave this part of the country unexplored.' A stranger at Amsterdam should, however, not neglect to make an excursion to North Holland. The people are primitive in their habits and picturesque in their costume. North Holland is, indeed, in many 26 NOETH HOLLAND. respects, one of the most interesting regions in Continental Europe. The most agreeable way of seeing the country is to take the little steamboat that leaves Amsterdam daily for Hoorn, at the head of the JZuyder Zee, and return by diligence and the North Holland Canal. If the trip is made in the autumn nothing can be more delightful. Having emerged from a lock, remarkable for the solidity of its- masonry, the ship glides into the Zuyder Zee. Sea and sky appear WATEE GATE AT XIOOIIN. to be merged; there is no hoiizontal line, but the greyish-blue soft *ky imperceptibly blends itself -with the greyish-blue soft sea. As- the steamer proceeds on its course through the short choppy waves, Monnickendam is seen on the left. Then the island of Mabken rises oat of the waves; then the town of Edam, the great centre of the cheese district, can be descried. At length, as the sun is gradually disappearing, an object presents itself right at the bow of the ship. At first sight it appears to be a large cone or buoy floating on the water. Then its dimensions increase, and it seems to elongate itself into the sky. As the ship advances, a grass bank presents itself as if XOBTH HOLLALD. 27 to bar her further progress. In Wales such a bank would not be large enough to keep cattle from straying. Here it does more—it coerces the ocean. An opening is soon found in the bank; the ship- glides through and draws up alongside of a jetty, under the object that has been described. This is the beautiful water-gate of Hooen, one of the dead cities of the Zuyder Zee. Hoorn has been maligned by the few travellers who have described their visit thither. With its nearly 10,000 inhabitants it is as lively as any English town with the same amount of population. 'DEAD CITY' FISHEEMEN. From Hoorn there are other places of interest in the province to which a visit may be paid. In addition to the towns named, there is Enkhuizen, also a dead city, at the head of the Zuyder Zee. Easily reached, too, is Alkmaab. Lastly, there is Broek, regarded as one of the cleanest of Butch towns. But, since Hoorn itself boasts of all 28 NOETH HOLLAND. these attractions, the tourist may return without visiting any.of them.. The way is by diligence to Purmerende, and thence by canal boat to the capital. In the immediate vicinity of Hoorn the character of the scenery is much what it is elsewhere in this country. Soon, however, a remarkable change occurs. After reaching a little hamlet half way between Hoom and Purmerende, the diligence makes an abrupt turn to the right, then suddenly to the left, and a strange spectacle reveals, itself. In front is what appears to be an endless avenue—paved,, smooth as a billiard table, and straight as a line. The trees on both- sides, exactly of the same size, are planted at exactly the same distance- from each other; not one has a physiognomy peculiar to itself, and so» alike are they that one is tempted to believe that the leaves, if counted^ would be found to be the same in number on all. Every now and' then, but precisely at the same distance, the avenue is crossed at right angles by other avenues, each of which, on both hands, seems inter- minable. This uniformity exercises a sort of fascination over the passenger. But ^what impresses him most is tbat the vanishing line of the horizon is never reached. The horses clatter away, beating exactly the same time, over the pavement, each layer of which is com- posed of exactly the same number of clinkers; but the horizon appears- to be what it was when seen on first entering the avenue. This produces the impression that the lumbering vehicle is for ever moving without progressing, and the driver, who ejaculates to the horses at precisely the same intervals of time, becomes transfigured into* a Charon conveying souls across some frontier into a land un- known of mortals. At length, and just as the monotony of the situation has paralysed speculation, a dent is seen between the trees in front. This gradually widens, and in a short time the diligence makes a sudden turn to the right up a slight incline, and lands its passengers at the hotel in Pubmebende. The little steamer is ready. A bell rings and she starts. She glides through meadows with reeds whistling alongside. The first stoppage is at Ilpexdam, where a red flag is exhibited. Here she heaves to and discharges some of her passengers, taking others on board. Then she glides on again till she reaches Watergang, when the same operation is performed. Thence she steams straight on till the losk is reached which separates the canal from the Y. The towers and smoke of Amsterdam have been seen for a long time. When we emerge from the lock the city is in front like a panorama, such as it appears in the picture by Van der Velde in the Museum. For one who has long been in populous city pent, and with only three or four days at his disposal the trip to« North Holland is the most agreeable that can be recommended- Undee that thin lace-like spire, which looks so high, so fragile,, and so fairy-like, that if you have slept well, breakfasted welly and are sentimentally inclined, you might in truth say resembles rather an exquisite drooping pendant from heaven than the result of base mortal's line and plumb—lies the city of Antwerp. Across the weary expanse of dull water and green pastures, the delicate tracery stands sharp against the clear morning sky. The broad, deep, winding, busy Scheldt up which we are steaming has borne richer argosies and rarer freights in the long ago than it ever will again. But the vessels of many flags, going and coming, are units only of the goodly six thousand which sail annually up and down, to and from the city, under the lace-like spire. Both banks of the river, flat and green as a billiard-table, form part of Holland, until two grim forts guarding either shore are passed, and Belgian waters are entered. Beyond these the stream winds and narrows with each succeeding reach. At last, on the left bank, where countless masts, tapering, mingled, and massed, rise like a forest of dead pines, the splendid docks are recognised which, as everyone knows, Napoleon, built when he made the futile resolution that Antwerp should rank, once more as the first commercial city of the world. 30 ANT WEEP. Safely landed upon the busy quay, you have, perhaps, observed that the Great Eastern Company's clock is upon the stroke of nine, when hush! what is that delicious ripple of tinkling melody which seems wafted down from Cloudland? Bah! That wretched .steam whistle drowns every note. But, hark! now you can hear it again. It comes in soft waves of clear mellow music one moment, ;&nd in the liquid murmurs of a musical-box the next. The notes you heard at first are repeated. They seem familiar, although the sound :so strangely sweet is new. Then you recognise a bar or two, and as the last soft cadence of the dying air fades note by note away, you suddenly recollect it is the prettily plaintive 'Mandolinata,' that on piano and street organ at home drove you to a fine frenzy of distraction -two or three seasons ago. If anything can reconcile one to being reminded every sixty minutes he is an hour older surely it is the Antwerp chimes. They haunt you, waking and sleeping. They play _you charmingly into the city, they play you as charmingly out. Such chimes could have but one resting-place; would be looked for only in that spire of embroidered stone, which itself crowns an •edifice worthy alike its coronet and carillon. On the south side of the Cathedeal is the wide market-place, the Place Veete, with its central Statue of Rubens. The Church is usually entered from the entrance on this side. * "Who has not seen the Church under the Bells? Those lofty aisles, those twilight chapels, -that cumbersome pulpit with its huge carvings, that wide, grey pavement flecked with various lights from the jewelled windows, -those famous pictures between the voluminous columns over the altars, which twinkle with their ornaments, their votive little silver hearts, legs, limbs, their little guttering tapers, cups of sham roses, and what not?' The famous pictures are veiled. Devout worshippers perforce pray before inferior works of art, and curious visitors perforce pay a regulation fee before the several green curtains- are drawn, with a theatrical air, by the stagey sacristan. One's admiration is divided between Rubens's masterpieces and the fine taste and sense of reverence shown by the very reverend traders in this ecclesiastical peep-show. In * The Descent from the Cross' they possess a precious heritage to ibe guarded and preserved for future generations at the expense of the present—unless it elects to pay the price of admission as it might for the extra room at a waxworks exhibition. 4 The Elevation of the Cross,' 'The Assumption,' and i The Resurrection,' by Rubens; and the i St. Francis,'- by Murillo—each a famed and fine example of the ANTWERP. masters—are, together with the * Descent,' relegated to green baize. But no one visiting Antwerp will omit seeing them. It is unnecessary to describe all or any. The eye that can see a picture wants no aid. The vision that requires a guide to artistic beauties may look long and patiently, and never see the picture. Of the great work, Motley^ whose 'History of the Netherlands,' by the way, none should forega reading before touching Belgian soil, said, 'I defy anyone of the* average amount of imagination and sentiment to stand long before* the "Descent from the Cross" without being moved more nearly to- tears than he would care to acknowledge.' Motley spoke as most feel who gaze for the first time upon this masterpiece of the master- painter. By the wide west portal of the Church is the dwarf entrance to the wondrous tower. A flight of steps leads to the first gallery, as second to the gallery beneath the bells. It may be mentioned that the- first flight numbers five hundred steps, the second a hundred. Great Carolus, to whom Charles V. stood godfather, hangs up there, massive and sonorous in its 16,000 lbs. of sounding metal, with ninety-eight brazen companions, varying in size from the big bass, which takes* sixteen strongmen to ring, to the tiny treble not larger than the homely hand-bell of the muffin-man. For three hundred and fifty years and more those bells have gone on ringing. 'Whilst the French were pitching their fulgara into Chasse's citadel the bells went on ringing quite cheerfully. Whilst the scaffolds were up, and guarded by Alva's soldiery, and regiments of penitents, blue, black, and grey^ poured out of churches and convents droning their dirges, and marching to the place of the Hotel de Ville, where heretics and rebels were to meet their doom, the bells up yonder were chanting at their appointed half-hours and quarters, and rang the mauvais quart tflteure for many a poor soul.' They rang on quite as cheerfully through the three awful days and nights of the 'Spanish Fury.' The victims of" Castilian butchers numbered more than the dead on the morn follow- ing the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Eight thousand people were* murdered, the city plundered and half destroyed, and the old power* and glory of Antwerp had departed for ever. 4 The tall spire cast its gigantic shadow across the last desperate conflict. In the street called the Canal au Sucre (still so named), immediately behind the Town Hall, there was a fierce struggle, a horrible massacre. M. crowd of burghers, grave magistrates, and such of the German soldiers as remained alive, still confronted the ferocious Spaniards- Then, amid the flaming desolation, Goswyn Verreyck, the heroic: margrave of the city, fought with the energy of hatred and despair^ The burgomaster, Vander Meere, lay dead at his feet; senators, 32 ANTWEBP. soldiers, citizens fell fast around Mm, and he sank at last upon a heap of slain. With him effectual resistance ended. The remaining combatants were butchered, or were slowly forced downward to perish in the Scheldt. Women, children, old men, were killed in countless numbers, and still through all this havoc, directly over the heads of the struggling throng, suspended in mid-air above the din and smoke of the conflict, there sounded every half-quarter of every hour, as if in gentle mockery, from the belfry of the cathedral, the tender and melodious chimes.' Facing the door of the tower in the open space before the west portal is an old well, protected by a delicately wronght-iron canopy, the work of Quentin Matsys, once blacksmith of Louvain. Matsys came to seek his fortune at Antwerp, and fell in love with a painter's daughter. To win her, and to conciliate the father, he exchanged the anvil for the palette. With his brush he won a wife and fame. His masterpiece is preserved in the Museum. Adjacent to the Cathedral is the spacious Grande Place with its high, fantastic, many gabled Guild Houses, dating from the sixteenth century, and the imposing Renaissance Hotel de Ville, forming one side of the Square. Its interior is interesting chiefly for some historical paintings in the great hall. A few minutes east of the Cathedral is the * Canal des Recollects,' with the 'Rue des Recollects' on the left. It leads to a. small 'place,' with a central Statue of Vandyck. In this place is the entrance to the Museum. The building was formerly a monastery of the Minorites. Its picture gallery is the finest in Belgium. The six hundred pictures, each with the subject and artist's name affixed, nearly all belong to the Flemish School. The greater part were produced in Antwerp itself. The old city, in its golden era, became a cradle of art, and boasted a School of its own. It claims Rubens, Van Dyck, Quintin Matsys, David Teniers, Jordaens, De Craeyer, Zegers, Snyders, and others. Rubens was actually born at Seigen, but he lived, painted, and achieved greatness here. The Museum contains a complete series of his works; chief among them are his * Crucifixion,' * The Adoration of the Magi,' and * Christ a la Paille.' They number fourteen in all. In the first room are Rubens' chair, and his * Death' painted by Vanbree. < The Dead Saviour,' admittedly the chef d'ceuvre of Quentin Matsys, was removed here from the Cathedral, where it was formerly an altar- piece. 'The Dead Saviour' of Van Dyck is a fine example of poor Sir Antony. 4 In that Pieta of Van Dyck,' asks Thackeray, * have you ever looked at the yellow-robed angel with the black scarf thrown over her wings and robe? What a charming figure of grief and baauty! What a pretty compassion it inspires! It soothes and ANTWERP. 33 pleases me like a sweet rhythmic chant. See how delicately the yellow robe contrasts with the blue sky behind, and the scarf binds the two! If Rubens lacked grace, Vandyck abounded in it. What a con- summate elegance! What a perfect cavalier! No wonder the fine ladies in England admired Sir Antony.' Many works of these and other native painters are distributed among the Churches. In the imposing Church of St. Jacques Rubens- is buried. He painted the brilliantly-coloured altar-piece of the chapel which contains his tomb. The figure of St. George is himself 'r the figures of Martha and Magdalene are his two wives; the St. Jerome is his father. Other family portraits are introduced of his. daughter and niece, and his grandfather as the god of Time. Another chapel contains a * Crucifixion' by Vandyck. The old Antwerp families lie in the vaults of St. Jacques, and the costly monuments of stone and marble, and florid decorations, are not always in faultless taste. The High Altar was designed by Rubens. The Church of St. Augustine possesses a large altar-piece by Rubens, 4 St. Catherine and the Infant Jesus,' a fine picture in bad preservation, and another altar-piece by Vandyck. The Mansion which Rubens built unto himself, and lived and died in, situated in the Rue Rubens, has been so much restored that it may be said not ,to exist. His favourite summer-house in the garden, and the yew tree he planted, are shown. The old fortifications of the city have been converted into broad boulevards. The new, which eneircle- the city, and should be seen, will, when finished, have cost more than two million pounds sterling. The best view of Antwerp is obtained from the opposite shore of the Scheldt, to which steamboats cross- constantly. Brussels is distant from Antwerp 27 miles. About half-way the line passes through the ancient town of Mat.tnes (Mechlin), celebrated for its lace and wood-carving. The imposing Cathedral of St. Rombold contains a * Crucifixion' by Vandyck, one of his finest- works; the Church of Notre Dame, a winged picture, 'The Draught of Fishes,' and the Church of St. Jean, a fine and large High Altar piece, both by Rubens. * You should go to St. Jean of Malines,' he used to say to his friends, 'if you would see my best pictures.' From Antwerp a line runs direct to Ghent, 31 miles; thence- to Bruges, 59 miles; and Ostend, 73 miles distant. To Cologne, the most interesting route is by Brussels, Malines, Louvatn, which pos- sesses a fine Gothic town hall and some good pictures; Xiege, th# Birmingham of Belgium; and through the richly wooded and beau* tiful valley of the Vesdre to the German frontier. A few miles past o 84 BSU88ELS. Liege, at Pepinster, the Luxemburg line branches south. Spa is ten miles down. Prettily and breezily situated under the Ardennes, a thousand feet higher than sea level, the original spa, famous now for a century and a half, still attracts some twenty thousand visitors or patients every year. The new and luxurious Etabussf.mf.nt des Bains is said to have cost £80,000. BRUSSELS. To say that Brussels is Paris in miniature is to repeat what every guide-book has said any time this twenty years. But if trite, it is true. Brussels, as far as it goes, and it goes a considerable way, is the gay, airy, careless, charming counterpart of the sister city. French training has generated all the Celtic gassiness and killed all the Flemish phlegm of its people. Monsieur le Brave Beige, the gay, the debonnair of the capital, has come to despise his native tongue in his ceaseless endeavour to acquire a Parisian accent, pure and undefiled. He dresses himself, his servants, his soldiers after the latest Parisian mode. He is French in everything but his nation- ality—which is his misfortune, not his fault. His lively city on the Senne has been modelled after the lively city on the Seine. Paris has its Palace of the Tuileries with its fronting garden, Brussels its Palace du Roi, with its fronting * park. * Paris has its Bois de Boulogne, Brussels its Bois de la Cambre. Paris* has its Notre Dame, Brussels its Ste. Grudule. Paris has its Latin quarter, its columns, its fountains, its leafy, breezy boulevards, its countless cafes, its attractive shops with repelling prices, its shocking horses and artful cabmen, its gallant and gesticulating gendarmerie, its colony of foreign residents and mysterious refugees; and all these Brussels reproduces with startling fidelity. The higher part of the city, which is the new and fashionable quarter, looks down in both senses upon the ancient and lower portion. The latter should be seen first. One cannot appreciate •an old vintage immediately after feasting upon cheesecakes. In its remaining narrow streets, which the Belgian Haussmann is clearing away with all possible promptness, Flemish is sometimes heard, a few old buildings are met with, and about all there is just sufficient flavour of the past to enable one to enter the venerable Gbande Place with a proper feeling of adu?iring awe. Few who have read Motley's delightful book but will come across some of the historic figures, who live again in his pages, moving across that famous square. Who cannot see dark Alva scowling from yonder window upon those valiant THE HOTEL DE VILLE. 36 BRUSSELS. Counts of Egmont and Hoorn, who stand on the grim scaffold below, waiting patiently and prayerfully a martyr's doom? It wants no fervid imagination, for upon the very spot where these brave gentlemen died, as only brave men could, a costly monument is raised to their memory. Motley once wrote, * Nothing can be more exquisite in its way than the Grande Place, surrounded with those toppling, zigzag, ten-storied buildings, bedizened all over with ornaments and emblems so peculiar to the Netherlands, the brocaded Hotel de Ville on one side, with its impossible spire rising some three hundred and seventy feet into the air, and embroidered to the top with the delicacy of needlework, sugar-work, spider-work, or what you will. I haunt this place because it is my scene, my theatre. Here were enacted so many deep tragedies, so many stately dramas, and even so many farces, which have been familiar tome so long that I have got to imagine myself invested with a kind of property in the place, and look at it as if it were merely the theatre with the coulisses, machinery, drapery, etc., for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually moving across its pavements than if they had occurred in the moon. The dead men of the place are my intimate friends. I am at home in my cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the most familiar terms. Any ghost that ever flits by night across the moonlight square is at once hailed by me as a man and a brother. I call him by his Christian name at once.'. The interior of the Hotel de Ville is interesting for its historical pictures and banqueting-hall. On a clear afternoon the field of Waterloo can be distinctly seen from the Tower. Behind the Hotel is the Manneken FouNTAiN-~one of the curiosities of the city. Three palaces surround the favourite little park in the higher quarter. The King's Palace may be visited when the Court is absent. The Ducal Palace ought to be visited for its collec- tion of modern Belgian pictures, and the Palais de la Nation need not be visited. Adjacent to the King's Palace, and adjoining the Palais de 1'Industrie, is L' Anctenne Cour, containing a collection of old masters, which ranks after the Antwerp gallery as the finest in Belgium. Rubens, Vandyck, Teiriers, and most of the Flemish painters are represented. It contains two of the wings of Van Eyck's celebrated 'Adoration of the Immaculate Lamb,' from the Church of St. Bavon, at Ghent, and a few 6x.aj»ples of Italian masters. The neighbouring Palace of the Duke P!AbE3Sbee», once the residence of Count Egmont, contains a choice cplleclaon-of the Netherlands school, each master being represented l>y;a fine example. The Palais de Justice possesses two powerful nio&iiii: pictures—* The Abdication of Charles V.' and 'The Compro- WATEELOO. 37 .imise, or petition of the Belgian nobles.' Beyond the fine fourteenth- we occupied the house and gardens of Hougoumont (Le Chateau de Groumont), which covered the return of that flank; and in front of the left centre, 38 WATERLOO. we occupied the farm of La Haie Sainte. By our left we communi- cated with Marshal Prince Bliicher, at Wavre, through Ohain; and the marshal had promised me that in case we should be attacked he would support me with one or more corps, as might be necessary. The enemy collected Ms army, with the exception of the 3rd corps, which had been sent to observe Marshal Bliicher, on a range of heights, in our front, in the course of the night of the 17th and yesterday morning; and at about ten o'clock he commenced a furious attack upon our post at Hougoumont. I had occupied that post with a detach- ment from General Byng's brigade of guards, which was in position, in its rear; and it was for some time under the command of Lieutenant - Colonel Macdonnell, and afterwards of Colonel Home; and I am happy to add that it was maintained throughout the day with, the utmost gallantry by these brave troops, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of large bodies of the enemy to obtain possession of it~ This attack upon the right of our centre was accompanied by a very heavy cannonade upon our whole line, which was destined to- support the repeated attacks of cavalry and infantry, occasionally mixed, but sometimes separate, which were made upon it. In one of these the enemy carried the farm-house of La Haie Sainte, as the detachment of the light battalion of the German legion which occu- pied it had expended all its ammunition, and the enemy occupied the only communication there was with them. The enemy repeatedly charged our infantry with his cavalry, which attacks were repeated till about seven in the evening, when the enemy made a desperate effort with cavalry and infantry, supported by the fire of artillery, to force our left centre near the farm of La Haie Sainte, which after a severe contest was defeated; and having observed that the troops retired from this attack in great confusion, and that the march of General Bulow's corps by Frischermont upon Tlanchenois and La Belle Alliance had begun to take effect, and as I could perceive the fire of his cannon, and as Marshal Prince Bliicher had joined in person, with a corps of his army to the left of our line by Ohain, I deteimined to attack the enemy, and immediately advanced the whole line of in- fantry, supported by the cavalry and artillery. The attack succeeded in every point; the enemy was forced from his position on the heights, and fled in the utmost confusion, leaving behind him, as far as I could judge, one hundred and fifty pieces of cannon, with their ammuni- tion, which fell into our hands. I continued the pursuit till long after dark, and then discontinued it only on account of the fatigue of our troops, who had been engaged during twelve hours, and because 1 found myself on the same road with Marshal Bliicher, who assured me of his intention to follow the enemy throughout the night. He- has sent me word this morning that he had taken sixty pieces of cannon 'belonging to the Imperial Guard, and several carriages, baggage, etc., belonging to Buonaparte, in Genappe.' The Mottnd of the Belgian Lion, nearly two hundred feet in* height, but crumbling with every winter's frost and rain, is sur- mounted by a Hon-weighing nearly 30 tons, cast from captured [French cannon. "When the French army passed in 1833, on its march to. Antwerp, it hacked off the end of the lion's tail. Waterloo was avenged- I g 0 BBTJ0ES. Visitors here and elsewhere on the field should beware of relics of the battle, proffered by the industrious and simple peasantry. Every year they sow an annual stock of buttons and bullets, with their potatoes, for the following season's consumption. At more than one house the traveller's anxious and eager eye may discover, half embedded in the fissured wall of an inner building, a rusting cannon ball. His interest is at once aroused. He examines it closely, and excitedly calls others of his party round. One probs it with his umbrella, another furtively picks at the stonework to see how firm or how loose it is. Alas, the bullet is as completely embedded as on the day it crashed into the splintered wall. The proud discoverer appealing to his con- ductor inquires, in a tone of assumed indifference, whether it would be possible to obtain that ball? The conductor cannot say, but if Monsieur will wait one moment he will enquire. He returns beaming, and with the landlord. Yes, as a great favour, Monsieur may have it for—and a price is named which might be reasonable if the ball Were solid silver. But this being eventually arranged, the ball is dug out and carried away in triumph. At home it is preserved as a precious memento, and the owner thinks of adding a new codicil to* his will concerning it. For the peace of his soul he had best not visit Waterloo again; or, in that identical building, in the identical spot whence his treasure came, he may see, half embedded and as firmly fixed as on the day it crashed into the splintered wall, the ex-act counterpart of his rusty relic. BRUGES. 'Poor Bruges! The light of other days has indeed faded. Its commerce has gone; its prosperity long' since departed. ^Nearly a third of its good people, who number little short of 50,000, are paupers. Once the mart of Europe, it can boast now only that it is the most picturesque town in all Flanders. Some guide-books tell us Bruges is dull. Dull it is, no doubt, to dull people. To the intelligent traveller there is no duhxess in its broad, old sleepy streets, lined with ancient houses, of rich fantastic architecture, and forming grotesque vistas, which take you back a' generation with every step until you breathe and live in the atmosphere of three cen- turies ago. The quaint figures sitting at the low arched doors, con- juring dotton into cloudy lace; the glimpses of antique interiors through lattice windows; the queer costumes that one meets; the sounding footfall through the drowsy ways; the tinkling melody floating from GHENT. 41 the belfry, and clinging like a memory to the place—all is very dreamy, and demure and old, but not dull. This drooping sense of age is everywhere. Its Cathebbal of ungainly exterior but imposing interior, rich in pictures, monuments, and brasses, and choir stalls embossed with the escutcheons of the early knights •of the Golden Fleece, an Order founded in Bruges in 1429, by Philip of Burgundy, dates from the thirteenth century. The ^adjacent Church of Notre Dame, dating from the same period, •contains the sumptuous marble tombs of Charles the Bold and Mary of Burgundy, many pictures, and the exquisitely wrought statue of the Virgin and Child attributed to Michael Angelo. Facing the west side of the church is the Hospital of St. John. 4 And Hans Hemling at Bruges! Have you never seen that dear old hospital of St. John, on passing the gate of which you enter the fifteenth century? I see the wounded soldier still lingering in the house, and tended by the kind grey sisters; his little panel on its easel is placed at the light; he covers his board with the most wondrous, beautiful little figures, in robes as bright as rubies and amethysts. I think he must have a magic glass in which he catches the reflection of little cherubs with many-coloured wings, very little and bright; angels in long, crisp robes of white come and flutter across the mirror, and he draws them.' Whose pretty conceit could this be but of the author of the * Roundabout Papers'? .Then there is the Eglise be Jebttsalem, with its imitation of the Holy Sepulchre, to which a devout burgomaster made two pilgrimages to ensure the resemblance; there is the Chapelle dtj Saint Sang, where the * Holy Blood,' said to have been brought from the Holy Land by Count Theodoric of Flanders, is shown each Friday morning; there is the Palais de Justice, with its remarkable Renaissance fire-place, executed in honour of Charles V.; and in the Grande Place there is the striking Hotel de Ville, begun in 1377, the mediaeval house ^called au Lion be Flandre, in which Charles II., who was made * King of the Guild of Archers,' is said to have passed part of his exile, and there too * in the market-place of Bruges stands the belfry eld and brown; thrice consumed and thrice rebuilded it watches o'er the town!' GHENT. The irrepressible spirit of the Ghenters has saved their city sharing the fate of Bruges. The days are past when they could place 80,000 fighting men in the field, or could repulse single-handed an English 42 GHENT. army, as in the days of the first Edward, or could win another such* Tictory as the 4 Battle of the Spurs,' or could defy obnoxious princes, and make or unmake its rulers. No longer have citizens, as of old, to be warned, by sound of bell, to remain at certain hours in-doors, lest they should be crushed in the throng of the 40,000 weavers going to or leaving their daily work. The famous bell of St. Roland, 'whose iron tongue had called citizens from generation to generation to arms, whether to win battles over foreign kings, or to plunge their swords into each other's hearts,' still sounds; but now happily gives the lie to its motto, * When I am rung hastily there is a fire, when I resound in peals there is victory in Flanders.' They were fine fellows those sturdy, passionate, irrepressible Ghenters. If they knew how to beat the English at one time, they could shake hands and teach them the art of weaving, and do thriving business- with them at another. Ghent drew from Erasmus the confession that there was no town in all Christendom like it for size, power, political constitution, or the culture of its people. Charles V.r punning upon its French name Gand, boasted once to Francis I., i I could put all Paris in my glove ((/ant).1 The time came, how- ever, when the brave burghers' pride was to be humbled, when their proud burgomasters were to walk through the broad streets- with halters round their necks in token of submission, and their glorious privilege of being independent to succumb after fierce aneL sanguinary struggles. But the old spirit has never died-. Ghent,, with its hundred and twenty thousand inhabitants, lives aneL flourishes, while Bruges dozes by its quiet waters, and dreams* of days departed. Yet with the cheery modern movement and* bustle, with trams and 'buses running through its broad high- ways and market-places, along its quays and over its seventy bridges, it retains its ancient rich quaintness and colour. A pleasant odour of age clings to the place, as old lavender retains, the fresh sweet perfume of the flower. Its Cathedral Church of St. Bavou, the crypt of which was consecrated in 941, is the glory of Ghent. *As you look up the nave you suspend your breath. Oil *very side you are surrounded by monuments of marble; the whole of the interior is lined with black marble, relieved at intervals witlk graceful scrolls and white monuments of Parian purity and delicacy. There are twenty-four chapels within the walls; the altars are alternately composed of gold, silver, and marble; the rarest paintings and the most elaborate sculpture teem upon you frcm all sides.' One of the chapels contains a picture of European fame, 4 The Adoration, of the Lamb,' by the brothers Van Eyck. The wings are wanting. GHENT. 43 Two are in the Brussels Gallery, and others in the Gallery of Berlin. The Church of St. Michael's contains a once celebrated * Crucifixion,' by Vandyck, now spoilt by the restorers. St. Nicholas and the other churches are all interesting for their art treasures. Near the THE BELFEY AT GHENT. Cathedral is the Belfey, 386 feet in height, and surmounted by a liuge gilt dragon brought from St. Sophia, at Constantinople, in 1204, by Count Baldwin IX. The mechanism of the chimes can be examined in the tower, the view from which embraces half Flanders. 44 GHENT. The B&htinage of Ghent is the largest in Belgium. The sisters, numbering some 700, bound by no monastic vow, devote themselves to a religious life, works of charity, and self-support. The whole attend vespers daily in the Church, and the service and sight are most interesting and impressive. Of the spacious market-places, with their mediaeval buildings forming a strange framework to the pictures of modern Flemish life they enclose, the Maechk du Vendeedi is the most characteristic. This was the rallying-point of the excitable Ghenters; when the Guilds assembled to avenge real or imaginary wrongs, here the standard of revolt was invariably raised. It con- tains a statue of Jacques Van Aetevelde, the famous 'Brewer of Ghent.' In the Maeche-Atrx-Poissons an old massive turreted gate- way marks the site and forms part of the original palace, the birth- place of John of Gaunt, 'time honoured Lancaster.' rspite of the American-looking steamers constantly churning its blue waters; in spite of the shrill railway whistle sounding' from either bank, and waking its charmed echoes; in spite of its modern castles, its modern towns, its modern touts, the dark probability of meeting one's tailor, and other signs and witnesses of a higher civilization that tend to strip it of some romance, the Rhine to most will probably afford more varied pleasure in the days allotted to it than can be crowded anywhere into the same time. Its craggy heights may boast no fairer dream of pastoral beauty than the Thames at Richmond. It may afford no such vision of might and majesty as the English river from the hill at Greenwich, as it springs into light and life from the quivering shadows of the Great City. It may possess nothing equal to the cool delights and dreamy charm of the Thames' upper reaches. But the Rhine is the Rhine. The wondrous river that has inspired misanthropic poets, subdued the sneers of scoffing cynics, evoked torrents of exalted gush from countless people who have 'done' it, and from more who have not. It may be seen, perhaps, through an atmosphere not altogether free from the motes of Brummagen romance and fustian chivalry; but it is still * a work divine, a blending of all beauties; streams and dells, fruit, foliage, crag, wood, cornfield, mountain, vine, and chiefless castles breathing stern farewells from gray but leafy walls, where Ruin greenly dwells.' From Rotterdam, the line by Utrecht to Cologne follows its ^flat shores and touches Aenheoc, Emmerich, Dusseldobf, where the river reaches its greatest width, and other towns upon its banks. From Cologne the railway runs on either bank through flat country as far as Bonn, where the beauties of the Rhine begin and end at Mayence, 40 COLOGNE. Cologne, the largest town in Rhenish Prussia, a fortress of the first class, and, with its 135,000 inhabitants, one of the most thriving commercial cities in Germany, has been wickedly libelled in its latter days. Its virgins, its relics, its score of original Eau-de-Cologne vendors, its forty denned and distinct smells, all have been the theme of much cruel satire and bitter jibes. Even the good Cologners are human, and if they take revenge upon the pockets of the third and fourth generations of those that scoffed them, long-suffering tourists can scarcely complain. The advice given by the cynic in Hood's * Up the Rhine,' was—' Don't wash or be shaved; go like hairy wild men, play dominoes, smoke, wear a cap, and frock-smock it, But if you speak English, or look like it, then Take care of your pocket—take care of your pocket.' Few may care to avail themselves of the disguise suggested^ but the final admonition may be remembered with profit. The system of licensed, or unlicensed, touting, common to most con- tinental cities, is met with, rampant and unrestrained, at Cologne. The first and last sight is, of course, the Cathedral. It is disappointing to find almost the whole of the exquisite shell shrouded with scaffolding, but it is maddening to the little-travelled visitor when, having discovered a door or corner free from poles and ladders, and a coign cf vantage in the narrow surrounding space whence to view it, he finds himself surrounded by an evil-smelling, evil-looking crowd of howl- ing harpies, redolent of garlic, and rich in vile English, unanimous in assuring him that without their aid he will fail to detect any beauties or see anything of the building whatsoever. The withering1 glance, the stony British stare, may be thrice directed, but without effect. The thundering no may be launched at their shock heads a hundred times and avail nothing. It stimulates them to fresh exer- tions. By dint of reiterated importunings, they think to weary you into passive submission. Indignation they ignore, anger they en- courage. There is but one way of swiftly ridding yourself of these irritating rascals. As they approach, affect a pleasant smile; beam upon them as they surround you, and allow the smile to break into ripples of low laughter as their clamorous entreaties increase. They don't understand this. Repeat it; then they slink away appalled and disappear into the dark corners as mysteriously as they came. In that place they will trouble you no more. The story of the Cathedral's slow growth has been a checkered one from the time of its foundation in 1248 to the end of the last century, when it wag COLOGNE. 47 converted by the French into a huge hay-loft. The work of restoring and completing the roofless, crumbling, dilapidated, and woe-begon© pile was begun in 1823, and since then upwards of £750,000 haa been spent upon it. SOUTH DOOE, COLOGNE CATHEDBAL. Above the bones St. Ursula owns, And those of the Virgin she chaperones, Above the boats, and the bridge that floats, And the Rhine, and the steamers' smoky throats, Above the chimneys and quaint tiled roofs, Above the clatter of wheels and hoofs, Above Newmarket's open space, Above that consecrated place Where the genuine bones of the Magi seen are, And the dozen shops of the real Farina, Higher even than old Hohestrasse— Whose houses threaten the timid passer, Above them all, through scaffolds tall— And spires like delicate limbs in splinter, 48 COLOGJTE. The great Cologne's Cathedral stones Climb through the storms of eight hundred winters. Unfinished there, in high mid-air, The towers halt like a broken prayer; Through years belated, unconsummated, The hope of its architect quite frustrated. Its very youth, they say, forsooth, With a quite improper purpose'mated; And every stone, with a curse of its own, Instead of that sermon Shakespeare stated— Since the day its choir—which all admire— By Cologne's Archbishop was consecrated.' The vast and splendid proportions of the interior, the glorious vistas of clustered pillars seen in the rich, dim half light, are happily free from the screen of scaffolding hiding so much of the exterior. Its solemn stillness, and the splendour of its endless aisles, its wondrous windows, its old worn floors and springing arches glowing with soft tints where the changed sunlight falls, its silent •chapels in the shadowy choir, its sacred relics and its gleaming gems— * Yes 8are, vare fine, sare, vare fine. And vare fine view from de tower, sare. I vill show you, sare, de tower. This vay, sare. Vare fine view from de tower.' In this fashion the raptures of the entranced visitor are cut short by one of the licensed tout tribe, starting from a pillar on his prey. The prey assumes the impurturbable smile, and indulges in low laughter—the ghoul returns to his hiding-place abashed and aghast. Enshrined in the eight chapels of the choir are many of Cologne's archbishops. Their saintly dust reposes under sculptured tombs. Among them rests Archbishop Conrad, of Hoch- staden, founder of the cathedral. The famous picture of ' The Adora- tion of the Magi' is in the chapel of St. Agnes. Under a stone, without inscription, in front 6f the Chapel of the Three Kings, lies buried the heart of Marie de Medicis. The sacred skulls of the Magi have been removed with their golden reliquary from this chapel to the Treasury. There, besides the grim coroneted pates of Gaspar, Melchoir, and Balthazzar, are glittering shrines and crosses, and mon- strances, and vessels of gold and silver, incrusted with precious stones and gleaming jewels innumerable. From the tower a splendid view is obtained of the teeming city and the winding Rhine away to the distant Seven Mountains. The other churches of Cologne are ancient, numerous, and characteristic. St. Peter's, containing a fine Rubeni?, 4 The Crucifixion of St. Peter;' St. Ursula, with the bones of that Saint and her eleven thousand virgins; St. Gebeon, with the bones of the Theban Legion of Martyrs; and St. Martin and St. Maeia im Capitole, of architectural interest, are among the chief. There B6NN. 40 ■are two museums—the Walleat-Richaetz Museum, 1 a fine modem "building, possessing a fair picture gallery, and a good collection of stained glass and antiquities; and the Archiepiscopal Museum, near the cathedral. The Zoological Gardens, one of the sights, are made a fashionable promenade. Another, on which Cologne prides itself, is the fine Iron Bridge that spans the Rhine to Deutz. Among the older buildings are the Rathhaus (Town Hall), with its old rooms, in which met the Hanseatic League, and the house in which Marie de Medicis died, and in which Rubens was not born. And worth inspec- tion is the well-preserved town wall, with its massive gate towers and broad fosses, guarded by the blue-coated, blonde-bearded, be- spectacled janitors of the * Sacred City,' Twenty miles by rail from Cologne is the pleasant university town of Bonn, the centre of many charming excursions, and marking the entrance of the picturesque portion of the Valley of the Rhine. Its broad streets are full of fine buildings, and the surrounding heights are dotted with pleasant villas, whose gardens slope to the river's ♦edge. The birthplace of Beethoven, his statue will be found in the Miinster-platz, and the house in which he was born in the Bonngasse. The Munster, a cruciform church of fine proportions, Museums of art and antiquities, and other collections in connection with the University, at which the late Prince Consort was a student, are among its more interesting buildings. The favourite promenades are the Hofgarten, with grand old avenues, and the Poppelsdorfer Alle, shaded with a triple row of chestnut trees, leading to the Poppels- dorfer* Schloss, once the palace of the Electors. Above, on the heights of Kbeuzbebg, peeps a white church possessing the Holy -Steps, constructed under Elector Clement Augustus. Twenty-eight in number, they may be ascended only with becoming reverence on ~the knees. To some the steps may be of less interest than the com- manding view from the tower of the church. Seven miles from Bonn, passing the village and castle of G-odesberg, Nourishes the little town of Konig-s winter.—Nestling at the foot of the Drachenfels, it Is the most convenient point for reaching any or all of the famed Seven Mountains. The Drachenfels commands the first of a magnificent .series of views obtained from the succeeding heights overhanging the :river. The castled crag of Drachenfels Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine, Whose breast of waters broadly swells Between the banks which bear the vine; 50 BOLAXDSECK. And hills all rich with blossom'd trees, And fields which promise corn and wine; And scatter'd cities crowning these, Whose far white walls along them shine. Hie easy ascent, made along good roads and bridle-paths, requires, mo guide. Half-way, among the vineyards, the wine from which is. called Dragon's Blood (Drachenblut), looms the cavern in which dwelt the dreadful Dragon, whose unconscionable appetite for the rare maidens of the valley evoked the dire vengeance of the valiant Siegfried. 4 The castle is built on the very edge of the precipice. 'From the river it looks hardly the height of a man's hand, but here, standing at its foot, one gazes up with awe to its castellated walls, rising seventy feet above the foundation. By what contrivances the masons executed their labour, the unskilled spectator, appalled by merely gazing downwards, cannot conceive, without calling in the help of the genii. Parts of the architecture are still whole; the steps to the keep may yet be ascended, and such bits of the masonry as remain are as solid as the rock on which they stand. It is a fearful feat to attempt to penetrate the chamber of the donjon. At one side there is an aperture accessible from the land, but only large enough to admit a person of small size; while on the side built up perpendicularly from the rock, the whole tower lies open, that portion having been rent away by storms.' From the G-t. Oelbebg, the highest of the moun- tains on the Lower Rhine, rising behind the Drachenfels, the view extends over the richly-wooded vine-clad tract of the Seven Mountains and the far windings of the river as far as Cologne. In the neigh- bourhood of the Oelbeig are the picturesque ruins of the Abbey op Heisterbach. From the summits of the Lowenbueg, the Petebsbeeg,, and the Stenzelbeeg, some new panorama of mountain, river, and valley is unfolded. On the east bank two miles from Konigswinter, past the dark heights of Honnef, is Jtolandseck, a beautiful and much frequented spot. Midway in the stream, forcing it into three rapid channels, are the islands of Gbafenwebth and Nonnenwebth, the latter with its ancient nunnery peeping above the fruit-trees. Perched on the peak of the height above the village, Roland's Abch, a ruin of the once lordly castle looks sadly down upon the silent convent. The plaintive legend of Roland and the fair Hildegunde which connects them, tells cf hearts and hopes of former inmates, ruined and changed as are those places now. Passing Obeewinteb on the right bank, from which there is a lovely COBLENTZ. 51 Tetrospective view of the Seven Mountains and the island dotted river, Remagen is reached, from which excursions up the beautiful Vallkt of the Ahe are made. On the opposite bank rises a basaltic peak— the Eepelee Lei, the vines growing on its jagged sides, thriving in (baskets of earth forced into the hard clefts. Passing Linz, interesting for its adjacent basalt quarries of Dattenbeeg and Mindeebebg, and Beohl on the right bank, and the ruined Castle of Hammeestein on the left; passing the restored Castle of Aeenfels the ancient little town of Aedeenach, Neuwikd (left), with its fine park and colony of Moravian Brothers, Weissenthuem, the spot at which Julius Caesar the island of nonnenweeth. is said to have crossed, and then the island of Neideeweeth, where JEdward HI. rested some time in 1337, the frowning fortress of JShrenbreitstein and the town of Coblentz loom in sight and mark another resting-place. Coblentz, the fortified capital and seat of government of the Rhenish province, with thirty thousand inhabitants, marks the con- fluence of the fair Moselle with the favoured Rhine. It is charmingly situated, filling the angle at the meeting of the two rivers. It is the •centre of the finest portion of the Rhine itself, and a favourite halting- place midway between Cologne and Mayence. In the warped and 52 CAPPELLEN. narrow streets of the ancient quarter nearest the Moselle are the chief public buildings of the city. The ancient church of St. Castoe,. dating from the twelfth century, and the only church of interest* is- here, and near it the antique Kaufhaus (Merchants' Hall), with the quaint figure below the clock, that rolls its goggle eyes with every beat of the pendulum, and opens its great mouth at every full hour. 'This figure is known through all the country as the "man in the CustomHouse," and when a friend in the country meets one in Coblentz, instead of saying, "How are all the good people of Coblentz?" he says, "How is the man in the Custom House?" Thus the giant has a great part to play in the town.' The modern quarter is laid out in spacious squares and shady avenues of fragrant limes. The breezy Rhine Pbomenade follows the bank of the river almost to the Latj- bach, about three miles out of Coblentz. The views here, and from the fortified heights overlooking the Moselle, and from the old bridge that crosses it, are varied and delightful, while that from the opposite heights of Ehrenbretstein, reached by the bridge of boats, is one of the finest on the river. The tremendous fortress on this precipitous rock, inaccessible on three sides, has been called the Gibraltar of the Rhine. Nearly two million pounds sterling are said to have already been expended upon it, and the works are still progressing. In spite of repeated and remorseless sieges, it has twice only fallen into the hands of the enemy. From Coblentz to Mayence the railway on both banks fringes the river. The first point of interest is Cappellen, four miles distant, a* small village at the foot of the royal and restored castle of Stolssenfels, which stands on the brink of a towering crag. It commands a far view of the fair and fertile valley of the Lahr. The chapel contains some good frescoes, and the rooms are shown in the castle which the Queen and Prince Albert occupied when they visited the King in 1845. Leaving Cappellen,. and passing on the left Obeblahnstein, the station for Ems, Braubach> commanded by the Castle of Maexbbueg, is reached. This, of all the fortresses that once frowned from every height along the Rhine, is the only one that has escaped destruction. After this the healthy, picturesquely-placed little town of Boppaed, from which many pleasant excursions may be made to the surrounding wooded heights. Two miles above it on the left bank lies Camp, from which the famous Castles of Stebbenbebg and Lieben- sxein, known as The Brothers, are easily reached. This is the story of The Brothers: * A great, great many years ago, an old man lived in the liebenstein with his two sons; and both the young men loved- CAMP. 53 the Lady Geraldine, an orphan under their father's care. The elder son went away in despair, and the younger was hetrothed to the Lady G-eraldine, and they were as happy as Aschenputtel and the prince. And then the holy St. Bernard came and carried away all the young men to the war, just as Napoleon did afterwards; and the young lord went to the Holy Land, and the Lady G-eraldine sat in her tower and wept, and waited for her lover's return, while the old father built the Sterrenberg for them to live in when they were married, and when it was finished .the old man died; and the elder brother came back and lived in the Liebenstein and took care of the gentle lady. Ere *THE BEOTHEES.' long there came news from the Holy Land that the war was over, and the heart of the gentle lady beat with joy, till she heard that her faithless lover was coming back with a Greek wife—the wicked man! —and then she went into a convent and became a holy nun. So the young lord of Sterrenberg came home and lived in his castle in great splendour with the Greek woman, who was a wicked woman, and did what she ought not to do. But the elder brother was angry for the wrong done to the gentle lady, and challenged the lord of Sterrenberg to single combat. And while they were fighting with their great swords in the valley of Bornhofen, behind the castle, the convent 54 ST. GOAB. bells began to ring, and the lady Geraldine came forth with a train •of nuns all dressed in white and made the brothers friends again, and told them she was the bride of heaven, and happier in her convent ithan she could have been in the Liebenstein or the Sterrenberg. And when the brothers returned they found the false Greek wife had gone ;&way with another knight; so they lived together in peace and were never married.' From Camp, passing Salzig in the midst of vast cherry orchards, . and Welmich with its ruins of Thubmbebg, called the Mouse, nine miles up the river is the handsome little town of _ St. Goar, backed by the sombre and striking ruins of the Rbein- fels. On the opposite, bank, above the tiny village of St. GrOAR- hattsen, stands the Cat Castle, at the entrance of the pretty 4 Swiss Valley.' Above St. G-oar the river narrows, and foams in whirling -eddies and fierce rapids between towering rOcks that overshadow the rushing stream. On the left, jutting darkly into the river, rise the precipitous echoing rocks of the charmed Luelei. The legend is as a tale that is told, but an English rendering of Heine's dainty version jnay be welcomed by some readers:— The air chills, day is declining, And smoothly Rhine's waters run, And the peaks of the mountains are shining . Aloft in the setting sun. A maiden of wondrous seeming Most beautiful, see, sits there; Her jewels in gold are gleaming, She combs out her golden hair. "With a comb of red gold she parts it, And stiH as she combs she sings; As the melody falls on our hearts, it With power as of magic stings. With a spasm the boatman hears it Out there in his little skiff: He sees not the reef as he nears it; He only looks up to the cliff! The waters will sweep, I am thinking, O'er skiff, ay, and boatman ere long; And this is, when daylight is sinking, What Lorley did with her song. To Obebwesel the river presents a succession of charming views, .-and this ancient picturesque walled town forms another pleasant halt- ing-place. Above it frowns the massive ruined castle of Schonbubg. JPassing Catjb, surrounded by sombre slate cliffs, crowned by the castle MAYENCE. 55 of Gtjtenfels, a little above the town, in mid-stream rises the PpALzr a small quaint stronghold, said to have been one of the numerous * toll houses,' from which black mail was impartially levied on passing vessels by the baronial robbers of the Rhine in the bad old chivalric days. From Bachaeach, a mile or two further up, crumbling ruin upon ruin crowns the vine-clad rocks as far as Assmannshattsen, whence the ferry crosses to the castle of Rheinstein. Restored in mediaeval- style, it is interesting on this account, and for its collection of armour and antiquities. Above Assmannshausen are the rapids of Binges Loch,. overlooked by the tower of Eheenfels. Then on a quartz rock in mid-stream the Mouse Towee, the subject of Southey's Ballad. Here the valley of the Rhine widens into the rich and smiling district of the^ Rhinegatt, the garden of Germany, whose vine-clad heights produce some of the rarest of the world's vintages. From Bingen, roman- tically situated at the commencement of the Rhinegau, where the Nahe mingles its troubled waters with the Rhine, to the opposite vineyards of Rttdesheim and Prince Metternich's chateau and vine- yards of Johannisbeeg, many pleasant excursions are to be made in this sunny region of the grape. Ascending to Geisenheim, where the stream is at its widest, and to Biebeich, the station for Wies- baden and Frankfort, Mayence is reached, nineteen miles from Bingen. Mayence, the once famous archiepiscopal capital, with the premier* prince of the German Empire for its primate, at present one of the- most important Prussian fortresses is more particularly interesting to the tourist as marking the termination of the picturesque portion of the valley of the Rhine. Having seen the massy, mediaeval- Cathedeal, with its ponderous red sand-stone walls scarred by shot and shell in past sieges, and its restored and glowing interior, con- taining, among numberless tombs of the city's great departed, the sepulchre of the wife of Charlemagne; this and the Towee op- Dbustts, and the * sights' proper of Mayence are exhausted. The antique Tower, supposed to have been erected by the Roman Legions- in about the year 9 B.C., in honour of Drusus Germanicus, is near the citadel. It affords a fine view of the town, and the winding Main, flowing through a luxuriant district of glowing vineyards, bounded, by the Taunus mountains; and the Rhine as it sweeps on to and. is lost amidst the purple mountains of the Rhinegau. To Mayence ithe world is partly indebted for the printing press. Gutenburg, one of its earliest inventors, was born at No. 23, Emmerans Gasse, which bears the inscription i Hof zum Gensfleisch.' Thorwaldsen's statue, of the printer is in the Gutenburg Platz, near the Cathedral. The- 56 public gardens, overlooking the Rhine.form the fashionable promenade, where on Wednesday afternoons the townsfolk and crowds from the environs come to listen to the music of the regimental bands. Mayence is a central and convenient point of departure by a choice of routes for Vienna, for the Brenner Pass (Italy), and for Basle (Switzerland), along either bank of the Upper Rhine. MAYENCE TO BASLE (East Bank). Darmstadt, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the first place of any note after leaving Mayence, although a new and torpid town, has a sad interest for English travellers as the last home of our Princess Alice. For its broad streets, spacious squares, and pleasant pleasure-grounds, it is indebted to the Grand Duke Louis I., who died in 1830. The column supporting his statue, erected in 1844 by 4 his grateful people,' commands a good view of the surrounding wooded country. The restored castle (Residenzschloss) contains a fine library of nearly half-a-million volumes, and a Pictube Gallery with some 700 works by old and modern masters, including examples, good, bad, and questionable, of Rubens, Rembrandt, Raphael, Vandyck, Holbein, and Velasquez. The Palace of Pbince Charles contains a celebrated Madonna by Holbein. The fir forests and woods in the neighbourhood of Darmstadt afford some pleasant excursions and drives. Passing through Mannheim, a city built in sections like the squares of a chess-board, and connected by a railway bridge on the Rhine with Ludwigshafen on the Strasburg line, at the entrance of the rugged valley of the Neckar, the University town of ■ Heidelberg" is reached. The renowned castle, crowning the heights, more famous now in its green decay than in the proudest days of its strength and splendour, is reached in half-an-hour from the town. Founded and extended by the Counts Palatine in the thirteenth century, and fortified by the electors of the fifteenth, glorified by the addition of its palatial parts by the electors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, restored after the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, and held by the French during the claim of Louis XIV. to the Palatinate, it was remorselessly wrecked at the approach of the German armies in 1689. The elements completed its final destruction. In 1764 the ruined stronghold was struck by lightning, leaving the poor shadow of its former greatness in the ivy-clad walls that still inspire poets, and kindle the enthusiasm of the historical student as well as the lover of the picturesque. HEIDELBERG-. 57 'High and hoar on the forehead of the Jettenbuhl stands the: castle of Heidelberg. Behind it rise the oak-crested- hills of the- G-eissberg and the Kaiserstuhl; and in front, froia the broad terrace of masonry, you can almost throw a stone upon the roofs of the town, so close do they lie beneath. Above this terrace rises the broad front of the chapel of Saint TJdalrich. On the left stands the slender octagon tower of the horologe; and, on the right, a huge round tower, battered and shattered by the mace of war, shores up with its broad shoulders the beautiful palace and garden-terrace of Elizabeth, wife of the Pfalzgraf Frederick. In the rear are older palaces and towers, forming a vast, irregular quadrangle; Rodolph's ancient castle, with its Gothic gloriette and fantastic gables; the Giant* s. FAgADE OF THE PALACE OF OTHO HENRY. Tower, guarding the drawbridge over the moat; the Rent Tower, with the linden-trees growing on its summit, and the magnificent Rittersaal of Otho Henry, Count Palatine of the Rhine and grand seneschal of the Holy Roman Empire. From the gardens behind the castle, you pass under the archway of the Giant's Tower, into the great courtyard. The diverse architecture 6f different ages strikes the eye, and curious sculptures. In niches, in the wall of Saint Udalrich's chapel stand rows of knights , in armour, all broken and dismembered; and on the front of Otho's Rittersaal, the heroes of Jewish history and classic fable. You enter the open and desolate chambers of the ruin, and on every side are'medallions and family* BADEN. sarins; the Globe of the .Empire and the Golden Fleece, or the Eagle of the Caesars, resting on the escutcheons of Bavaria and the Palati- nate. Over the windows and doorways and chimney-pieces are sculptures and mouldings of exquisite workmanship; and the eye is bewildered by the profusion of caryatides, and arabesques, and rosettes, ^and fan-like flutings, and garlands of fruits, and flowers, and acorns, and bullocks' heads, with draperies of foliage, and muzzles of lions, Tiolding rings in their teeth. The cunning hand of art was busy for jfiix centuries in raising and adorning these walls; the mailed hands of time and war have defaced and overthrown them in less than two. Next to the Alhambra of Granada, the Castle of Heidelberg is the most magnificent ruin of the middle ages. * In the valley below flows the rushing stream of the Neckar. •Olose from its margin, on the opposite side, rises the mountain of All Saints, crowned with the ruins of a convent; and up the valley stretches the mountain-curtain of the Odenwald. So close and many are the hills, which eastward shut the valley in, that the river seems a lake. But westward it opens upon the broad plain of the Rhine, like the mouth of a trumpet; and like the blast of a trumpet is at times the wintry wind through this narrow mountain pass. The blue Alsatian hills rise beyond; and, on a platform or strip of level land, between the Neckar and the mountains, right under the castle, stands the town of Heidelberg; as the old song says, "a pleasant town, when it has done raining.''' Passing through Beuchsal (where the line branches for Munich ^and the Brenner) and Caelsetthe, the capital of the Grand Duchy, a -clean, cheerful city built in the shape of a fan, Oos is reached, from ^which ten minutes by rail on a branch line is Baden.—lu spite of the suppression of its gaming tables Baden- Baden remains one of Europe's most fashionable lounging places. 'The solemn matutinal draughts of strong water or weak whey swallowed at its Tbihkhall to the waltz music of Strauss; the gay afternoon concerts in front of the gorgeous Convebsationshaus; the luxurious baths in the sumptuous Fbiedbichsbad; the weekly balls; the special Wednesday performances; the matinees musicales; the promenades in the pleasant grounds by the cool banks of the Oos, or in the brave avenue of oaks, limes, and maples of the shady Xichtenth A LEE Allee; the delightful drives among the lower pine- •clad hills of the Black Forest, that shelter the town from the heats of .summer, and protect it from the blasts of winter; the longer excur- sions to the old castle, to the High Rocks, to the Devil's Pulpit, and the Roman tower of Ebebsteinbtjbg, or to the Favourite—the *Grand Duke's chateau, among the woods of Ktjppenheim; these are the never-failing resources of the great German Spa. The dilettante and the diseased, real or imaginary, and the popular crowd who -crowd ro.ind the select crowd, bring up the number of annual FREIBTTBG. Tisitors, during the season from July to September, to the respectable^ total of fifty thousand. From Baden the line runs through the vast and fertile plain of Hanau between the heights of the Black Forest and the Rhine Valley, a pastoral district where the old tastes and picturesque costumes of the pea- santry are still seen. Sixty-six miles nearer Basle from Baden is Freiburg1, stand- ing at the entrance into the HoLLENTHAL (Valley of HeU), and embowered in vine- yards in one of the prettiest spots fring- ing the Black Forest. From the town, re- markable for its old Gothic Minsteb, which rivals that of Strasburg* for the airy grace and exquisite tracery of its tower, and as the birthplace of the Franciscan monk Barthold Schwarz, a claimant to*» the discovery of 'villainous saltpetre,' many easy and expeditious excursions may be made into the most interesting and picturesque portions of the Black Forest. From Freiburg, after passing through- Mollheim, the rail skirts for some distance the Rhine bank, and in, about two hours after leaving the old Breisgau capital arrives at Basle. PEASANTS OF HANAIT. MAYENCE TO BASLE (West Bank), From Mayence to Oppenheim, and thence to "Worms, 27J miles,, the rail partly skirts the Rhine, past the wine-producing villages' nestling on its eastern vineclad slopes. Worms, an antique and once imperial city, lies in the fertile plain* of the Wonnegau, nearly a mile from the Rhine. It was herer at the Imperial Diet of 1521, and before the Emperor Charles V.r STRASBURG. that Luther made his celebrated defence-—* Here I stand; I cannot act otherwise; God help me! Amen,' concluded the Reformer. On the north side of the massive Romanesque Cathedral is the doorway which led into the Episcopal Palace where the Diet was held. Of the building only part of the foundations remain. In the Luther-Platz rises the imposing memorial of Luther. The Monument took nine years to execute, and cost about £17,000. The heroic and emphatic figure of the Reformer * is surrounded by a row of bold spirits, who before, or along with him had fought the last struggle for the freedom of the Reformation, or were privileged to promote it in various posi- tions of life.' Fourteen miles from Worms is Ludwigshafen, connected with the east bank of the Rhine, and with branch lines to Strasburg, by Weissenbttro, where, in 1870, the Crown Prince of Prussia gained the decisive victory over the French under Douay, or by Speyer, which possesses the grandest Romanesque Cathedral, with fine modern frescoes, in Germany. Strasburg.—The important fortified capital of Alsace and Lor- raine—a thriving business centre between France, Germany, and Switzerland—once ranking as the third great French arsenal, and now being restored and engirdled by German outworks of enormous strength, Strasburg is chiefly associated in the traveller's mind with bilious pates, a beautiful Cathedral, and beer. Strasburg has the characteristics of an old German town, tinged with a slight glow of French polish gained from two centuries of Gallic dominion. It has been described as a sort of civic cross between German and French, with a slight sprinkling of Dutch canals flowing through its veins of streets. * In nearly the centre of the city stands the Cathedral, founded originally in 504. The present building was 3t their cunning. Since 1806, when the old place T^ecame a Bavarian city, it has partially revived. All the toys styled ' Dutch,' but made in the Thuringian forest, come through Nuremberg. It produces some two hundred million lead pencils ■every year, and a multitude of mirrors and baubles in brass and bronze, and carved trifles in wood and ivory to boot. Time has dealt gently with the witnesses of its ancient prowess. Brown, broken walls and crumbling towers still encircle the city Tike some battered coronet on a fallen king. The old ramparts, the deep wide fosse, the towering citadel, and the massive gates guarded "by pointed loppholed turrets, bear mute eloquence to its feudal might. Its quaint streets, flanked by the once palatial mansions of its merchant nobles, its high, gabled houses with oriel windows, encrusted with rich carving and heavy ornament, its grand churches and civic halls, its antique monuments, and tall fantastic fountains, 64. NTJBEMBEEG-. rarely wrought in stone and hammered metal, tell sadly of great days departed, andiUumine the blurred,record of its past renown. The town is divided by the narrow Pegnitz into two parts, which are named after the two great churches situated within them; the Horthern the St. Sebald side, the Southern the St. Lawrence side. St. Laweence—the finest of the Nuremberg Churches—con- tains the wondrous Saceamentshauslein. 'This pix or tabernacle for the vessels of the sacrament, by the hand of Adam Krafft, is an exquisite piece of sculpture in white stone, and rises to a height of sixty-four feet. It stands in the choir, whose richly-painted windows- cover it with varied colours. The famed Volkamebsche window is considered one of the most magnificent examples of stained glass in existence. In the Church of St. Sebald, the Sheine op St. Sebaldtjs. —one of the richest works of art in Nuremberg—is of bronze, and was cast by Peter Visches and his sons, who. laboured upon it for fourteen years. It is adorned with nearly a hundred figures, among which those of the Apostles' are conspicuous for size and beauty. The Schreyersche Entombment, one of Krafft's master works; the Tucher Memorial, by Hans Holbein, the wood-carving by Albert Durer, Krafft's beautiful reliefs of the Lord's Supper in the choir, the colossal bronze crucifix at the west end, weighing nearly a ton, claim admiring attention. Opposite St. Sebald's is the old Bathhatts, the finest town haH in Germany, with some pictures by Albert Durer; and the Moeitz Kapelle with its choice collection of old Flemish and German masters, and Durer's 4 Ecce Homo.' *t!o the north' of these by the city wall, on a rocky eminence, rises the Kaiseebueg or Castle, once the residence of the Emperors, and the abode of the present King when he visits the city. In the courtyard there still flourishes a venerable lime, propped and carefully tended in its drooping age, said to have been planted by the Empress Kunig- unde, wife of Henry II., in about 1014. The Audience Hall is hung* with pictures. Among them are portraits of Luther by Holbein, and his wife by Lucas Kranach. The Castle commands a rare view of Nuremberg and all the country round. In one of the towebs on the north-west walls, with other instruments of torture, is the Ieon* VmHN, a colossal figure in the costume of the fifteenth century. On touching a spring, says * Murray,' the front, consisting of two massive doors, gradually opens, disclosing the inner side studded with iron spikes, which penetrated the victim who was thrust into its embrace. Through a trap-door in the floor the dead body was 'afterwards' dropped into oblivion* < Ambn^* the' endless objects of interest "associated' with' art and REGENSBURG/. 65 ^its workers are the collection of antiquities and Kaulbaeh's mnral painting of Otho III. discovering the enthroned body of Charle- magne in the vault of Aix-la-Chapelle Cathedral, and the por- trait of Hyeronymus Holzschuher, a masterpiece of Durer's, in the German Museum; Durer's house, preserved with reverent care, and his grave in the Johannis Churchyard, surrounded by the tombs of Hans Sachs, Veit Stoss, and many of Nurem- berg's departed great; the Stations of the Cross along the road leading to the Churchyard by Adam Krafft, and many rare bits of the master's skill dispersed over the town; the Beautiful THE WALLS OF NUREMBERG. Fountain (der Schone Brunnen) and the Man and G-eese Fountain (Gansemannchen) in the Haupt Markt, and the adjacent Roman Catholic richly-sculptured Frauenkirche, dating from the four- teenth century, and possessing a curious clock, made in 1509, but, as * Black' states with happy euphonism, 'which has ceased to go.' From Nuremberg the line runs through Regensburg (87 miles), built on the banks of the 'blue Danube,* possesses in the Dom of St. Peter's a masterpiece of German archi- tecture, magnificently restored; there is an antique Rathhaus, with ite D 66 VIENNA. torture chambers and their implements intact, as in the good old days; and the Walhalle, a temple built on a distant height above the* Danube, after the Parthenon at Athens, by Ludwig I. of Bavaria, in 1842, in honour of eminent Germans of all ages and conditions, whose marble busts are enshrined in its sculptured and polished marble walls. The route is continued through Passatt, a frontier town near the Austrian border, beautifully placed on the Danube at the junction of the Inn and Hz, and thence to Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, om a delightful portion of the Danube, from which, 117 miles east, lies VIENNA, There are those—and they are neither few nor without influence im the world of politics or letters—who pronounce the city which lies on the Danube Canal by far the superior, even of queenly Paris, in all that conduces to the enjoyment of life. Vienna has, with all the- comforts of modern life and with all the splendour of new boulevards, antique attractions in which Lutetia can hardly rival her. Then instead of the prim and trim Bois de Boulogne, we have the wild and enjoyable Prater; in place of the muddy Seine the magnificent Blue Donau—the Mississippi of Europe; and for those who have the- eutree into society Vienna eclipses both London and Paris in the real enjoyment and the i good intent9 that pervades the upper world. For young medical men or students there is no capital in Europe that offers equal attractions. A smattering of *high Dutch' will enable a budding 3C.D. to pick up more practical teaching in Vienna in one session than in either Paris or London in three. Then out- door life in the Austrian capital is as pleasant as in any part of Italy or the South of France, and far more pleasant than in Paris or Berlin. The cooking is the one drawback to the city of St. Stephen; but even this can be circumvented by patronising certaim easily found restaurants where Caviare is not produced unless asked for, and grease can no more be detected in the dishes than it can in the Oafe Anglais on the Italian Boulevard beloved of Britons 'to- Paris and back.' The environs of Vienna exceed in beauty those of any European capital, London only excepted, and a run of a few hours places the tourist in the midst of the Yrai Orient, to which Vienna is the principal gateway from the West. If economy is an object, in no European capital can life be enjoved'more cheaply than in Leopoldstadt, and in no city are the hotels more splendid for those whose purses are well stocked. WIENNA. 6? The Viennese ding to the old 2 68 YJMWSA. in height, commands a far view of the Danube, and Napoleon's- famous battle-fields of Lobau, Wagram, and Essling. In the adjacent Church of the Capucines (KapuzinerHrche), in the Neue Markt, the present burial vault of the Imperial family is shown by one of the brothers. Resting among the departed of the Royal' House of Austria, who have been laid here since 1619, are pointed' out the coffins of the son of the First Napoleon and the ill-fated Maximilian of Mexico. The hearts of the Austrian princes are preserved in urns in the Loretto Chapel of the Augustine Church (Augustiner Kirche), which, in the Mausoleum of the Archduchess Maria Christina, possesses one of Canova's masterworks. Thi& church adjoins the Imperial Palace (Kaiserliche Burg), a strag- gling and spacious pile, containing much of Vienna's art treasures. The whole of the south side forms the Imperial Library, a rare and magnificent collection of some 300,000 volumes and precious manuscripts. The curious may see among its countless treasures the worn and thumbed prayer-book of Charles V., the Psalm book, printed in gold, of Charlemagne, the MS. of the 5th decade of Livy from which that part of his history is printed,, Tasso's manuscript of 1 Jerusalem Delivered' the famous Tabula Peutigeriana, a map of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, copied on parchment in the 13th century. Its collection of Oriental manu- scripts is the richest in Europe. Attached to the Library is one of the finest collections of engravings and etchings and sketches existing. Among its 300,000 works are sketches of Raphael, the Caracci, Diirer, Rembrandt," Vandyck, and the earlier Italian and German masters. The Treasury, in the Schweizerhof, the older portion of the palace, possesses some remarkable jewels and relics. Among its treasures are the Austrian regalia, and the regalia of Charlemagne—the crown sceptre, orb, dalmatia, gloves, and shoes used at the coronation of the German Emperors for centuries, and said to have been found with the- body of Charlemagne in the vault of Aix-la-Chapelle Cathedral. Then there are a holy spear, some nails of the true Cross, a piece of the Cross itself, a snuff-box of Prince Kaunitz, a tooth of St. John the Baptist, the silver-gilt cradle of the King of Rome, weighing 5 cwt., a portion of the table-cloth used at the Last Supper, the crown, sceptre, and robes worn by Napoleon at his coronation at Milan, a piece of the coat of St. John the Evangelist, several quaint 'Nuremberg egg' watches, the celebrated diamond, once the property of Charles the Bold, of Burgundy, weighing 133 carats, of enormous Value, and a glittering collection of the decorations of various- VIENNA. THE CROSSING SWEEPER. orders, and countless jewels of inestimable worth. The NATtraM. History Cabinet, the Mineeai Cabinet, and the Cabinet oar Coins and Antiquities containing a celebrated gold salt-cellar, made by Benvenuto Cellini, for Francis I., are each valuable and unique collections. Attached to the palace are the Hofgarten and the ever-thronged Volksgarten. Its brick temple, built in imitation of the marble "V Theseus, at Athens, contains Canova's celebrated group of The- seus killing the Minotaur. Leaving the palace, passing by the superb new Opera Houses, crossing the Opera Ring, the bridge over the Wein, and traversing the RennWeg, on the right, an imperial cha teau, divided by gardens into the Upper and Lower Belvedere, is reached. In the Upper is the great Picture Gallery, with nearly 2,000 works. The paint- ings are arranged in schools, and bear the artists' names. Many belonged to Charles I. of Eng- land. There is the Rembrandt Saloon, the Van Dyck Saloon, the Teniers Saloon, the Rubens Saloon, [the saloons containing the Venetian, the Florentine, the Roman, the Bolognese, the Neapolitan, the old German and Flemish, and the new German Schools. A mere cursory exami- nation of this well classified and instructively arranged collection will take several mornings., TM© Lower Belvedere contains the Ahbras Collection of armour and arms of renowned knights and nobles of the sixteenth century, and nearly 1,200 historical portraits, many indifferent works of art, but of deep interest to tibe * brother.' 70 ETOTTG/ABT. student and to the historian. Kot far from the Belvedere is the great castellated Abmouby, where the workshops may be inspected, and a collection of implements—offensive and defensive—connected with 1 villianous saltpetre' from its introduction into Europe until the present enlightened days. The other museums of Vienna are numerous and interesting, and its many private Picture Galleries are generously thrown open by their owners. After the lordly Prateb and the lively city gardens, the place most beloved of Vien- nese is Schdnbrunn, in close vicinity. i At Schonbetjnn is the summer palace of the Emperor, and as this is surrounded by very beautiful gardens, at all times freely open to the public, the place is a great resort of the Viennese, and is as full of hotels and lodging-houses and holiday folk as Bichmond or Hampton Court. On a summer evening the road is thronged with carriages of all descriptions—the rakish four-in-hand of the Hungarian noble, with its gaily-coloured jingling horses and picturesque groom; the steady, precise carriage belonging to foreign embassies; the rattling little Jiacre with a full load, or cumbrous omnibuses carrying sixteen inside. In fact, the throng commences at eleven in the morning and lasts till eleven at night. On the road is the summer theatre, and a hundred bands are playing at as many casinos in the neighbourhood.' MAYENCE TO THE BRENNER PASS. For those proceeding to Italy from the Rhine the best and most interesting route is on the right bank of the river by Darmstadt and Heidelberg (pp. 56-8) as far as Bkuchsal. Here the direct line branches to Munich and the Brenner. Sixty-eight miles from Bruchsal is Stuttgart, the pleasant and finely-situated Court capital of Wurtemburg. Of its six hundred acres of palaces, the only one worth seeing is the modern King's Palace (Residenz des Kbnigs). It has rooms as numerous as the year has days, and statuary by Canova, Thorwaldsen, and Dannecker, and frescoes, and old tapestries, and two or three miles of gardens. The Konigsbatt, a vast building, which combines Bourse, reading-rooms, and concert- hall in one, the Public Libeaey, with some 300,000 volumes, and countless Bibles in endless languages, and the Pine Abt Galleeies (containing many indifferent pictures and some good sculpture) are its chief 'sights.' Initspicturesque environs are Berg and Cahnstatt, two xriiM. 71 cheerful spas whose acidulous waters are freely swallowed under the hallowed conditions of all German watering places. Forty-two miles- from Stuttgart is "01m, a quaint old fortified Swabian town on the Danube, inter- esting for itself and for its magnificent Mtjnsteb, the second largest German Cathedral, and considered the finest Protestant 'place of worship' on the Continent. The wondrous Tabernacle, by the high altar, a triumphal masterwork in sculptured stone, mounting to the high roof until the fragile outline of its exquisite tracery is lost in dim light, rivals Master Krafft's famous Tabernacle at Nuremberg. The huge organ, with 7,000 pipes, is the largest in Germany. From TJlmy Augsburg is 55 miles. The Augusta Vindelicorum of the Romans, at present ranking after Frankfort as the greatest Continental money market, Augsburg, during the Middle Ages, was the trading centre between Northern Europe and the Levant, and ranked among the great commercial cities of the world. In those days the daughters of its wealthy citizens were given in marriage to the proudest of Europe's princes. The patrician house of Fiigger, the Rothschilds of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, could name forty-seven counts and countesses of the Empire among its members, at a time when it traced back its origin, within the half-century, to a simple Augsburg weaver. Here were enacted the famous Diets. The old Archiepis- copal Palace still exists, in which the historical 'Confession of Faith r was presented to Charles V. by Luther and Melancthon. The Emperor required the confession to be recited. in Latin. The Reformers refused * because they were Germans, standing on German ground.' By the Diet of 1555 a religious peace was first concluded, and the blunt Lutherans obtained that tolerance for which they had fought so sturdily and long. Like many of the old German towns, Augsburg retains much of the outward semblance of its former greatness. The rich mediaeval architecture of its houses, the decaying magnificence of its mansions, yet adorned with faded and falling frescoes, and the crumbling glory of its civic palaces, are seen in a single stroll through its great street, the Maximilians Strasse, that traverses the city from end to end. The Cathedral and the Bishop's Palace adjoining it; the Town Hall, dating from the early part of the 17th century; the Picture Galleby, containing some fine examples of the elder Holbein, a native of Augsburg; the Deei Mohben Inn, formerly part of the Fiigger Mansion where the Banqueting Hall in which Charles V. was entertained by the princely merchant, Count Anthony Fiigger are among its oldest and most interesting buildings. 72 MUNICH. [From a mediocre German town, uiimviting and uninteresting half a century ago, Munich, has sprung into a sumptuous city unmatched in Grermany and unique among the cities of the world as a professed national nursing centre of native art. Under poet-princes, who com- bine in 4 a lesser degree' something of the splendour of a Pericles with the cultivated taste of a Lorenzo de Medicis, the Bavarian capital in two generations has been glorified into one of the great show cities of Europe. And dependent upon no stable industry nor on the fruits of the soiTfor its progress, under a father and son, it has quadrupled its population and become the acknowledged metropolis of Southern Grermany. There are those who sneer at modern Munich and point to the aesthetic efforts of its princely founders as the imita- tive faculty run mad. They tell you the new Konigsbau Palace is but a feeble copy of the Pitti Palace, at Florence; the triumphal Seiges Thor only a second-hand edition of the Arch of Constantine; the Hall of the Marshals merely an attenuated repetition of the Loggia de' Lanzi; the Church of St. Boniface nothing more than a servile imitation of St. Paul's at Rome; the Court chapel a paltry cross between the Chapel of the Medici and a dwarfed St. Mark's at Venice. They jeer at its miles of modern already-fading frescoes and its acres of historical canvasses. They accuse the Bavarian monarch of seeking to draw a pictorial parallel between his ancestors* himself, and his subjects, and the greatest sons of Greece and Rome in their most glorious days. But these artistic or architectural incongruities, imagined or real, while provoking the few have pleased the many. The travelling public, year by year, crowds more to the city on the Isar, attracted by its priceless art treasures and its unique individuality. Munich, like most German capitals, has had a history. It was taken once by Gustavus Adolphus, it has been taken three times by the Austrians, and once by the French under Moreau. But .the tourist of to-day sees few mementoes of the past. He will regard Munich chiefly as an art centre. The traffic of the city is focussed in the Max Josephs platz. The spacious square, adorned with the Monument of King Max Joseph, is flanked by the Royal Palace. This vast and splendid pile is made up of the Alte Residenz dating from the seventeenth century, arid two modern wings—the Konigsbau and the Festsaalbau. The KoNiasBA.tr was built for Kong Lewis in 1835, after the famous Pitti Palace. AH the wealth and resources of modern art have been MUNICH. 7& lavished with an unsparing hand upon its interior. Walls and ceilings are glowing masses of magnificent colour. The floors are inlaid with rich variegated woods. Adorned with frescoes, paintings and sculptures by Zimmermann, Kaulbach, Schwanthaler and others who worked eon amore, under the guidance of their patron prince, an ensemble is produced probably unsurpassed outside the Vatican. The apartments on the ground floor are covered with the Nibelungen frescoes, illustrating the national German epic. Commencing with the entrance hall, where the chief personages and leading incidents of the poem are portrayed, the romance runs its pictorial course through the Marriage Hall, the Hall of Treachery, the Hall of Revenge, and the Hall of Mourning. The apartments on the first floor are occupied by the King. The King's rooms are covered with paintings in encaustic, illustrating subjects from the Greek poets, the friezes representing scenes from Pindar. In the Queen's rooms the subjects are taken from German poets. On the second floor is the handsome ball-room and its adjoining Blumensaal, or Hall of Flowers, leading to the Hof Theatre. The Festsaai^au (building of festive halls), built in 1842, in the later Renaissance style, contains the great State apartments. The lower saloons are decorated with encaustic mural paintings from the Odyssey, after designs by Schwanthaler. Leading from the stately ball-room, painted in the Pompeian style, are the banqueting room, with battle scenes from the war of 1805-14; the Hall of Beauties, with por- traits of Bavaria's loveliest women; and three halls preceding the Throne Room, adorned with large historical paintings represent- ing the chief events in the lives of Charlemagne, Barbarossa, and Rudolf of Hapsburg. Between the twelve white pillars of the Throne Room itself stand twelve colossal gilt bronze figures of the ancestors of the House of "Wittlesbad, from Otho the Illustrious to Charles XII. of Sweden. The Alte Residenz is shown but is less interesting. The Court Chapel (Allerheilige Kirche) is built" in the most sumptuous Byzantine style. Its walls are encrusted. with precious marble, its arches rest on variegated marble pillars, and the upper walls and cupolas are adorned with fine frescoes on a ground of glowing gold. The open arcades of the Palace Gardens are. covered with several thousand feet of frescoes, painted chiefly as experiments by young native artists during the,lifetime of King Lewis. The chief of the city's countless art treasures rest in the Glyptothek, the Old and New Pinakothek and the Bavarian National Museum. The Glyptothek (Sculpture Gallery) was erected by King Lewis J. for the collection he had made while Crown Prince. The earlier 74 MUNICH. rooms" are* devoted to Egyptian and Early Greek and Etruscan antiquities, and the valuable marbles discovered in the island of ^Egina in 1811, purchased by the King for £6,000. The Hall of Bacchus contains the famous sleeping or Barberini Faun, discovered, as Gibbon states, 'on clearing out the ditch of the Castle of St. Angelo at Borne, and formerly the tomb of Hadrian, into which it had no doubt been thrown by the Greeks under Belisarius, who defended the castle against the Goths, a.d. 537, by hurling down the statues on the heads of the assailants.' Following these are the Hall of Niobe, the Hero Hall, the sumptuous Boman Hall, and the Hall of Modern Sculpture, with an Adonis and a bust of the late King by Thorwaldsen. The Old Pinaxothex contains nearly 1,500 paintings of the old masters, perfectly lighted and faultlessly arranged in 9 saloons and 23 cabinets* They are classified according to their schools, and these again according to their period. The Rubenb saloon contains 95 of the master's works. The New Pinaxothek has some 300 modern pictures, chiefly of native artists, and a fine collection of paintings on china, copied from many of the best works in the old gallery. Germany has no museum to compare with the National Bavarian Museum in point of interest, completeness, or size* For years old castles, churches and palaces have been ransacked, and the treasures of suppressed monasteries ruthlessly requisitioned, to swell the splended display, and render the collection not national alone in name but in fact. From loathsome instruments of torture which curdle one's blood to glance at, to altar pieces, rare curios, and art works of perfect beauty, there is, as in poor Artemus "Ward's museum, an 4 endless variety.' The History of Bavaria is told on its walls in a series of a hundred and fifty fresco paintings, covering an area of some sixteen thousand square feet. The churches of Munich are numerous, and some are beautiful. In all, as in most of the public edifices, the examples of stained glass, produced here in such beauty, will alone repay a visit. In the imposing Basilica of St. Boniface, built during the King's lifetime, covered with frescoes and adorned with sixty-five marble columns, repose in a magnificent mausoleum the honoured remains of the royal and cultured founder of modern Munich* From Innsbeuck, 117 miles from Munich, the frontier fortress town of the Tyrol, finely situated nearly 2,000 feet above the sea, and particularly interesting for its celebrated Monument to Maximilian I. in the Franciscan Church, commences the Brenner Railway to Botzen, 80 miles south. The line, constructed at a cost of £2,250,000, passes through seventeen tunnels and over eleven bridges, crossing the TH aS, BEENNEB. 75 picturesque Pass or the Beennee, 4,500 feet above the Adriatic. At Botzen and Teent, although German towns, a changed architecture and new forms and figures are revealed. They are of the Italian type, although Peei, forty miles still to the south, makes the present frontier line. After Peri is reached, the line traverses the beautiful valley towards Pescantina and Paeano, and to Verona (jp. 92). BASLE. Basle is the centre of the attractive and inexpensive Circular Swiss Tours arranged in connection with the Great Eastern Company'8 route. The first Swiss town generally approached by this route from Germany, it is equi-distant from the Falls of the Bhine and Lake Constance, from Lakes Zurich and Lucerne, and from Berne, the starting-point for the Bernese Oberland. Basle is a populous and flourishing town lying on sloping banks overlooking the broad Rhine. It is celebrated chiefly for its stern Protestantism and its silk ribbon. The birth- place of the younger Holbein, it boasts in its picture-gallery a good collection of his works. The meeting-place of the famous A fountain at basle. Ecclesiastical Council in 1431, its Cathedral remains one of the most imposing Protestant Cathedrals on the Continent. The price of admission is half-a-franc. During the summer months recitals are given twice a week on its fine organ. The price of BERNE. •77 -admission is one franc. The mediaeval collection in the chapels attached to the Cathedral is shown daily. The price of admission is •one franc. When the sacristan accompanies you the fee he expects is half-a-franc. The calculating Christianity of the good Baslers is proverbial. It is ji>art of what the guide books call * the enterprising ^character of its inhabitants.' But the Cathedeal should not be omitted. Its interior is imposing, and among its fine old monuments -and quaint tablets is the tombstone of Erasmus. In the old Council Hall, which has undergone little change, the great Council, which, unanimous in agreeing that the Church must be reformed * in Head .and Members' was only more unanimous in disagreeing as to what this meant, sat and consulted and wrangled for years, until the 500 clerics were excommunicated en masse by Pope Eugene TV% and was finally dissolved in 1448. The Hall contains many fragments of the famed * Death Dance' fresco, formerly attributed to Holbein; and, among other curiosities, a grotesque Head that once rolled its mechanical eyes and lolled its mechanical tongue from the clock tower on Basle Bridge in derisive mockery at the exasperated inhabitants of Little Basle, on the opposite bank, between which and those of Great Basle there was ill blood. The fine old. Cloisters terminate in a shady terrace overlooking the green river and com- manding a pleasant prospect of the dark heights of the Black Forest. The remaining town gates and mediaeval buildings and fountains will repay a stroll through the older quarters of the town. Distant sixty-six miles from Basle is BEENE. Although the capital of the Helvetian Republic and the seat of the Federal Government, with a population of nearly forty thousand souls, placid bear-ridden Berne retains more of its ancient characteristics than any other Swiss town of like importance. It contentedly -cultivates the arts of peace in the shape of musical boxes, Swiss clocks, and pretty wood carvings. These are its staple and simple industries. Berne is a city of bears, as its name imports. * There are bears on its gates, bears on its fountains, bears in its parks and gardens, bears -everywhere. But, though it rejoices in a fountain adorned with an image of Saturn eating children, nevertheless the old city—quaint, -quiet, and queers—looks as if, bear-like, it had been hybernating good- naturedly for a century, and were just about to wake up.' Its bears are in wood, in stone, and in stucco; in sweet gingerbread and in solid flesh. The Bear's Den, where Bruin, as the tutelar deity of the place, 78 BERNE.. Is domiciled with befitting dignity, is on the right bank of the Aar, at the foot of the handsome three-arched nydeckbrucke. Bruin is not proud. He will beg for biscuits, and will dance for fruit. But, even* more abundant than the bears of Berne, are its views. In clear weather from every eminence and open space some new and lovely prospect? is- revealed. The lofty Cathedral Tebbace, rising* a sheer HO feet above the river, and from which a student, whose horse was startled, is said to have leaped and escaped with a few fractured ribs, commands the- snow-clad Alps of the Bernese Oberland. The view from the platform' on the roof of the Federal Council Hall embraces the town, withthe* Aar flowing on three sides, and its fair environs bounded by mountain ranges and white ghstening peaks. The beautiful prospect from the- gardens of the Schanzli, a hill on the opposite bank, where ices and the scenery are discussed to the sprightly strains of Strauss and Offen- bach, evokes from the always correct but rarely effusive * Baedeker ** an admiring tribute in small type. c Nothing can? surpass the sub- limity of the mountains at sunset in fine weather, especially when the west horizon is partially veiled with thin clouds, and the phenomenon called the Alpgluhen (Glow of the Alps) or Nachgluhen (after-glow) is- produced. Long after the shadows of evening have fallen upon the- -valleys, and the lingering rays of the evening sun have faded from the- snowy peaks themselves, the mountains begin to glow from their bases* upwards, as if illumined by a bright internal fire.' After the beans,, one of the Hons of Berne is its Clock Tower. Its ingenious and amusing performing figures are to the admiring Bernese and the wondering folk on market days from all the country round what the 'striking' movements of two mechanical images belonging to a certain knight of Chepe are to the young cits of the 'Big Village.*' like the Phyllis of song they never fail to please. The performance commences a minute or two before each hour. The signal is given by a wooden chanticleer, who flaps his wings and indulges in a lusty- crow. At this a solemn procession of mechanical bears slowly emerge- and stalk round the seated figure of Old Time, bearded like the pard and hour-glass in hand, with the precision of tried performers. Then a harlequin strikes the hour on a small bell, and a stone figure up above strikes the hour on a large bell. Then the cock crows a second! time. Old Time counts the strokes with mute movements of his mouth, and beats time with an uplifted wand. A grand past-master- bear on his right hand sagely wags his head at each beat. As the last chime dies away Old Time turns his glass. Then the cock crows* a third time, and the performance is at an end. 79 THE BERNESE OBEBLAND. The Bernese Oberland may be 'done' in four days, or it may be pleasantly spread over four weeks. The distances are short, the excursions diverge from one or two common centres. Those whose leisure is long will find the resources of the Bernese Alps endless. Those with limited leisure may see much in a short time by keeping in the beaten tracks. The route is none the less delightful for being well worn. Tourists with wild yearnings to leave the worn ways more often come home dissatisfied than pleased with the essay. The <5berland district, famous for * cheese, liberty, property, and no taxes,' is one splendid succession of * rockg, pines, torrents, glaciers, clouds, and summits of eternal snow far above them.' Its beauties which yesterday Byron sung of in gloomy verse and sketched in buoyant prose, have a magic which to-day tinges even the cold treatise of a Tyndall with a faint rose gleam of poetic fervour. **We have been,' wrote Byron, 'to the Grindelwald and the* 80 THUN. Jungfrau, and stood on the summit of the Wengern Alp; and seen torrents of nine hundred feet in fall, and glaciers of all dimensions; we have heard shepherds' pipes and avalanches, and looked on the clouds foaming up from the valleys below us like the spray of the ocean of hell. Chamouni, and that which it inherits, we saw a month ago; hut though Mont Blanc is higher, it is not equal in wildness to the Jungfrau, the Eigher, the Shreckhorn, or the Rose glaciers.' The twenty miles by rail from Berne, up the valley of the Aar to Thun forms a fitting introduction to the grand scenery of the Oberland. The curious old-fashioned town of Thun is beautifully situated on the Aar, a little below the lake. The walks above the town, or below the town, down by the lake or up on the fir-clad slopes, afford a succession of lovely views. The old chtjechyaed on the heights commands the wide fertile valley, watered by the winding arms of the rapid Aar, and the Lake, backed by the eternal snows of the radiant Jungfrau, Queen of the Bernese Alps, the Monch, the Eiger, the Shreckhorn and the "Wetterhorn. The Niesee\ which rises about seven miles to the south of Thun, is reached with facility and ascended with ease. Nearly 2,000 feet higher than the Rigi, it commands an even more extensive view than the famous mountain by Lucerne. Interlaken is distant the length of the lake, about an hour by steamer, from Thun. Passing sunny vineclad and wooded slopes, the verdant banks dotted with smiling villages peeping from laden orchards, by and bye give place to precipitous rocks falling sheer to the water's edge. Above them tower the lofty peaks of the Stock- horn, 'very lofty and scraggy, patched with snow only; no glaciers on it but some epaulettes of clouds/ the pyramid of the Niesen, the black Faulhorn and the Schwarzhorn, and the white Alps that have gleamed in the morning light and glowed in soft rose hues at sunset over the lake to Thun. Dakligen is the landing place for Inter- laken, which is reached by rail in a few minutes. Interlaken,—Rows of imposing hotels, flanked by pretentious pensions, or sandwiched between palpable Swiss boarding-houses and fashionable Swiss shops. A busy, dusty, delightfully situated little place, lying low between the Lakes of Thun and Brienz, in a chronic state of placid unrest and demure turmoil from the stream of varie- gated visitors pouring through it the summer long*. The head- quarters for the lengthier and more laborious excursions among the Bernese Alps, travellers here find the repose they may need in the balls, receptions, and such-like dissipations of its Kites a a l. At this. German institution grafted upon Swiss soil, the whey-cure takes the place of the water-cure with marked benefit —to the Kursaal. It lies. INTEBLAKEN. 81 between the Aar that flows by the town, and the long walnut avenue. th^t runs from end to end. From this shaded avenue there is a favourite view of the snowy Jungfrau, framed by the dark mountains, at t\ie entrance of the Lauterbrunnen valley. The heights in the enviipns of Interlaken form a paradise for picnics, and the adjacent lakes scope for boating excursions without end. 1 Murray' adduces as the most remarkable proof of its rise and progress, that when the Empress of Austria visited Interlaken in 1811 a carriage had to- be borrowed from Berne. Now, solemnly asserts 'my Murray,' it. possesses 167 carriages. Beside this crushing fact the detail that THE JUNGFRAU, EBOM INTEBLAKEN. during its short season some 25,000 visitors pass through Interlaken is dwarfed into nothingness. From Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. The famed falls of the Staubbach in the rocky valley of Lauter- brunnen are about an hour's drive from Interlaken. The way lies, through wild and magnificent scenery, and passes the ruined and picturesque castle of Unspunnen, which from Byron having laid th& scene of his tragedy in the neighbourhood, has been made the abode ■82 LA.UTEEBEUNNEIT. of the mystical Manfred. The village of Lauterbbttnnen (nothing bit springs) nestles between overhanging precipitous rocks, so high tltat in winter they shut out the sun until noon from the valley. / Gushing from clefts in the dark cliffs, or tumbling from iheir jutting edges, are feathery cascades that, dashed into spray in their fall, sway to and fro in silvery diaphanous waves with every freeze midway in their flight. About half a mile above the village is the •Statjbbach. * The torrent,' wrote Byroninhis Swiss Diary,'is in shape, curving over the rock, like the tail of a white horse streaming" in the wind, such as it might be conceived would be that of the pale horse •on which Death is mounted on in the Apocalypse. It is neither mist nor water, but a something between both; its immense height (nine Tiundred feet) gives it a wave or curve, a spreading here or a condensa- tion there, wonderful, and indescribable. . . Before ascending the mountain, went to the torrent (seven in the morning) again, the £un upon it forming a rainbow of the lower part of all colours, but principally purple and gold; the bow moving as you move. I never saw anything like this; it is only in the sunshine.' One •of Byron's traducers has recorded in what she is pleased to term her 'Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands' that i the waterfall is very sublime, all except the water and the fall.' The expectant traveller is, in truth, sometimes doomed to disappointment. During the dry summer season the cascade, rarely great in volume, is reduced to a film of scattered spray, so fine and faint that unless lighted by sun- shine it may be pronounced, as it has been, * a sell.' From the falls the excursion may be continued to the Alpine village of Mueeen, among the hills which shut in the valley. It is more than £,000 feet above the sea, and is said to be the highest village in Europe. The ascent, made through pine forests and by rushing torrents, is easy, and commands ever widening views of mountains and glaciers descending from their snowy heights into the valleys feelow. 'The Eiger and the Monch, the Jungfrau with its dazzling Silberhorn, and the rugged precipices of the Schwarze Monch, rising sheer from the valley; the wall of the Ebne-Fluh, its conical summit to the left, in its mantle of spotless snow; adjoining it the Roththaisattel; then the Mittaghorn, the Grosshorn, the Breithorn, from which the Schmadribach flows, the Tschingelhorn—nice names, so soft, as Byron says—and nearer the Tschingelgrat and Gspalten- horn, form this wondrous amphitheatre. i The prospect is far more imposing,' Baedeker opines, i than from the Wengern Alp, although ithe view of the Jungfrau itself from the Wengern Alp is unrivalled.* JVom Murren the ascent of the Schelthoen, 10,000 feet high, is made IiATJTEEBEIJNNEN. in iour or five hours. The beautiful Upper Valley of Lauierbrunnenr with its lonely falls of the Schmadbtbach, and the Trumlei*bach, fed by the glaciers of the Jungfrau, approaehed through woods of pine and ©ak and maple, offers endless and easy excursions to the lovers of mountain scenery in its grandest forms. From Lauterbrunnen to Grindelwald. Although Grindelwald is but a few hours by diligence from Inter* laken, the favourite and finest route is by the Wengern Alp from* Iiauterbrunnen. It is an hour's stiff climb by zigzag paths up the heights which hem in the village to the hamlet of Wengebn; up until the chalets that dot the valley become specks, the flowing Lui- schine, a mere streak, and the falling Staubbach a pendulous silver thread. Then the path winds through sloping and shady meadows,, through pine woods, and up the flowering pastures of the Alp to the* point commanding the famous view of the Jungfbatj. The maiden mountain, in her queenly crown and dazzling robe of gleaming snowr and with mighty glaciers for her footstool, stands divided from the Wengern by the deep and desolate chasm of the Trumleten. The- sublime and splendid solitude of these regions inspired Byron with the theme of Manfred. He writes in his diary, after seeing the Jungfrau. and the Trumleten from the Wengern Alp, * Heard the avalanches falling every five minutes. The clouds rose from the opposite valleyr curling up perpendicular precipices like the foam of the ocean of hell during a spring tide—it was white and sulphury and immeasurably deep in appearance. The side we ascended was not of so precipitous- nature, but on arriving at the summit we looked down upon the other side upon a boiling sea of cloud, dashing against the crags upon which we stood—the crags on one side quite perpendicular.' * When we come to the inn upon the Wengern Alp we are nearly 5,000 feet above the level of the sea. We are directly in front of the Jungfrau, with its masses of perpetual snow. They seem close to usr so great is the deception of the clear air, but a deep vast ravine separates the Wengern Alp from the Jungfrau, which rises in an abrupt sheer precipice, of many thousand feet, somewhat broken in terraces, down which the avalanches, from the higher beds of un- trodden everlasting snow, plunge, thundering into the uninhabitable abyss. Perhaps there is not another mountain in Switzerland which you can look at so near and so full in the face. Out of this ravine the Jungfrau rises eleven thousand feet, down which vast height the avalanches sweep with their incalculable masses of ice from the very topmost summit. Ordinarily, in a summer's day, at noon, the avalanches are falling about every ten minutes, with the roar of GEINDELWALD. thunder. You are standing far below, gazing up to where the great disc of glittering Alp cuts the heavens, and drinking in the influence of the silent scene around. Suddenly an enormous mass of snow and ice, in itself a mountain, seems to move; it breaks from the toppling outmost mountain ridge of snow, where it is hundreds of feet in depth, and in its first fall of perhaps two thousand feet is broken into millions of fragments. A cloud of dusty, misty, dry snow rises into the air from the concussion, forming a white volume of fleecy smoke, or misty light, from the bosom of which thunders forth the icy torrent in its second prodigious fall over the rocky battlements. Ploughing through the path which preceeding avalanches have worn, it comes to the brink of a vast ridge of bare rock, perhaps more than two thousand feet perpendicular. Then pours the whole cataract over the :gulf, with a still louder roar of echoing thunder, to which nothing but the noise of Niagara in its sublimity is comparable. Another fall of still greater depth ensues. Then the torrent roars on to another smaller fall, till at length it reaches a mighty groove of snow and ice. Here its progress is slower. And last of all you listen to the roar of the falling fragments as they drop out of sight, with a dead weight, into the bottom of the gulf, to rest for ever.' The descent of the "Wengern to the village of Grindelwald is made down stoney slopes, through sparse pastures •and boggy land, dotted with clumps and patches of withered pines, to the valley, over which are scattered the chalets of its shepherds. Orindelwald lives partly on its cherries and cattle, but more on the visitors enticed by its glaciers. The summer is short in this glacier valley. The winter is cold and long, and the poor peasantry have learned to beg. Murray tearfully confesses that * the morals and ancient simplicity' of the Grindelwalders has deteriorated. Baedeker sadly re-echoes the sigh. * The original simplicity and morality of the natives of these once sequestered regions has been sadly corrupted by modern invasion,' mourns the admirable Teuton. But they are amus- ing amateur vagrants, these poor and once simple peasants of the icy valley. There is an ingenuousness about their ingenuity in extracting one of those metal pieces that take so many to make a franc from the traveller's loose change. The boys and girls offer you bunches of Alpine roses and mountain flowers. The elder and more abandoned miscreants of both sexes show you tame marmots and tamer gazelles, whose 4 dark black eyes' have only seen crags and mountain tops afar off from their native pen. They deafen you with the musical Banz des Vaches and other national and noisy bellowings on the Alpine horn. They fire small pistols and awake great echoes from the resonant rocks. They beg you to buy their worthless -crystals and their tasteless strawberries. The boy-beggars stand on their heads by the verge of a precipice, and turn somersaults on the odge of a cataract. There is an artlessness about their artfulness GRLN3>ELWALD. "that melts the heart which came steeled by the grave adjurations of the grave * guides.' For the summer is short, and the winter is, long in this lone Alpine valley, and so many many centime pieces go to the franc I Grindelwald is shut in on the south by three vast mountains—the Wetterhorn, the Eiger and the Mettenberg. Between these stream the two glaciers, the Upper and Lower, far into the valley. Inferior in magnitude and beauty to the Rhone and many of the Swiss glaciers, and yearly decreasing in size, these glittering, azure ice-fields are easy of access and unrivalled in the splendour of their surrounding scenery. An excursion on the Upper Glacier is generally made to the Ice Grotto, a tunnel hewn through the solid ice, the ascent occupying about an hour. 'It is high enough,' writes Sydney Hall, * to stand upright in, and its internal light produces a curious effect upon you as you enter, everything appearing of a transparent blueish green tinge. As you advance towards the end of the grotto your nose is greeted by an unmistakeable smell of burnt tallow, and a faint tinkling sound, which gradually becomes familiar to your ear as the song of * The Merry Swiss Boy.' On turning the corner you come suddenly on a lovely Syren, an old woman who smiles in her most bewitching way, and she quavers and quakes, accompanied by the tinkling of a zither. As the old lady sits with her feet in iced water and iced water dripping on her head and down her back, singing and smiling long after you have given her your fee, you begin to think she must really like it, but if, after descending the mountain a little way, you turn, you'll find the old party scuttling off to a cabin with a warm fire, there to wait until she spies fresh visitors toiling up the valley, when she hurries once more to the Ice Grotto and takes her seat.' The upper basin of the Lower Glacier called the Eismeer (sea of ice) reached in two hours, affords a striking view of the grotesque peaked and pointed ice needles 'where the glacier's cold and restless mass moves onward day by day.' A more ambitious excursion is to the chalet of Zasenberg, perched at a height of 6,000 feet among wild and towering masses of ice and snow. The ascenii of the Faulhorn, 8,800 feet high, and commanding an imposing view of the surrounding giant mountains, is made in five hours from Grindelwald. The diligence runs twice daily from Grindelwald to Interlaken. From Interlaken to Lucerne. From Interlaken the rail runs in a few minutes to Boningen on the south bank of the Lake of Brienz, whence a steamer leaves for the 86 LT7CEBNE. Falls of G-iessbach, one of the most frequented of all the frequented spots in the Oberland. The Falls are seven distinct cascades, each from the topmost falling into and increasing the volume of the next. The water dashes from a height of more than a thousand feet, and rushes impetuously from rocky ridge to ridge. The silver torrent framed by dark, dense masses of firs, is crossed by rustic bridgesr THE GIESSBACH FALLS. and at noontide is spanned by nebulous many-coloured rainbows. From the Falls the steamer proceeds to Beienz, a picturesque village at the opposite end of the Lake. From Brienz there is a choice of three routes to Lucerne by diligence either to Alpnach or Becxenbied, or to Fluelen, each on the southern borders of the Lake of Lucerne,, whence Lucerne is reached by steamboat. 87 LUCERNE. Fifty-five miles from Basle, where the rapid Beuss darts with sarrowy swiftness from the lovely Lake of the Four Cantons, lies Lucerne. It is one of the fairest and most frequented spots in. Switzerland. Charmingly situated in the centre of a district 'con- secrated by the muse of Schiller and the heroism of Tell,' it is the starting-point for the ascent of the Bigi, for the picturesque pass of the St. Gothard, for the Bernese Oberland, and for a hundred and one local excursions by beaten tracks, or by secluded ways. The old THE LION MONUMENT. portion of the town, through which the headstrong Beuss flings itself with the force of a mountain torrent, is interesting for its quaint old nooks and corners, its busy and bright little markets, its Museum- Absenal, and its picturesque old-roofed and grimly-painted Bridges whereon the loungers of Lucerne are for ever gaping at the big lazy lake fish seen feet and feet down with every weed and stone of the shingly bottom. * The alterations which have taken place in the town of Lucerne,1 says Ruskin, in Modern Painters,' 4 have still spared two of its ancient bridges; both of which being long •covered walks, appear, in past times, to have been to the population of the town what the Mall was to London, or the Gardens of the Tuileries are to Paris. For the continual contemplation of those who 88 LUCERNE. sauntered from pier to pier, pictures were painted on the woodwork of the roof. These pictures, on the one bridge, represent all the important Swiss battles and victories; on the other they are the well-known series of which Longfellow has made so beautiful a use in * The Golden Legend,' '' The Dance of Death.'' The modern town covering the crescent head of the lake is fronted by a line of giant hotels, that might be palaces if they were smaller. Facing them is a favourite chest- nut walk, commanding the famed view that has made Lucerne's hotels- great. The Bigi rises on the left, and on the right cloud-capped Hiatus, still haunted by the restless spirit of Pontius Pilate, whose body—as the legend avers, and who shall doubt ?—was cast into a Mttle lake in the Briindelen Alp. Between them, above green slopes and wooded heights and brown mountains, rising tier upon tier above the crystal waters of the 1 ake, gleam the distant peaks of the Alps of Uri and Engelberg white with eternal snow. Near the church at the east of the avenue is the Lion of Lucerne, * the monument to those brave Swiss Guards who were slain for their unshaken fidelity to the unhappy Louis XVI. In a sequestered spot the rocky hill is cut away, and in the living strata is sculptured the colossal figure of a dying lion. A spear is broken off in his side, but in his last struggle he still defends a shield marked with the flew de lis of France. Below are inscribed in red letters, as if charactered in blood, the names of the brave officers of that devoted band. From many a crevice in the rock drip down trickling springs, foiming a pellucid basin below, whose dark glossy surface, encircled with trees and shrubs, reflects the image. The design of the monument is by Thorwaldsen, and the whole effect of it has inexpressible pathos.' Near it are the Glacier Garden, a cool retreat laid out in Alpine style, with some interesting remains of a glacier of the Ice period, and Stauffer's Museum, containing in groups a complete collection of stuffed Alpine animals. Tell's Chapel is at the extreme southern arm of the lake on the spot where Tell is said to have sprung from Gessler's boat. It stands on a ledge of rock, washed by the waters of the lake and shaded by overhanging trees, at the foot of the Axenberg, not far from Fluelen. Reached by steamer in about two hours and a half, this is one of the most delightful trips from Lucerne. The Bigi is the most popular mountain in Switzerland. No one thinks of leaving the lake without making the ascent. The steamboat from Lucerne reaches Vitznau, at the foot of the Rigi, in an hour. Within another hour the traveller rests on the summit, six thousand feet above sea level. Few nowadays attempt the weary climb by tor- tuous bridle paths, and the toy alpenstocks purchased at Lucerne may THE EIGI. 89 be reserved for some more daring exploit. The rail is very slow and very sure. It enables those who do not aspire to rival the nimbleness of the chamois or the endurance of a sturdy member of the Alpine Club to enjoy a view famous since first the search after the picturesque THE EIGI EAILWAY. became a fashionable pastime. For three months in the year the Eigi is the most densely populated mountain in the world. Hotels are springing up at every few hundred yards. To ensure a bed at some it is necessary to engage it by telegram with twenty-four hours* notice. Not that the beds are so few, but the visitors so many. 90 SCHAFFHAT7SEN. Occasionally upwards of 2,000 people have made the ascent in one* day. At evening a dined and enthusiastic crowd, composed of every creed and nationality, gather on the summit, and in a babel of tongues chorus their admiration of the wondrous sunset. At the sound of a horn the same crowd, subdued and chilly, gather on the summit again in the grey dawn, and watch, impressed and awestruck, the more- wondrous sunrise. The panorama, some three hundred miles in circumference, remarkable at all times for its unique magnificence, and comprising the most magnificent lake and alpine scenery of Switzer- land, forms a vision of surpassing beauty, as from the mist peak, mountain, valley, lake, and village, at first dimly outlined in the faint flush of day, glow in rich contrasts of radiant colour, when the flood of flaming light, bursting over the boundless landscape, throws the vast shadow of the Rigi upon Pilatus, and sends the crowd of spectators back to their hotels intoxicated with beauty, and a fierce craving for breakfast. From Lucerne the rail runs to Ztjg, on the pretty Lake of Zug, and thence to Ztjeich, the capital of the Canton, at the northern point of the Lake, where the green and rapid Limmat rushes with impetuous force through the town. The charm of Zurich lies in the beauty of its position, overlooking the lake fringed with villages, orchards and vineyards, and backed by the snow-clad Alps. Zurich, which culti- vates a thriving trade in silk and cottons, and is a great educational centre and stronghold of Protestantism, was the scene of Massena's victory over the Russians in 1799. Its Town Libeaey is the only building of special interest. Among its treasures are some autograph letters of the ill-fated Lady Jane Grey, Zwingli's Greek Bible, a letter of Frederick the Great, Dannecker's bust of Lavater, a native of Zurich. Coverdale printed his English Bible here in 1535. The Lake of Zurich, which is some 25 miles long and 4 broad, and the heights surrounding it, afford many quiet and delightful excursions. From Zurich the line travels due north either to Dachsen or S chaff- hatxsen for the Falls of the Rhine—the Niagara of Europe. * Stand for half an hour beside the Fall of Schaffhausen, on the- north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of water first bends, unbroken in pure polished velocity, over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen except when a foam globe above darts like a falling star; and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves at the instant that it breaks into foam; how all the hollows of that foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and how, ever and anon, startling yom BCHAFFHATJSEN. 91 with, its white flash, a jet of spray leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and driven away in dust, filling the air with light, and how through the curdling wreaths of the wrestling, crashing abyss below, the blue of the water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through white rain cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous stillness over all, fading and flash- ing alternately through, the choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last amongst the thick golden leaves which loss to- and fro in sympathy with the wild water; their dripping masses FALLS OF SCHAFFHATJSEN. lifted at intervals, like sheaves of loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again upon the mossy rocks as its roar «dies away; the dew gushing from their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shores feeding the lichens which chase and chequer them with purple and fdlver.' From Schaffhausen the rail proceeds due east to Basle, and north by Singen through the Black Forest, joining the line that runs from Basle to Mayence, on the homeward journey, at Offenburg. In the limits of this 'G-uide' it would be futile and foolish to pretend that anything like justice could be done to all the cities in the interesting and comprehensive Italian tours of the Great Eastern Railway. So that what is described may not be altogether valueless, only the great and abiding centres of interest have been sketched. Italy is entered by the Great Eastern route through the picturesque pass of the Brenner. The first halt on Lombard soil is generally at Verona. Thence a series of tours have been arranged by the Great Eastern Railway through Northern Italy, Central Italy, and Southern Italy separately and together. The first comprises the cities of Verona, Padua, Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, Parma, Placentia, Bergamo, and Milan, the common starting point for the famed districts of Italian Lakes. The second includes all these, with Rome, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, and Turin. The third, these again, with Ancona, Capua,, and Naples. VERONA. 4 Pleasant Verona!' wrote Dickens, in 'Pictures from Italy,* 'with its beautiful old palaces, and charming country in the distance, seen from terrace walks and stately balustrated galleries! With its Roman gates, still spanning the fair street, and casting on the sun- light of to-day the shade of fifteen hundred years ago! "With its marble-faced churches, lofty towers, rich architecture, and quaint VERONA. 93 old quiet thoroughfares, where shouts of Montagues and Capulets. once resounded, And made Verona's ancient citizens Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments To wield old partizans. With its fast-rushing river, picturesque old bridge, great castle, waving cypresses, and prospect so delightful and so cheerful! Pleasant Verona!' Of its great old Roman days—for here Theodoric fixed his- residence after his victory over Odoacer, and later, Alboin, the- founder of the Lombard kingdom—Verona retains its mighty monument in the vast and splendid Amphitheatre built, it is sup- posed, under Diocletian. Less impressive than the Coliseum at Rome, it is the most perfect of the remaining Roman arenas. Ordinary measurements will convey no idea of its size. Roughly, it will contain about 20,000 people in the seats, and 12,000 more in the- arena. It stands in the centre of the city, in the sunny old Piazza di Bra, now Vittorio Emanuele, 'a spirit of old time among the familiar realities of the passing .hour, so well preserved and so carefully maintained that every row of seats is there unbroken. Over certain of the arches the old Roman numerals may yet be seen, and there- are corridors, and staircases, and subterranean passages for beasts, and winding ways, above ground and below, as when the fierce thou- sands hurried in and out, intent upon the bloody shows of the arena. Nestling in some of the shadows and hollow places of the walls, now, are smiths with their forges, and a few small dealers of one kind or other; and there are green weeds and leaves and grass upon the parapet. But little else is greatly changed.' From the Piazza Bra it is but a short walk to the Garden op the Oreanotrofio (Vicolo delle- Franceschine), where those interested in the loves of Romeo and Juliet may stand over their sepulchre—a disused marble washing trough by the garden wall, placed there in about the year 1840. The previous sepulchres of the unhappy lovers had been removed in chips by confiding and reverent relic hunters. In the Via St. Sebastiano an inn called the Osteria del Cappello is pointed out as a remnant of the Palace of the Capulets. North from the Amphitheatre, is the Piazza delle Erbe, the ancient Forum, and now the picturesque Market Place, with its ancient frescoed houses, its fountain and tall clock tower, both erected in about 1360, and the marble pillar erected by the Venetians for the Lion of St. Mark, which was thrown down at the death of the Venetian Republic, standing above the huge white umbrellas of the market women., Thence the Piazza dei Signoria VEEONA. is reached. Here surrounded by mediaeval piles and palaces, among" them the Palazzo del Consiglio, surmounted by statues of Verona's famous citizens, Pliny the younger and Catullus and others, and containing among its historical paintings, 'The Recognition of the Lordship of Venice by Verona,' by Titian—here under the shadow of the magnificent brick Campanile, in the little grave- yard of the Old Court Chapel, are the famous Tombs op the Scaligees. 'The small burial ground of Sta. Maria l'Antica is fenced from the busy thoroughfares, which on two sides bound it, by an iron railing of most exquisite design, divided at intervals by piers of stone, on whose summits stand gazing upwards as in prayer, or downwards as in warning to those who pass below, a beautiful series of saintly figures. Within a glorious assemblage of monuments meets the eye—one over the entrance doorway, the others either towering up in picturesque confusion above the railing which has been their guardian from all damage for so many centuries, or meekly hiding their humility from behind the larger masses of their com- panions. The monuments are all to the members of one family—the Scaligeri—who seem to have risen to power in the thirteenth century and to have held sway in Verona until almost the end of the fourteenth.' The tomb of Boninius a Compigliono, or Da Campione, 'is the stateliest and most sumptuous of the three; it arrests the eye of the stranger and long detains it—a many pinnacled pile, surrounded by niches with statues of warrior saints.' The busy Corso, reached from the Piazza, terminates in the square and Church of St. Anastasia, considered one of the most beautiful Gothic edifices in Italy. 'It looks so beautiful at the end of the narrow street, whose dark shade contrasts with the bright sunshine which plays upon its lofty arched marble doorway and frescoed tympanum, and lights up by some kind of magic the rough brickwork with which the unfinished church has been left so brightly, that as you gaze thoughts pass across your mind of portions of some lovely painting or some sweeter dream; you feel as though Fra Angelico might have painted such a door in Paradise, and as though it were too fair to be real.' Crowning a gateway on the left of the church is a beautiful fourteenth century tomb of Count Gruglielmo de Castelbarco. The subdued solemn interior is adorned with many fine tombs of old Veronese families. The Corso in the opposite direction terminates in the battlemented bridge over the Adige, with the massive, mediaeval, Castel Vecchio, on the opposite bank. Several of the palaces along the Corso are the works of the great Veronese architect Sanmicheli, whose churches, palaces, and gates form the richest ornaments of the eity. Much of the impressive grandeur of the interior of the fine old Cathedral is due to Sanmicheli. In Titian's * Assumption' in the first chapel the architect, who was a great friend of the Venetian VEEONA. 95 painter, is introduced as one of the Apostles. Each of the churches has some special points of interest or beauty, from the magnificent MARKET PLACE, VEEONA. St. Zeno Maggioee, in the Lombard Romanesque style, dating from about the eleventh century, to the Caveened Chapel of the earliest "96 VENICE. Christian art in the North, with rude frescoes of a period prior to the Tevival of the arts in Italy, in a subterranean part of the nunnery of SS. Nazzabo e Celso. One of the most beautiful views of Verona is from the Gtjisti Gardens across the Ponte Acqua Morta. It rises terrace upon terrace, * and contains monstrous cypresses, pointing like spikes into the air. A tree whose branches, the oldest as well as the youngest, are striving to reacKheaven—a tree which will last its three hundred years, is well worthy of veneration. Judging from the time when this garden was laid out, these trees have already attained that venerable age.' At Gabgagnano, in the beautiful environs of Verona, Dante is supposed to have written his Purgatorio, and at Quinto, a day's excursion, is the curious Church of S. Maeia della Stella, with a clear stream flowing through its crypt. VENICE. 'This Venice, which was a haughty, invincible, magnificent Republic for nearly fourteen hundred years, whose armies compelled "the world's applause whenevei and wherever they battled, whose navies well nigh held dominion of the seas, and whose merchant -fleets whitened the remotest oceans with their sails and loaded these piers with the products of every clime, is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect, and melancholy decay. Six hundred years ago Venice was the Autocrat of Commerce; her mart was the great commercial centre, the distributing-house from whence the enormous trade of the Orient was spread abroad over the Western world. To-day her piers are deserted, her warehouses are empty, her merchant fleets are vanished, her armies and her navies are but memories. Her glory is departed; and with her crumbling grandeur of wharves and palaces about her she sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world. She that in her palmy days commanded the •commerce of a hemisphere, and made the weal or woe of nations with a beck of her puissant finger, is become the humblest among the peoples of the earth—a pedlar of glass beads for women, and trifling toys and trinkets for school-girls and children. The venerable Mother of the Republics is scarce a fit subject for flippant speech or the idle gossipping of tourists. It seems a sort of sacrilege to disturb the glamour of old romance that pictures her to us softly from afar off as through a tinted mist, and curtains her ruin and her desolation from our view- One ought, indeed, to turn away from Jier rags, her VENICE. 97 poverty, and her humiliation, and think of her only as she was when «he sunk the fleets of Charlemagne, when she humbled Frederick Barbarossa, or waved her victorious banners above the battlements of Constantinople.' 'In the glare of day there is little poetry about Venice, but under i;he charitable moon her stained palaces are white again, their battered sculptures arc hidden in shadows, and the old city seems •crowned once more with the grandeur that was hers five hundred years ago. It is easy, then, in fancy, to people these silent canals with plumed gallants and fair ladies—with Shylocks in gaberdine and sandals, venturing loans upon the rich argOsies of Venetian commerce—with Othellos and Desdemonas, with Iagos and Roderigos —with noble fleets and victorious legions returning from the wars.' x VENICE. * There is a glorious city in the sea: The sea is in the broad, the narrow streets, Ebbing and flowing; and the salt sea-weed Clings to the marble of her palaces. No track of men, no footsteps to and fro. Lead to her gates. The path lies o'er the sea, Invisible! and from the land we went, As to a floating city—steering in, And gliding up her streets, as in a dream, So smoothly, silently—by many a dome, Mosque-like, and many a stately portico, The statues ranged along an azure sky; By many a pile, in more than Eastern pride, Of old the residence of merchant kings; The fronts of some, tho' time had shatter'd them, Still glowing with the richest hues of art, As tho* the wealth within them had run o'er.' Venice is built upon 72 islands connected by nearly 400 bridges,, and every inch of it may be traversed on foot. Its interest is centred in the Piazza of St. Mark. 'It is one of the supreme moments of life when we first land on the steps of the Piazza, right in front of the clock-tower, where the signs of the Zodiac serve for numerals, a sun is the pointer, and those- two bronze Vulcans strike the hour on the big bell swung aloft. Before us are the famous columns :—that on the right bearing the "Winged Lion, that on the left St. Theodoras with his crocodile—he who was the patron saint of Venice before the body of St. Mark wa& found and the greater claim set up. To the right, again, stand the noble arches of the Peoctjeatie Vecchie, running round two sides of the square formed by the Doge's Palace; to the left are the less beautiful Peoctjeatie Nuove, concealing while forming part of the uninteresting modern royal residence. We cross the broad marble- flags of the smaller piazetta between these two series of arcades— pass the sculptured base of the Campanile—and into the Grand Piazza, where those three tall Venetian masts which once bore- the banners of Cyprus, Candia, and Morea, but now the Italian tricolour stand before the portico of St. Mask's to give additional emphasis to one of the grandest things on the face of the earths Gold and colour and rare marbles sculptured into perfect form— an intricacy of line, a richness of idea that bewilders you like a labyrinth, and of which you cannot at the first moment gain a clear- conception—cupolas standing out against the sky, grey and soft like- giant pearls—saints and angels set between acanthus leaves to break the poverty of the bare outline—those four life-like horses, seeming- as if they would spring from the heights where conquest placed them as a sign of how the old was vanquished by the new—glass that glitters black and stern as steel as a foil to the broad expanse fof gold! and brilliant colour in the hollowed architraves over the doors—these VENICE. are the first things that strike you as you look at St. Mark's from ^the outside, and strive to piece together into one clear whole all these separate circumstances of beauty.' A lozenge of red and white marble in front of the central door marks the spot of the meeting and reconciliation of the Emperor Erederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III. in 1117. 'The Emperor with the Doge and senators, with his own Teutonic nobles, advanced tto the portal of St. Mark, where stood the Pope in his pontifical attire. Frederick no sooner beheld the successor of St. Peter thanhe threw off his imperial mantle, prostrated himself, and kissed the feet of the Pontiff. Alexander, not without tears, raised him up and gave him the kiss of peace. Then swelled out the Te Deum; and the Emperor holding the hand of the Pope, was led into the choir, and received the Papal benediction.' Above are the four famous bronze horses brought from Constantinople after the fourth Crusade. To the right of the principal entrance is the Baptistery with the tomb of the Doge Andrea Dandolo, * early great among the great of Venice and early lost. She chose him for her king in his thirty-sixth year, and he died ten years later, leaving behind him that history to which we owe half of what we know of her former fortunes.' A door on the left leads into the church. * Out of the deep twilight opens a vast •cave, hewn out into the form of a cross, and divided into shadowy aisles by many pillars. Round the domes of its roof the light enters only through narrow apertures like large stars; and here and there a ray or two from some far away casement wanders into the darkness, and casts a narrow phosphoric stream upon the waves of marble that Iheave and fall in a thousand colours along the floor. What else there is of light is from torches or silver lamps, burning ceaselessly in the recesses of the chapels; the roof sheeted with gold, and the polished walls covered with alabaster, give back at every curve and angle some feeble gleaming of the flames; an i the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out upon as as we pass them, and sink again to gloom. Under foot and overhead a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture rassing into another as in a dream. The mazes of interwoven lines and changeful figures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and carved in eveiiy place and upon every -stone. And although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, where -the mist of the incense hangs heavily, we may see continually a figure traced in faint lines upon their marble, a woman standing with her •eyes raised to heaven, and the inscription above her, "Mother of •God," she is not here the presiding deity. It is the Cross that is first seen and always, burning in the centre of the temple; and every dome and hollow of its roof has the figure of Christ in the utmost height of it, raised in power, or returning in judgment.' Under the High Altar rest the supposed relics of St. Mark. The Venetians possessed themselves of his body in the ninth century,. 100 VENICE. which, according to the legend, was carried off from Alexandria by two sea captains. In the Treasury there are many precious relics and' a rich collection of Byzantine work. * You cannot stay too long in St. Mark's. Fascinating as it is, it is also overpowering; and the bright sunshine calls you out into the^ Piazza, where the glossy pigeons flock under your feet, eat out of your hand, perch on your shoulders, fight for a place on your arms, if you will buy a pennyworth of seed to scatter among them. It is- part of the pleasantness of Venetian life to feed the pigeons in the Piazza; and an experience worth recording when the swish of their* wings comes cleaving through the stillness, and the air is darkened by the multitudes that fly down from every point and corner, from every balcony and wall-band, roof and window, sill and shutter— wherever indeed their little pink feet can find a resting-place. From St. Mark's the Doge's Palace is entered by the beautiful Porta della Carta at its side. Facing the portal is the exquisitely-carved 4 Giant's Staircase,' at the head of which the Doge was crowned, and where here Byron places the execution of Doge Marino Faliero. From the top step you look round on the galleries where, at the coronation, * the Doge's family sat in exulting pride, and where the scarlet- * robed senators gathered, with the shouting multitude thronging the court below, and where the huge bronze cisterns, wrought within and without, are now the meeting-place of a few laughing gossips filling their brass pots merrily. Banners and music, and the fair faces of noble women, and the stately bearing of the proudest patricians whom the world has ever seen, with the quaintly-dressed crowd below—you see them all as Carpaccio and Bonifazio, Veronese and Tintoret, have left them, while you stand on the now deserted Stair- case of the Giants, and re-create the past as you re-people the present. And then you go up the "Scala d'Oro," which only those illustrious. Venetians whose names were written in the Golden Book had the right to tread; and so to that grand Hall of the Great Council where the Three Hundred discussed and determined the destinies of nations. AH round the wall runs a frieze of Doges; the most significant that black tablet which stands where Marino Faliero should have come, and which bears in gold letters the terrible legend: Hie est locus Marini Falethri, decapitati pro criminibus.' They are seventy-two in number, beginning from a.d. 809. It was no sinecure to be Doge of Venice. Five of the fifty first Doges abdicated; five were banished, with their eyes put out; nine were deposed; five were massacred; and two fell in battle. Below the portraits are a series of splendid pictures, ruthlessly restored, illustrating the history of Venice- VENICE. 101 * Those of Paul Veronese,' says RusMn,' 'are celebrated as compositions of highest poetry, biit the works themselves are full of such heads and gestures as were common at Venice, and of such satins and velvets as were peculiarly studied in that portrait and pageant-painting school. Tintoret's "Paradise" is a multitudinous confusion of hurried figures, which none but that 'fulmine di pennello' could assemble. Palma's "Last Judgment" is another immense composition, but more intelligibly detailed. These artists seem fond of introducing their friends into their pictures. In one part of this work you see Palma's mistress in heaven, and in another the fickle lover sends her to hell.' The other paintings of the great council-chamber record the triumph which the Republic pretends to claim over Frederic Barba-rossa. The walls and ceilings of the Doge's apartments and the Halls of the Council of Ten, with its inner opening of the famous Lion's Mouth, through which secret denunciations were handed in, are covered with frescoes by Titian, Paul Veronese and other great Venetian masters. 'From the palace to the gloomy prison is but a step—one might almost jump across the narrow canal that intervenes. The ponderous stone Bbedge *of Sighs crosses it at the second storey—a bridge that is a covered, tunnel—you cannot be seen when you walk in it. It is partitioned lengthwise, and through one compartment walked such as bore light sentences in ancient times, and through the other marched sadly the wretches whom the Three had doomed to lingering misery and utter oblivion in the dungeons, or to sudden and mysterious death/ 'I descended,' says Dickens, 'from the cheerful day into two* ranges, one below another, of dismal, awful, horrible stone cells. They were quite dark. Each had a loophole in its massive wall, where, in the old time, every day, a torch was placed to light the prisoner within for half an hour. The captives, by the glimmering of these brief rays, had scratched and cut inscriptions; in the blackened vaults. I saw them. Fortheir labour with a rusty nail's point had outlived their agony and them, through many generations. One cell I saw, in which no man remained for more than four-and- twenty hours; being marked for dead before he entered it. Hard by,, another, and a dismal one, whereto, at midnight, the confessor came—a monk brown-robed, and hooded—-ghastly in the day and free bright air, but in the midnight of that murky prison, Hope's extinguisher, and Murder's herald. I had my foot upon the spot where, at the same dread hour, the shriven prisoner was strangled; and struck my hand upon the guilty do yr—low-browed and stealthy— through which the lumpish sack was carried out into a boat, and. rowed away, and drowned w^iere it was death to cast a net. Around this dungeon stronghold, a^kd, above some part of it: licking the rough walls without, and sanearing them with damp and slime within: stuffing dank weeds and refuse into chinks and crevices, as. 102 VENICE. if the very stones and bars had mouths to stop: furnishing a smootb. road for the removal of the bodies of the secret victims of the state— a road so ready that it went along with them, and ran before them, like a cruel officer—flowed the water.' From the Piazza of St. Mark a gondola should be taken for a leisurely view of the Grand Canal. 'Down the Grand Canal what a world of beauty greets you! On each side rise palaces of the grandest architectural perfection; but among them all, the Casa d'Obo stands supreme. How your ears drink in the old, well-known names! Here is the palace of the Contaeini; there that, of the Foscari, which, with that of the Balbi, command the two lengths of the canal situated as they are at the elbow; here the Pisani family hung out cloth of gold when the festa of the Foundation of the City called all loyal citizens to rejoice; and there, in that small modest house, the great Doge Enrico Dandolo lived—he who took Constantinople in 1204—and got for his country half the city itself, and the Adriatic littoral. Here comes the wide span of the bridge of the Bjalto, bearing its shops crowded with barbaric jewelry and luscious fruit, and in the covered ways of which the merchants met and congregated; ther<4 is the splendid dwelling-place of Queen Caterina Cornaro, whom the republic treated with the respect and tenderness due to a devoted daughter after she had ceded her kingdom of Cyprus to her native city; here is the grey cipolino-faced Fandaco dei Tuechi, restored as in the olden times. Here is the palazzo of the Falieri, where Marino Falieri lived—he whose conspiracy against the nobles "brought his own ruin and created a festa; and if you like to believe your smiling, soft-tongued gondoliers there stands the house where Othello lived and Desdemona died; while one, perhaps more topo- graphically impudent than the rest, and better up in what pleases * gli Inglesi,1 will point out to you Cassio' s dwelling, and, if you are not too quick for him, Iago's. It is historically truer that in -the centre of those three palaces, the Polazzo Mocexigo, Lord Byron lived and wrote, loved and suffered. Poor graceful sylph- like Taglioni has given her name to what was once the Palazzo Comer *Spinelli, which she made warm with welcome and gay with dance and song in the days of her prosperity; and here comes the house where Xuigi Manin, the last Doge, lived—he who abdicated in 1797, when i;he French came too near, after having voted for that * unarmed neutrality1 which handed the hitherto unconquered city over to the Austrians by the treaty of Campo Formio. We look at that "house with dumb wonder and regret, and are glad that the name VENICE. 103 of the last great Duke was redeemed—at least by name, though not by blood—when Daniele Manin took the lax reins in his strong" patriot hands, and broke off the foreign yoke, if not at that moment completely, yet effectually for the future. For all that, we need not admire the ugly statue, with the stuffed bronze pincushion at ON THE GKAND CANAL. the base of the column which does duty for the typical Lion of St. Mark's, raised to the great patriot's memory. Here is the palace where the Due de Bordeaux lived; and there, that odd halved house which the toothers Frangini once owned and quarrelled over- 104 VENICE. They were joint inheritors, and could not agree as to the disposition of their property; so one took away a clean half of the palace— leaving even half a column as the finish of the facade—and carted off every stone to Hungary, where he set up his morose stone tent, and probably rejoiced at the will and wisdom which had spoiled a house for one that two might be ill served. * Among all these palaces you come upon bits of the grandest architecture that it is possible to conceive—arches, windows, doors, loggies, balconies, each one of which is a poem written in stone and marble, not in words, and the beauty of which you are never tired of admiring. Go as often as you will up and down this Grand Canal, you come always on something fresh, while the eager- ness with which you turn to the loveliness already made known to you never abates. Whether it is the solidity of that magnificent pile which cost as much below the water as above, or the exquisite orgives and ornaments of the Casa d' Oro, there is ever a new sen- sation to be had, or a repetition of the old so vivid as to be equal to new. But with it all is a certain sadness in knowing that these splendid palaces are now put to base uses—some turned into hotels, some into flats and sets of apartments; here a 'dogana,* there a * dazio,' here a * Monte di pieta;' there a school or a museum, a shop, or a manufactory.'* * The churches are grand. San Georgio, lonely and deserted, standing on its own little island and looking in the evening light as if hewn out of pearl or opal, is one of the evidences of how different is the present from the past. Once one of the most thronged, the most favourite churches in Venice, it is now absolutely deserted * the sleepy water laps the old stone steps undisturbed by hurrying barques bearing reverent worshippers. The wealth of the monastery and the numbers of the monks have declined with the changes that have come into the times; and only four poor old souls sigh in humility and deadly dulness, where formerly the high-feeding, pleasure-loving, -worldly Benedictines revelled, laughed and plotted, and prepared for their Order the decay which has fallen on them like the mildew which comes on fruit ripe to rottenness. Sta. Maeia della Salute, with its grand facade, and cupola like a giant bubble against the westering sun stands in memory of the plague which stopped the public rejoicing for the happy peace made with the Austrians in 1630, when the Queen of the Adriatic recovered all that she had lost during the war. In thanksgiving for the cessation of the plague, •' Pictures from Venice,' by Mrs. Lynn Lyntoa. VENICE. 105 this church to La Madonna della Salute was built, and held its own. festa for ever after. Every kind of thing can be found in these churches. Pictures like the beautiful