GIFT OF V« Potroosky *> TURRETS, TOWERS, AND TEMPLES The Great Buildings of the World, as Seen and Described by Famous Writers EDITED AND TRANSLATED By ESTHER SINGLETON Translator of 'The Music Dramas of Richard Wagner" With Numerous Illustrations NEW YORK P. F. COLLIER & SON PUBLISHERS Copyright, 1898 By Dodd, Mead & Company Copyright, iqii By P. F. Collier & Son :-':--. -. .. . Preface IN making the selections for this book, which is thought to be the realization of a new idea, it has been my endeavour to bring together descrip- tions of several famous buildings written by authors who have appreciated the romantic spirit, as well as the architectural beauty and grandeur, of the work they describe. It would be impossible to collect within the small boundaries of a single volume sketches and pic- tures of all the masterpieces of architecture, and a vast amount of interesting literature has had to be ignored. I have tried, however, to gather choice examples of as many different styles of architecture as possible and to give a description, wherever practicable, of each building's special object of veneration, such as the Christ of Burgos and the Cid's coffer in the same Cathedral ; the Emerald Buddha at Wat Phra Kao, Bangkok; the statue of Our Lady at Toledo ; etc., as well as the special i — Vol. 3 256809 VI PREFACE feature for which any particular building is famous, such as the Court of Lions in the Alhambra ; the Chapel of Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey; the Convent of the Escurial ; the spiral stairway at Chambord ; etc., and also a typical scene, like the dance de los seises in the Cathedral of Seville ; and the celebration of Easter at St. Peter's. Ruskin says : " It is well to have not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled and their strength wrought all the days of their life." It is also well to have what sympathetic authors have written about these mas- sive and wonderful creations of stone which have looked down upon and outlived so many genera- tions of mankind. With the exception of the Mosque of Santa Sofia, all the translations have been made expressly for this book. E. S. New York, May, 1898. Contents St. Mark's, Venice » • " John Ruskin. The Tower of London H William Hepworth Dixon. The Cathedral of Antwerp 18 William Makepeace Thackeray. The Taj Mahal, Agra 23 Andre Chevrillon. The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, Paris 28 Victor Hugo. The Kremlin, Moscow 38 Theophile Gautier. The Cathedral of York 49 Thomas Frognall Dibdin. The Mosque of Omar, Jerusalem 56 Pierre Loti. The Cathedral of Burgos 65 Theophile Gautier. The Pyramids, Gizeh 71 Georg Ebers. St. Peter's, Rome 76 Charles Dickens. viii CONTENTS The Cathedral of Strasburg 84 Victor Hugo. The Shway Dagohn Rangoon 92 Gwendolin Trench Gascoigne. The Cathedral of Siena 98 John Addington Symonds. The Town Hall of Louvain 102 Grant Allen. The Cathedral of Seville 105 Edmondo De Amicis. Windsor Castle no William Hepworth Dixon. The Cathedral of Cologne 117 Ernest Breton. The Palace of Versailles .126 Augustus J. C. Hare. The Cathedral of Lincoln 132 Thomas Frognall Dibdin. The Temple of Karnak 137 Amelia B. Edwards. Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence • 143 Charles Yriarte. Giotto's Campanile, Florence 14 7 1. Mrs. Oliphant. 11. John Ruskin. The House of Jacques Cceur, Bourges 15 2 Ad. Berty. Wat Phra Kao, Bangkok 15 8 Carl Bock. CONTENTS IX The Cathedral of Toledo «... 163 Theophile Gautier. The Chateau de Chambord 170 Jules Loiseleur. The Temples of Nikko « « 177 Pierre Loti. The Palace of Holyrood, Edinburgh . . . . . 187 David Masson. Saint- Gudule, Brussels 193 Victor Hugo. The Escurial, Madrid ° 195 Edmondo De Amicis. The Temple of Madura 204 James Fergusson. The Cathedral of Milan 20p Theophile Gautier. The Mosque of Hassan, Cairo 215 Amelia B. Edwards. The Cathedral of Treves ... 221 Edward Augustus Freeman. The Vatican, Rome 225 Augustus J. C. Hare. The Cathedral of Amiens 234 John Ruskin. The Mosque of Santa Sofh, Constantinople . . . 24? Edmondo De Amicis. Westminster Abbey, London = 248 Arthur Penrhyn Stanley. The Parthenon. Athens .... ...» . 257 John Addington Symonds. X CONTENTS The Cathedral of Rouen 263 Thomas Frognall Dibdin. The Castle of Heidelberg 269 Victor Hugo. The Ducal Palace, Venice 278 John Ruskin. The Mosque of Cordova 286 Edmondo De Amicis. The Cathedral of Throndtjem 293 Augustus J. C. Hare. The Leaning Tower of Pisa 298 Charles Dickens. The Alhambra, Granada , . 301 Theophile Gautiek. Plates St. Mark's Frontispiece SERIES I Opposite Page 56 The Tower of London The Cathedral of Notre-Dame The Kremlin, Moscow The Pyramids St. Peter's Windsor Castle The Palace of Versailles The Temple of Karnak SERIES II Opposite Page 216 The Temple of Madura The Escurial The Vatican The Mosque of Santa-Sofia Westminster Abbey The Parthenon The Leaning Tower of Pisa Alhambra Turrets, Towers and Temples Turrets, Towers, and Temples, ST. MARK'S. JOHN RUSKIN. A YARD or two farther, we pass the hostelry of the Black Eagle, and, glancing as we pass through the square door of marble, deeply moulded, in the outer wall, we see the shadows of its pergola of vines resting on an ancient well, with a pointed shield carved on its side ; and so presently emerge on the bridge and Campo San Moise, whence to the entrance into St. Mark's Place, called the Bocca di Piazza (mouth of the square), the Venetian character is nearly destroyed, first by the fright- ful facade of San Moise, which we will pause at another time to examine, and then by the modernizing of the shops as they near the piazza, and the mingling with the lower Venetian populace of lounging groups of English and Austrians. We will push fast through them into the shadow of the pillars at the end of the " Bocca di Piazza," and then we forget them all ; for between those pillars there opens a great light, and, in the midst of it, as we advance slowly, the vast tower of St. Mark seems to lift itself visibly forth from the level field of chequered stones i 2 ST. MARK'S. and, on each side, the countless arches prolong themselves into ranged symmetry, as if the rugged and irregular houses that pressed together above us in the dark alley had been struck back into sudden obedience and lovely order, and all their rude casements and broken walls had been transformed into arches charged with goodly sculpture and fluted shafts of delicate stone. And well may they fall back, for beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in a kind of awe, that we may see it far away ; — a multitude of pillars and white domes, clustered into a long, low pyra- mid of coloured light ; a treasure-heap, it seems, partly of gold, and partly of opal and mother-of-pearl, hollowed beneath into five great vaulted porches, ceiled with fair mosaic, and beset with sculpture of alabaster, clear as amber and delicate as ivory, — sculpture fantastic and involved, of palm leaves and lilies, and grapes and pome- granates, and birds clinging and fluttering among the branches, all twined together into an endless network of buds and plumes ; and, in the midst of it, the solemn forms of angels, sceptred, and robed to the feet, and leaning to each other across the gates, their figures indistinct among the gleaming of the golden ground through the leaves beside them, interrupted and dim, like the morning light as it faded back among the branches of Eden, when first its gates were angel-guarded long ago. And round the walls of the porches there are set pillars of variegated stones, jasper and porphyry, and deep-green serpentine- spotted with flakes of snow, and marbles, that half refuse ST. MARK'S, 3 and half yield to the sunshine, Cleopatra-like, " their bluest veins to kiss " — the shadow, as it steals back from them, revealing line after line of azure undulation, as a receding tide leaves the waved sand ; their capitals rich with inter- woven tracery, rooted knots of herbage, and drifting leaves of acanthus and vine, and mystical signs, all beginning and ending in the Cross ; and above them, in the broad archi- volts, a continuous chain of language and of life — angels, and the signs of heaven, and the labours of men, each in its appointed season upon the earth j and above these, another range of glittering pinnacles, mixed with white arches edged with scarlet flowers, — a confusion of delight, amidst which the breasts of the Greek horses are seen blazing in their breadth of golden strength, and the St. Mark's Lion, lifted on a blue field covered with stars, until at last, as if in ecstasy, the crests of the arches break into a marble foam, and toss themselves far into the blue sky in flashes and wreaths of sculptured spray, as if the breakers on the Lido shore had been frost-bound before they fell, and the sea-nymphs had inlaid them with coral and amethyst. Between that grim cathedral of England and this, what an interval ! There is a type of it in the very birds that haunt them; for, instead of the restless crowd, hoarse- voiced and sable-winged, drifting on the bleak upper air, the St. Mark's porches are full of doves, that nestle among the marble foliage, and mingle the soft iridescence of their living plumes, changing at every motion with the tints, hardly less lovely, that have stood unchanged for seven hundred years. 4 ST. MARK'S. And what effect has this splendour on those who pass beneath it ? You may walk from sunrise to sunset, to and fro, before the gateway of St. Mark's, and you will not see an eye lifted to it, nor a countenance brightened by it. Priest and layman, soldier and civilian, rich and poor, pass by it alike regardlessly. Up to the very recesses of the porches, the meanest tradesmen of the city push their counters ; nay, the foundations of its pillars are themselves the seats — not " of them that sell doves " for sacrifice, but of vendors of toys and caricatures. Round the whole square in front of the church there is almost a continuous line of cafes, where the idle Venetians of the middle classes lounge, and read empty journals ; in its centre the Austrian bands play during the time of vespers, their martial music jarring with the organ notes, — the march drowning the miserere, and the sullen crowd thickening around them, — a crowd which, if it had its will, would stiletto every soldier that pipes to it. And in the recesses of the porches, all day long, knots of men of the lowest classes, unem- ployed and listless, lie basking in the sun like lizards ; and unregarded children, — every heavy glance of their young eyes full of desperation and stony depravity, and their throats hoarse with cursing, — gamble, and fight, and snarl, and sleep, hour after hour, clashing their bruised centesimi upon the marble ledges of the church porch. And the images of Christ and His angels look down upon it con- tinually. . . . Let us enter the church itself. It is lost in still deeper twilight, to which the eye must be accus- tomed for some moments before the form of the building can be traced j and then there opens before us a vast cave ST. MARK'S. 5 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 heave 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 to the flames ; and the glories round the heads of the sculptured saints flash out upon us as we pass them, and sink again into the gloom. Under foot and over head, a continual succession of crowded imagery, one picture passing into another, as in a dream ; forms beauti- ful and terrible mixed together; dragons and serpents, and ravening beasts of prey, and graceful birds that in the midst of them drink from running fountains and feed from vases of crystal ; the passions and the pleasures of human life symbolized together, ^nu the mystery of its redemption; for the mazes of interwoven lines and changeful pictures lead always at last to the Cross, lifted and carved in every place and upon every stone; sometimes with the serpent of eternity wrapt round it, sometimes with doves beneath its arms, and sweet herbage growing forth from its feet ; but conspicuous most of all on the great rood that crosses the church before the altar, raised in bright blazonry against the shadow of the apse. And although in the recesses of the aisles and chapels, when the mist of the incense hangs 6 ST. MARK'S. 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 On the surface of the still waters lilies and lotus are sleeping, their stiff leaves pinked out and resting heavily upon the dark mirror. Through the blackness of the boughs English meadows are revealed, bathed in brilliant sunlight, and spaces of blue sky, across which a triangle of white storks is some- times seen flying, and, at certain moments, the far-away vision of the phantom tomb seems like the melancholy spectre of a virgin. — How calm, how superb this solitude, charged with voluptuousness at once solemn and enervating ! Here dwell the beauty, the tenderness, and the light of Asia, dreamed of by Shelley. Dans rinde (Paris, 1891). THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. VICTOR HUGO. MOST certainly, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame is- still a sublime and majestic edifice. But, despite the beauty which it preserves in its old age, it would be impossible not to be indignant at the injuries and mutila- tions which Time and man have jointly inflicted upon the venerable structure without respect for Charlemagne, who laid its first stone, and Philip Augustus, who laid its last. There is always a scar beside a wrinkle on the face of this aged queen of our cathedrals. Tempus edax homo edacior, which I should translate thus : Time is blind, man is stupid. If we had leisure to examine one by one, with the reader, the various traces of destruction imprinted on the old church, Time's work would prove to be less destructive than men's, especially des hommes de Fart, because there have been some individuals in the last two centuries who considered themselves architects. First, to cite several striking examples, assuredly there are few more beautiful pages in architecture than that facade, exhibiting the three deeply-dug porches with their pointed arches ; the plinth, embroidered and indented with twenty-eight royal niches ; the immense central rose- THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. 29 window, flanked by its two lateral windows, like the priest by his deacon and sub-deacon ; the high and frail gallery of open-worked arches, supporting on its delicate columns a heavy platform ; and, lastly, the two dark and massive towers, with their slated pent-houses. These harmonious parts of a magnificent whole, superimposed in five gigantic stages, and presenting, with their innumerable details of statuary, sculpture, and carving, an overwhelming yet not perplexing mass, combine in producing a calm grandeur. It is a vast symphony in stone, so to speak ; the colossal work of man and of a nation, as united and as complex as the Iliad and the romanceros of which it is the sister j a prodigious production to which all the forces of an epoch contributed, and from every stone of which springs forth in a hundred ways the workman's fancy directed by the artist's genius ; in one word, a kind of human creation, as strong and fecund as the divine creation from which it seems to have stolen the two-fold character: variety and eternity. And what I say here of the facade, must be said of the entire Cathedral ; and what I say of the Cathedral of Paris, must be said of all the Mediaeval Christian churches. Everything in this art, which proceeds from itself, is so logical and well-proportioned that to measure the toe of the foot is to measure the giant. Let us return to the facade of Notre-Dame, as it exists to-day when we go reverently to admire the solemn and mighty Cathedral, which, according to the old chroniclers, was terrifying : qua mole sua terrorem Incutit spectantibus. That facade now lacks three important things : first, the 30 THE CATHEDR/L OF NOTRE-DAME. flight of eleven steps, which raised it above the level of the ground ; then, the lower row of statues which occupied the niches of the three porches ; and the upper row 1 of the twenty-eight ancient kings of France which ornamented the gallery of the first story, beginning with Childebert and ending with Philip Augustus, holding in his hand " la pomme imperiale." Time in its slow and unchecked progress, raising the level of the city's soil, buried the steps ; but whilst the pavement of Paris like a rising tide has engulfed one by one the eleven steps which formerly added to the majestic height of the edifice, Time has given to the church more, perhaps, than it has stolen, for it is Time that has spread that sombre hue of centuries on the facade which makes the old age of buildings their period of beauty. But who has thrown down those two rows of statues ? Who has left the niches empty ? Who has cut that new and bastard arch in the beautiful middle of the central porch ? Who has dared to frame that tasteless and heavy wooden door carved a la Louis XV. near Biscornette's arabesques ? The men, the architects, the artists of our day. And when we enter the edifice, who has overthrown that colossal Saint Christopher, proverbial among statues as the grand? salle du Palais among halls, or the fTeche of Strasburg among steeples ? And those myriads of statues that peopled all the spaces between the columns of the nave and choir, kneeling, standing, on horseback, men, 1 The outside of Notre-Dame has been restored since Victor Hugo wrote his famous romance. — E. S. THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. 31 women, children, kings, bishops, warriors, in stone, wood, marble, gold, silver, copper, and even wax, — who has brutally swept them away ? It was not Time ! And who has substituted for the old Gothic altar, splen- didly overladen with shrines and reliquaries, that heavy marble sarcophagus with its angels' heads and clouds, which seems to be a sample from the Val-de-Grace or the Invalides ? Who has so stupidly imbedded that heavy stone anachronism in Hercanduc's Carlovingian pavement ? Is it not Louis XIV. fulfilling the vow of Louis XIII. ? And who has put cold white glass in the place of those richly-coloured panes, which made the astonished gaze of our ancestors pause between the rose of the great porch and the pointed arches of the apsis ? What would an under-chorister of the Sixteenth Century say if he could see the beautiful yellow plaster with which our vandal archbishops have daubed their Cathedral ? He would remember that this was the colour with which the execu- tioner brushed the houses of traitors ; he would remember the Hotel du Petit-Bourbon, all besmeared thus with yellow, on account of the treason of the Constable, "yellow of such good quality," says Sauval, "and so well laid on that more than a century has scarcely caused its colour to fade ; " and, imagining that the holy place had become infamous, he would flee from it. And if we ascend the Cathedral without stopping to notice the thousand barbarities of all kinds, what has been done with that charming little bell-tower, which stood over the point of intersection of the transept, and which, neither less frail nor less bold than its neighbour, the 32 THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. steeple of the Sainte-Chapelle (also destroyed), shot up into the sky, sharp, harmonious, and open-worked, higher than the other towers ? It was amputated by an architect of good taste (1787), who thought it sufficient to cover the wound with that large plaster of lead, which looks like the lid of a pot. This is the way the wonderful art of the Middle Ages has been treated in all countries, particularly in France. In this ruin we may distinguish three separate agencies, which have affected it in different degrees ; first, Time which has insensibly chipped it, here and there, and dis- coloured its entire surface ; next, revolutions, both politi- cal and religious, which, being blind and furious by nature, rushed wildly upon it, stripped it of its rich garb of sculp- tures and carvings, shattered its tracery, broke its garlands of arabesques and its figurines, and threw down its statues, sometimes on account of their mitres, sometimes on ac- count of their crowns ; and, finally, the fashions, which, ever since the anarchistic and splendid innovations of the Renaissance, have been constantly growing more grotesque and foolish, and have succeeded in bringing about the decadence of architecture. The fashions have indeed done more harm than the revolutions. They have cut it to the quick ; they have attacked the framework of art ; they have cut, hacked, and mutilated the form of the build- ing as well as its symbol; its logic as well as its beauty. And then they have restored, a presumption of which time and revolutions were, at least, guiltless. In the name of good taste they have insolently covered the wounds of Gothic architecture with their paltry gew-gaws of a day, THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. 33 their marble ribbons, their metal pompons, a veritable leprosy of oval ornaments, volutes, spirals, draperies, gar- lands, fringes, flames of stone, clouds of bronze, over-fat Cupids, and bloated cherubim, which begin to eat into the face of art in Catherine de' Medici's oratory, and kill it, writhing and grinning in the boudoir of the Dubarry, two centuries later. Therefore, in summing up the points to which I have called attention, three kinds of ravages disfigure Gothic architecture to-day : wrinkles and warts on the epidermis, — these are the work of Time ; wounds, bruises and fractures, — these are the work of revolutions from Luther to Mirabeau ; mutilations, amputations, dislocations of members, restorations, — these are the Greek and Roman work of professors, according to Vitruvius and Vignole. That magnificent art which the Vandals produced, acad- emies have murdered. To the ravages of centuries and revolutions, which devastated at least with impartiality and grandeur, were added those of a host of school archi- tects, patented and sworn, who debased everything with the choice and discernment of bad taste ; and who sub- stituted the chicories of Louis XV. for the Gothic lace- work, for the greater glory of the Parthenon. It is the ass's kick to the dying lion. It is the old oak crown- ing itself with leaves for the reward of being bitten, gnawed, and devoured by caterpillars. How far this is from the period when Robert Cenalis, comparing Notre-Dame de Paris with the famous Temple of Diana at Ephesus, so highly extolled by the ancient heathen, which has immortalized Erostratus, found the 34 THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. Gaulois cathedral "plus excellente en longueur, largeur, hauteur, et structure." Notre-Dame de Paris is not, however, what may be called a finished, defined, classified monument. It is not a Roman church, neither is it a Gothic church. This edifice is not a type. Notre-Dame has not, like the Abbey of Tournus, the solemn and massive squareness, the round and large vault, the glacial nudity, and the majestic sim- plicity of those buildings which have the circular arch for their generative principle. It is not, like the Cathedral of Bourges, the magnificent product of light, multiform, tufted, bristling, efflorescent Gothic. It is out of the question to class it in that ancient family of gloomy, mysterious, low churches, which seem crushed by the circular arch ; almost Egyptian in their ceiling ; quite hieroglyphic, sacerdotal, and symbolic, charged in their ornaments with more lozenges and zigzags than flowers, more flowers than animals, more animals than human figures ; the work of the bishop more than the architect, the first transformation of the art, fully impressed with theocratic and military discipline, which takes its root in the Bas-Empire, and ends with William the Conqueror. It is also out of the question to place our Cathedral in that other family of churches, tall, aerial, rich in windows and sculpture, sharp in form, bold of mien ; communales and bourgeois, like politi- cal symbols; free, capricious, unbridled, like works of art; the second transformation of architecture, no longer hiero- glyphic, immutable, and sacerdotal, but artistic, progressive, and popular, which begins with the return from the Cru- sades and ends with Louis XI. Notre-Dame de Paris is THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. 35 not pure Roman, like the former, nor is it pure Arabian, like the latter. It is an edifice of the transition. The Saxon architect had set up the first pillars of the nave when the Crusaders introduced the pointed arch, which enthroned itself like a conqueror upon those broad Roman capitals designed to support circular arches. On the pointed arch, thenceforth mistress of all styles, the rest of the church was built. Inexperienced and timid at the beginning, it soon broadens and expands, but does not yet dare to shoot up into steeples and pinnacles, as it has since done in so many marvellous cathedrals. You might say that it feels the influence of its neighbours, the heavy Roman pillars. Moreover, these edifices of the transition from the Roman to the Gothic are not less valuable for study than pure types. They express a nuance of the art which would be lost but for them. This is the engrafting of the pointed upon the circular arch. Notre-Dame de Paris is a particularly curious specimen of this variety. Every face and every stone of the vener- able structure is a page not only of the history of the coun- try, but also of art and science. Therefore to glance here only at the principal details, while the little Porte Rouge attains almost to the limits of the Gothic delicacy of the Fifteenth Century, the pillars of the nave, on account of their bulk and heaviness, carry you back to the date of the Carlovingian Abbey of Saint-Germain des Pres, you would believe that there were six centuries between that doorway and those pillars. It is not only the hermetics who find in the symbols of the large porch a satisfactory compendium 2,6 THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. of their science, of which the church of Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie was so complete an hieroglyphic. Thus the Roman Abbey, the philosophical church, the Gothic art, the Saxon art, the heavy, round pillar, which reminds you of Gregory VII., the hermetic symbols by which Nicholas Flamel heralded Luther, papal unity and schism, Saint-Germain des Pres and Saint-Jacques de la Boucherie ; all are melted, combined, amalgamated in Notre-Dame. This central and generatrix church is a sort of chimaera among the old churches of Paris ; it has the head of one, the limbs of another, the body of another, — something from each of them. I repeat, these hybrid structures are not the least interest- ing ones to the artist, the antiquary, and the historian. They show how far architecture is a primitive art, inasmuch as they demonstrate (what is also demonstrated by the Cyclo- pean remains, the pyramids of Egypt, and the gigantic Hindu pagodas), that the grandest productions of architec- ture are social more than individual works ; the offspring, rather, of nations in travail than the inspiration of men of genius; the deposit left by a people; the accumulation of ages ; the residuum of the successive evaporations of human society ; in short, a species of formation. Every wave of time superimposes its alluvion, every generation deposits its stratum upon the building, every individual lays his stone. Thus build the beavers ; thus, the bees ; and thus, men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is a bee- hive. Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Often the fashions in art change while they are THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. 37 being constructed, pendent opera interrupta \ they are con- tinued quietly according to the new art. This new art takes the edifice where it finds it, assimilates with it, develops it according to its own fancy, and completes it, if it is possible. The result is accomplished without disturb* ance, without effort, without reaction, following a natural and quiet law. It is a graft which occurs unexpectedly, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which returns. Certes, there is material for very large books and often a universal history of mankind, in those successive solder- ings of various styles at various heights upon the structure. The man, the artist, and the individual efface themselves in these vast anonymous masses ; human intelligence is con- centrated and summed up in them. Time is the architect 5 the nation is the mason. Notre Dame de Paris (Paris, 18 31). THE KREMLIN. THEOPHILE GAUTIER. THE Kremlin, always regarded as the Acropolis, the Holy Place, the Palladium, and the very heart of Russia, was formerly surrounded by a palisade of strong oaken stakes — similar to the defence which the Athenian citadel had at the time of the first invasion of the Persians. Dmitri-Donskoi substituted for this palisade crenellated walls, which, having become old and dilapidated, were rebuilt by Ivan III. Ivan's wall remains to-day, but in many places there are restorations and repairs. Thick layers of plaster endeavour to hide the scars of time and the black traces of the great fire of 1812 which was only able to lick this wall with its tongues of flame. The Kremlin somewhat resembles the Alhambra. Like the Moorish fortress, it stands on the top of a hill which it encloses with its wall flanked by towers : it contains royal dwellings, churches, and squares, and among the ancient buildings a modern Palace whose intrusion we regret as we do the Palace of Charles V. amid the delicate Sara- cenic architecture which it seems to crush with its weight. The tower of Ivan Veliki is not without resemblance to the tower of the Vela ; and from the Kremlin, as from the THE KREMLIN. 39 Alhambra, a beautiful view is to be enjoyed, a panorama of enchantment which the fascinated eye will ever retain. It is strange that when seen from a distance the Kremlin is perhaps even more Oriental than the Alhambra itself whose massive reddish towers give no hint of the splendour within. Above the sloping and crenellated walls of the Kremlin and among the towers with their ornamented roofs, myriads of cupolas and globular bell-towers gleaming with metallic light seem to be rising and falling like bubbles of glittering gold in the strong blaze of light. The white wall seems to be a silver basket holding a bouquet of golden flowers, and we fancy that we are gazing upon one of those magical cities which the imagination of the Ara- bian story-tellers alone can build — an architectural crys- tallization of the Thousand and One Nights! And when Winter has sprinkled these strange dream-buildings with its powdered diamonds, we fancy ourselves transported into another planet, for nothing like this has ever met our gaze. We entered the Kremlin by the Spasskoi Gate which opens upon the Krasnaia. No entrance could be more romantic. It is cut through an enormous square tower, placed before a kind of porch. The tower has three di- minishing stories and is crowned with a spire resting upon open arches. The double-headed eagle, holding the globe in its claws, stands upon the sharp point of the spire, which, like the story it surmounts, is octagonal, ribbed, and gilded. Each face of the second story bears an enormous dial, so that the hour may be seen from every point of the compass. Add for effect some patches of snow laid on the jutting masonry like bold dashes of pigment, and you will have a 40 THE KREMLIN. faint idea of the aspect presented by this queenly tower, as it springs upward in three jets above the denticulated wall which it breaks. . . . Issuing from the gate, we find ourselves in the large court of the Kremlin, in the midst of the most bewildering conglomeration of palaces, churches, and monasteries of which the imagination can dream. It conforms to no , known style of architecture. It is not Greek, it is not Byzantine, it is not Gothic, it is not Saracen, it is not Chinese : it is Russian ; it is Muscovite. Never did archi- tecture more free, more original, more indifferent to rules, in a word, more romantic, materialize with such fantastic caprice. Sometimes it seems to resemble the freaks of frostwork. However, its leading characteristics are the cupolas and the golden-bulbed bell-towers, which seem to follow no law and are conspicuous at the first glance. Below the large square where the principal buildings of the Kremlin are grouped and which forms the plateau of the hill, a circular road winds about the irregularities of the ground and is bordered by ramparts flanked with towers of infinite variety : some are round, some square, some slender as minarets, some massive as bastions, and some with machicolated turrets, while others have retreating stories, vaulted roofs, sharply-cut sides, open-worked galleries, tiny cupolas, spires, scales, tracery, and all conceivable endings. The battlements, cut deeply through the wall and notched at the top like an arrow, are alternately plain and pierced with little barbicans. We will ignore the strategic value of this defence, but from a poetic standpoint it satisfies the imagination and gives the idea of a formidable citadel. THE KREMLIN. 41 Between the rampart and the platform bordered by a balustrade gardens extend, now powdered with snow, and a picturesque little church lifts its globular bell-towers. Be- yond, as far as the eye can reach, lies the immense and wonderful panorama of Moscow to which the crest of the saw-toothed wall forms an admirable foreground and frame for the distant perspective which no art could improve. . . . The Kremlin contains within its walls many churches, or cathedrals, as the Russians call them. Exactly like the Acropolis, it gathers around it on its narrow plateau a large number of temples. We will visit them one by one, but we will first pause at the tower of Ivan Veliki, an enor- mous octagon belfry with three retreating stories, upon the last of which there rises from a zone of ornamentation a round turret finished with a swelling dome, fire-gilt with ducat-gold, and surmounted by a Greek cross resting upon the conquered crescent. Upon each side of each story little arches are cut so that the brazen body of a bell may be seen. In this place there are thirty-three bells, among which is said to be the famous alarm-bell of Novgorod, whose rever- berations once called the people to the tumultuous delibera- tions in the public square. One of these bells weighs not less than a hundred and ninety-three tons, and is such a mon- ster of metal that beside it the great bell of Notre-Dame of which Quasimodo was so proud, would be nothing more than the tiny hand-bell used at Mass. . . . Let us enter one of the most ancient and characteristic cathedrals of the Kremlin, the first one built of stone, the 42 THE KREMLIN. Cathedral of the Assumption {Ouspenskosabor}. It is not the original edifice founded by Ivan Kalita. That crumbled away after a century and a half of existence and was re- built by Ivan III. Notwithstanding its Byzantine style and archaic appearance, the present Cathedral dates only from the Fifteenth Century. One is astonished to learn that it is the work of Fioraventi, an architect of Bologna, whom the Russians called Aristotle because of his astounding knowledge. One would imagine it the work of some Greek architect from Constantinople whose head was filled with memories of Santa Sofia and models of Greco- Oriental architecture. The Assumption is almost square and its great walls soar with a surprising pride and strength. Four enormous pillars, large as towers and massive as the columns of the Palace of Karnak, support the central cupola, which rests on a flat roof in the Asiatic style, flanked by four similar cupolas. This simple arrangement produces a magnificent effect and these massive pillars con- tribute, without any heaviness, a fine balance and extraor- dinary stability to the Cathedral. The interior of the church is covered with Byzantine paintings on a gold background. The pillars themselves are embellished with figures arranged in zones as in the Egyptian temples and palaces. Nothing could be more strange than this decoration where thousands of figures surround you like a mute assemblage, ascending and de- scending the entire length of the walls, walking in files in Christian panathenaea, standing alone in poses of hieratic rigidity, bending over to the pendentives, and draping the temple with a human tapestry swarming with motionless THE KREMLIN. 43 1 beings. A strange light, carefully disposed, contributes greatly to the disquieting and mysterious effect. In these ruddy and fawn-coloured shadows the tall savage saints of the Greek calendar assume a formidable semblance of life ; they look at you with fixed eyes and seem to threaten you with their hands outstretched for benediction. . . . The interior of St. Mark's at Venice, with its suggestion of a gilded cavern, gives the idea of the Assumption ; only the interior of the Muscovite church rises with one sweep towards the sky, while the vault of St. Mark's is strangely weighed down like a crypt. The i:onostase, a lofty wall of silver-gilt with five rows of figures, is like the facade of a golden palace, dazzling the eye with fabled magnificence. In the filigree framework of gold appear in tones of bistre the dark heads and hands of the Madonnas and saints. The rays of their aureoles are set with precious stones, which, as the light falls upon them, scintillate and blaze with celestial glory ; the images, objects of peculiar vene- ration, are adorned with breastplates of precious stones, necklaces, and bracelets, starred with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, amethysts, pearls, and turquoises ; the madness of religious extravagance can go no further. It is in the Cathedral of the Assumption that the coro- nation of the Czar takes place. The platform for this occasion is erected between the four pillars which support the cupola and faces the iconostase. The tombs of the Metropolitans of Moscow are placed in rows along the sides of the walls. They are oblong : as they loom up in the shadows, they make us think of trunks packed for the great voyage of eternity. . . . 44 THE KREMLIN. At the side of the new palace and very near these churches a strange building is seen, of no known style of architecture, neither Asiatic nor Tartar, and which for a secular building is much what Vassili-Blagennoi is for a religious edifice, — the perfectly realized chimaera of a sumptuous, barbaric, and fantastic imagination. It was built under Ivan III. by the architect Aleviso. Above its roof several towers, capped with gold and containing within them chapels and oratories, spring up with a graceful and picturesque irregularity. An outside staircase, from the top of which the Czar shows himself to the people after his coronation, gives access to the building and produces by its ornamented projection a unique architectural effect. It is to Moscow what the Giants' Stairway is to Venice. It is one of the curiosities of the Kremlin. In Russia it is known as the Red Stairway {Kramoi-Kriltosi). The interior of the Palace, the residence of the ancient Czars, defies descrip- tion ; one would say that its chambers and passages have been excavated according to no determined plan in some curious block of stone, for they are so strangely entangled, so winding and complicated, and so constantly changing their level and direction that they seem to have been ordered at the caprice of an extravagant fancy. We walk through them as in a dream, sometimes stopped by a grille which opens mysteriously, sometimes forced to follow a narrow dark passage in which our shoulders almost touch both walls, sometimes having no other path than the toothed ledge of a cornice from which the copper plates of the roofs and the globular belfries are visible, constantly ascending, descending without knowing where we are, see- THE KREMLIN. 45 ing beyond us through the golden trellises the gleam of a lamp flashing back from the golden filigree-work of the shrines, and emerging after this intramural journey into a hall with a rich and riotous wildness of ornamentation, at the end of which we are surprised at not seeing the Grand Kniaz of Tartary seated cross-legged upon his carpet of black felt. Such for example is the hall called the Golden Chamber, which occupies the entire Granovitaia Palata (the Facet Palace), so called doubtless on account of its exterior being cut in diamond facets. The Granovitaia Palata adjoins the old palace of the Czars. The golden vaults of this hall rest upon a central pillar by means of surbased arches from which thick bars of elliptical gilded iron go across from one arc to another to prevent their spreading. Several paintings here and there make sombre spots upon the burnished gold splendour of the background. Upon the string-courses of the arches legends are written in old Sclavonic letters — magnificent characters which lend themselves with as much effect for ornamentation as the Cufic letters on Arabian buildings. Richer, more myste- rious, and yet more brilliant decorations than these of the Golden Chamber cannot be imagined. A romantic person would like to see a Shakespearian play acted here. Certain vaulted halls of the old Palace are so low that a man who is a little above the average height cannot stand upright in them. It is here, in an atmosphere overcharged with heat, that the women, lounging on cushions in Orien- tal style, spend the hours of the long Russian winter in gaz- ing through the little windows at the snow sparkling on the 46 THE KREMLIN. golden cupolas and the ravens whirling in great circles around the bell-towers. These apartments with their motley wall-decorations of palms, foliage, and flowers, recalling the patterns of Cash- mere, make us imagine these to be Asiatic harems trans-^ ported to the polar frosts. The true Muscovite taste, perverted later by a badly-understood imitation of Western art, appears here in all its primitive originality and intensely barbaric flavour. I have frequently observed that the progress of civilization seems to deprive nations of the true sense of architecture and decoration. The ancient edifices of the Kremlin prove once again how true is this assertion, which appears para- doxical at first. An inexhaustible fantasy presides over the decoration of these mysterious rooms where the gold, the green, the blue, and the red mingle with a rare happiness and produce the most charming effects. This architecture, without the least regard for symmetry, rises like a honey- comb of soap-bubbles blown upon a plate. Each little cell takes its place adjoining its neighbour, arranging its own angles and facets until the whole glitters with colours dia- pered with iris. This childish and bizarre comparison will give you a better idea than anything else of the aggregation of these palaces, so fantastic, yet so real. It is in this style that we wish they had built the new Palace, an immense building in good modern taste and which would have a beauty elsewhere, but none whatever in the centre of the old Kremlin. The classic architecture with its long cold lines seems more wearisome and solemn here among these palaces with their strange forms, their THE KREMLIN. 47 gaudy colours, and this throng of churches of Oriental style darting towards the sky a golden forest of cupolas, domes, pyramidal spires, and bulbous bell-towers. When looking at this Muscovite architecture you could easily believe yourself in some chimerical city of Asia, fancying the cathedrals mosques, and the bell-towers minarets, if it were not for the sober facade of the new Palace which leads you back to the unpoetic Occident and its unpoetic civilization ; a sad thing for a romantic bar- barian of the present day. We enter the new Palace by a stairway of monumental size closed at the top by a magnificent grille of polished iron which is opened to allow the visitor to pass. We find ourselves under the large vault of a domed hall where sentinels are perpetually on guard: four effigies clothed from head to foot in antique and curious Sclavonic armour These knights have a noble air; they are surprisingly life-like; we could easily believe that hearts are beating beneath their coats of mail. Mediaeval armour disposed in this way always gives me an involuntary shiver. It so faithfully suggests the external form of a man who has vanished forever. From this rotunda lead two galleries which contain priceless riches : the treasure of the Caliph Haroun-al Raschid, the wells of Aboul-Kasem, and the Green Vaults of Dresden united could not show such an accumulation of marvels, and here historic association is added to the material value. Here, sparkling, gleaming, and sportively flashing their prismatic light, are diamonds, sapphires, rubies, and emeralds — all the precious stones which Nature has hidden in the depths of her mines — in as 48 THE KREMLIN. much profusion as if they were mere glass. They glitter like constellations in crowns, they flash in points of light from the ends of sceptres, they fall like sparkling rain- drops upon the Imperial insignias and form arabesques and cyphers until they nearly hide the gold in which they are set. The eye is dazzled and the mind can hardly calculate the sums that represent such magnificence. Voyage en Ruuie (Paris, 1866), THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN. LET us go immediately to the Cathedral — the deepen- ing tones of whose tenor bell seem to hurry us on to the spot. Gentle reader, on no account visit this stu- pendous edifice — this mountain of stone — for the first time from the Stonegate (Street) which brings you in front of the south transept. Shun it — as the shock might be distressing ; but, for want of a better approach, wend your steps round by Little Blake Street, and, at its termina- tion, swerve gently to the left, and place yourself full in view of the West Front. Its freshness, its grandeur, its boldness and the numerous yet existing proofs of its ancient richness and variety, will peradventure make you breath- less for some three seconds. If it should strike you that there is a want of the subdued and mellow tone of antiquity, such as we left behind at Lincoln, you must remember that nearly all this front has undergone a recent scraping and repairing in the very best possible taste — under the auspices of the late Dean Markham, who may be said to have loved this Cathedral with a holy love. What has been done, under his auspices, is admirable ; and a pattern for all future similar doings. 50 THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. Look at those towers — to the right and left of you. How airy, how elegant, what gossamer-like lightness, and yet of what stability ! It is the decorative style of architec- ture, in the Fourteenth Century, at which you are now gazing with such untiring admiration. Be pleased to pass on (still outside) to the left, and take the whole range of its northern side, including the Chapter-House. Look well that your position be far enough out — between the house of the residing prebendary and the deanery — and then, giving rein to your fancy, gaze, rejoice, and revel in every expression of admiration and delight ! — for it has no equal : at least, not in Germany and France, including Normandy. What light and shade ! — as I have seen it, both beneath the sun and moon, on my first visit to the house of the prebendal residentiary — and how lofty, mas- sive, and magnificent the Nave ! You catch the Chapter- House and the extreme termination of the choir, connecting one end of the Cathedral with the other, at the same moment — comprising an extent of some 550 feet! You are lost in astonishment, almost as much at the conception, as at the completion of such a building. Still you are disappointed with the central Tower, or Lantern ; the work, in great part, of Walter Skirlaw, the celebrated Bishop of Durham, — a name that reflects honour upon everything connected with it. Perhaps the upper part only of this tower was of his planning — towards the end of the Fourteenth Century. It is sadly disproportionate with such a building, and should be lifted up one hundred feet at the least. . . . After several experiments, I am of the opinion that you THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. 5 1 should enter the interior at the spot where it is usually entered ; and which, from the thousand pilgrim-feet that annually visit the spot, may account for the comparatively worn state of the pavement ; — I mean the South Transept. Let us enter alone, or with the many. Straight before you, at the extremity of the opposite or northern transept, your eyes sparkle with delight on a view of the stained- glass lancet windows. Fiow delicate — how rich — how chaste — how unrivalled ! All the colours seem to be intertwined, in delicate fibres, like Mechlin lace. There is no glare : but the tone of the whole is perfectly bewitch- ing. You move on. A light streams from above. It is from the Lantern, or interior summit of the Great Tower, upon which you are gazing. Your soul is lifted up with your eyes : and if the diapason harmonies of the organ are let loose, and the sweet and soft voices of the choristers unite in the Twelfth Mass of Mozart — you instinctively clasp your hands together and exclaim, " This must be Heaven ! " Descend again to earth. Look at those clustered and colossal bases, upon which the stupendous tower is raised. They seem as an Atlas that for some five minutes would sustain the world. Gentle visitor, I see you breathless, and starting back. It is the Nave with its " storied win- dows richly dight," that transports you ; so lofty, so wide, so simple, so truly grand ! The secret of this extraor- dinary effect appears to be this. The pointed arches that separate the nave from the side aisles, are at once spacious and destitute of all obtruding ornaments ; so that you catch very much of the side aisles with the nave ; and on 52 THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. the left, or south aisle, you see some of the largest win- dows in the kingdom, with their original stained glass, a rare and fortunate result — from the fanatical destruction of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries ; and for which you must laud the memory of General Lord Fairfax, Cromwell's son-in-law : who showed an especial tender- ness towards this Cathedral. " Breathe a prayer for his soul and pass on " to the great window at the extremity of the nave. To my eye the whole of this window wants simplicity and gran- deur of effect. Even its outside is too unsubstantial and playful in the tracery, for my notion of congruity with so immense a Cathedral. The stained glass is decidedly second-rate. The colour of the whole interior is admir- able and worthy of imitation. But where is The Choir, that wonder of the world ? — " Yet more wondrous grown " from its phoenix-like revival from an almost all devouring; flame ? 1 You must retrace your steps — approach the grand screen — throw- ing your eye across the continued roof of the nave ; and, gently drawing a red curtain aside, immediately under the organ, you cannot fail to be ravished with the most mar- vellous sight before you. Its vastness, its unspeakable and * I scarcely know how to trust myself with the mention of that most appalling, unprecedented, act of a one-third madman and two- thirds rogue — Jonathan Martin by name — who set fire to the choir of York Minster : a fire which was almost miraculously stopt in its progress towards the destruction of the entire Cathedral. This had been a result which Martin would have rejoiced to have seen effected. This horrid deed, at the very thought of which the heart sickens, took place on the 2d of February, 1829. THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. 53 indescribable breadth, grandeur, minuteness, and variety of detail and finish — the clustering stalls, the stupendous organ, the altar, backed by a stone Gothic screen, with the interstices filled with plate-glass — the huge outspread- ing eastern window behind, with its bespangled stained- glass, describing two hundred scriptural subjects — all that you gaze upon, and all that you feel is so much out of < everyday experience, that you scarcely credit the scene to be of this world. To add to the effect, I once saw the vast area of this choir filled and warmed by the devotion of a sabbath afternoon. Sitting under the precentor's stall, I looked up its almost interminable pavement where knees were bending, responses articulated, and the organ's tremendous peal echoing from its utmost extremity. Above the sunbeams were streaming through the che- quered stained-glass — and it was altogether a scene of which the recollection is almost naturally borne with one to the grave. . . . This Cathedral boasts of two transepts, but the second is of very diminutive dimensions : indeed, scarcely amount- ing to the designation of the term. But these windows are most splendidly adorned with ancient stained-glass. They quickly arrest the attention of the antiquary ; whose bosom swells, and whose eyes sparkle with delight, as he surveys their enormous height and richness. That^ on the southern side has a sort of mosaic work or dove-tailed character, which defies adequate description — and is an admirable avant-propos to the Chapter House : — the Chapter House ! — that glory of the Cathedral — that wonder of the world ! . ■ 54 THE CATHEDRAL OF YORK. Doubtless this Chapter House is a very repertory of all that is curious and grotesque, and yet tasteful, and of most marvellous achievement. You may carouse within it for a month — but it must be in the hottest month of the year ; and when you are tired of the " cool tankard," you may feast upon the pages of Britton and Halfpenny. . . . But the " world of wonders " exhibited in the shape of grotesque and capricious ornaments within this " House," is responded to by ornaments to the full as fanciful and extravagant within the Nave and Choir. What an imagi- nation seems to have been let loose in the designer en- gaged ! Look at what is before you ! Those frisky old gentlemen are sculptured at the terminating point, as cor- bels, of the arches on the roof of the nave: and it is curious that, in the bottom corbel, the figure to the left is a sort of lampoon, or libellous representation of the clergy: the bands and curled hair are decisive upon this point. . . . When I pace and repace the pavement of this stupendous edifice — when I meditate within this almost unearthly House of God — when I think of much of its departed wealth and splendour, 1 as well as of its present durability and 1 I gather the following from the abridged English version (1693) of Dugdale s Monasticon as quoted by Drake. Where is even the Protestant bosom that does not heave heavily as it reads it ? " To this Cathedral did belong abundance of jewels, vessels of gold and silver, and other ornaments ; rich vestments and books, — amongst which were ten mitres of great value, and one small mitre set with stones for the ' Boy Bishop.'' One silver and gilt pastoral staff, many pastoral rings, amongst which one for the bishop of the boys. Chal- ice., viols, pots, basons, candlesticks, thuribles, holy-water pots, crosses of silver — one of which weighed eight pounds, six ounces. o Z O a: o H W K H .Cl, THE CATHEDRAL OF NOTRE-DAME. . • o a o z s N 3 fa C/2 Q < fa fa k w W On H to . !&~^M% W J en aj > o W < ter, in the midst of which figure those of the Archbishoj Maximilian Heinrich. On the frieze you read the inscription : " Tribus ab oriente regibus devicto in agnitione veri numinis capitulwn metropol. erexit." Above the grilled window, which is opened dur- ing grand ceremonies to permit the people to see the reliquary, is written : " Corpora sanctorum recubant hie terna magorum ; Ax his sublatum nihil est alibive locatum.'"'' Finally, above the reliquary placed to the right and left between the columns one reads : " Et apertis thesauris suis obtulerunt munera" In 1794 the relics were carried to the treasury of Arnsberg, then to Prague, where the three crowns of diamonds were sold, and finally to Frankfort-on-the-Main. When they were brought back in 1804, the reliquary was repaired and put in its old place. This reliquary, a chef d'eeuvre of Twelfth Century orfevrerie, is of gilded copper with the exception of the front, which is of pure gold ; its form is that of a tomb ; its length 1 m. 85, its breadth I m. at the base, its height 1 m. 50 ; on the side turned 124 THE CATHEDRAL OF COLOGNE. to the west you see represented the Adoration of the Magi and the baptism of Jesus Christ. Above the sculp- ture is a kind of lid which may be raised, permitting you to see the skulls of the Three Kings ornamented with golden crowns garnished with L Bohemian stones, — a kind of garnet ; in the pedime\t is the image of the Divine Judge sitting between two ar,gels who hold the attributes of the Passion; the two b;ists above represent Gabriel and Raphael ; and, finally,, an enormous topaz occupies the summit of the pedimWit. The right side of the reliquary is ornamented with i v ages of the prophets, Moses, Jonah, David, Daniel, Amos, and Obadiah. The apostles Paul, Philip, Simon, Thomas, and Judas Thaddeus are placed in six niches above. In the left side you see the prophets Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Nahum, Solomon, Joel, and Aaron, and the apostles Bartholomew, Matthew, John the Lesser, An- drew, Peter, and John the Great. The back of the monu- ment presents the flagellation of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Saint John, the Saviour on the Cross, Saint Felix, Saint Nabor, the Archbishop Reinald and eight busts of angels. The monument is surmounted by an open-work ridge of copper lace. This magnificent reliquary is cov- ered with more than 1,500 precious stones and antique • cameos representing subjects which are not exactly Christian such as the apotheosis of an Emperor, two heads of Medusa, a head of Hercules, one of Alexander, etc. Behind the reliquary is a bas-relief in marble I m. 33 in height and 1 m. 40 in length, representing the solemn removal of the relics. The bas-reliefs of richly-gilr bronze, placed below the windows which occupy the back THE CATHEDRAL OF COLOGNE. 125 of the chapel, represent the Adoration of the Magi : these were the gift of Jacques dc Croy, Duke of Cambrai in 15 16. This window is ornamented with beautiful panes of the Thirteenth Century, representing various subjects of sacred history. Jules Gaillhabaud, Monuments anciens et modernes (Paris, 1865)0 THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. AUGUSTUS J. C. HARE. THE first palace of Versailles was a hunting-lodge built by Louis XIII. at the angle of the present Rue de la Pompe and Avenue de Saint-Cloud. This he afterwards found too small, and built, in 1627, a moated castle, on the site of a windmill in which he had once taken shelter for the night. The buildings of this chateau still exist, respected, as the home of his father, in all the alterations of Louis XIV., and they form the centre of the present place. In 1632 Louis XIII. became seigneur of Versailles by purchase from Francois de Gondi, Archbishop of Paris. The immense works which Louis XIV. undertook here, and which were carried out by the architect Mansart, were begun in 1661, and in 1682 the residence of the Court was definitely fixed at Versailles, connected by new roads with the capital. Colbert made a last effort to keep the king at Paris, and to divert the immense sums which were being swallowed up in Versailles to the completion of the Louvre. The very dulness of the site of Versailles, leav- ing everything to be created, was an extra attraction in the eyes of Louis XIV. The great difficulty to be contended with in the creation of Versailles was the want of water, THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. 127 and this, after various other attempts had failed, it was hoped to overcome by a canal which was to bring the waters of the Eure to the royal residence. In 1681 22,000 soldiers and 6,000 horses were employed in this work, with such results of sickness that the troops en- camped at Maintenon, where the chief part of the work was, became unfit for any service. On October 12, 1678, Mme. de Sevigne writes to Bussy-Rabutin : — " The king wishes to go to Versailles ; but it seems that God does not, to judge from the difficulty of getting the buildings ready for occupation and the dreadful mortality of the workmen who are carried away every night in waggons filled with the dead. This terrible occurrence is kept secret so as not to create alarm and not to deery the air of this favor i sans m'erite. You know this bon mot of Versailles." Nine millions were expended in the Aqueduct of Maintenon, of which the ruins are still to be seen, then it was interrupted by the war of 1688, and the works were never continued. Instead, all the water of the pools and the snow falling on the plain between Rambouillet and Versailles was brought to the latter by a series of subter- ranean watercourses. No difficulties, however — not even pestilence, or the ruin of the country by the enormous cost — were allowed to interfere with " les plaisirs du roi." The palace rose, and its gigantic gardens were peopled with statues, its woods with villages. Under Louis XV. Versailles was chiefly remarkable as being the scene of the extravagance of Mme. de Pompa- 128 THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. dour and the turpitude of Mme. du Barry. Mme. Campan has described for us the life, the very dull life, there of " Mesdames," daughters of the king. Yet, till the great Revolution, since which it has been only a shadow of its former self, the town of Versailles drew all its life from the chateau. Approaching from the town on entering the grille of the palace from the Place d' 'Armes we find ourselves in the vast Cour des Statues — " solennelle et morne." In the centre is an equestrian statue of Louis XIV. by Petitot and Cartellier. Many of the surrounding statues were brought from the Pont de la Concorde at Paris. Two projecting wings shut in the Cour Royale, and separate it from the Cour des Princes on the left, and the Cour de la Chapelle on the right. Beyond the Cour Royale, deeply recessed amongst later buildings is the court called, from its pavement, the Cour de Marbre^ surrounded by the little old red chateau of Louis XIII. The Cour de Marbre was sometimes used as a theatre under Louis XIV., and the opera of Alcestis was given there. It has a peculiar interest, for no stranger can look up at the balcony of the first floor without recalling Marie Antoinette presenting herself there, alone, to the fury of the people, October 6, 1789. The palace of Versailles has never been inhabited by royalty since the chain of carriages drove into this court on October 6, to convey Louis XVI. and his family to Paris. From the Grande Cour the gardens may be reached by passages either from the Cour des Princes on the left, or from the Cour de la Chapelle on the right. This palace has THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. 129 had three chapels in turn. The first, built by Louis XIII., was close to the marble staircase. The second, built by Louis XIV., occupied the site of the existing Salon d'Hercule. The present chapel, built 1699-1 7 10, is the last work of Mansart. Here we may think of Bossuet, thundering before Louis XIV., " les royaumes meurent, sire, comme les rois" and of the words of Massillon, " Si Jesus-Christ paraissait dans ce temple, au milieu de cette assembl'ee, la plus auguste de I'univers, pour vous juger, pour fair -e le terrible discernement" etc. Here we may imagine Louis XIV. daily assisting at the Mass, and his courtiers, especially the ladies, attending also to flatter him, but gladly escaping, if they thought he would not be there. . . . All the furniture of Versailles was sold during the Revo- lution (in 1793), and, though a few pieces have been recov- ered, the palace is for the most part unfurnished, and little more than a vast picture-gallery. From the ante-chamber of the chapel open two galleries on the ground floor of the north wing. One is the Galerie des Sculptures ; the other, divided by different rooms looking on the garden, is the Galerie de I'Histoire de France. The first six rooms of the latter formed the apartments of the Due de Maine, the much indulged son of Louis XIV. and Mme. de Maintenon. At the end of the gallery (but only to be entered now from the Rue des Reservoirs) is the Salle de T Opera. In spite of the passion of Louis XIV. for dramatic representa- tions, no theatre was built in the palace during his reign. Some of the plays of Moliere and Racine were acted in 130 THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. improvised theatres in the park ; others, in the halls of the palace, without scenery or costumes ; the Athalie of Racine, before the King and Mme. de Maintenon, by the young ladies of Saint-Cyr. The present Opera House was begun by Jacques Ange-Gabriel under Louis XV. for Mme. de Pompadour and finished for Mme. du Barry. The Opera House was inaugurated on the marriage of the Dauphin with Marie Antoinette, and nineteen years after was the scene of that banquet, the incidents of which were represented in a manner so fatal to the monarchy, given by the body-guard of the king to the officers of a regiment which had arrived from Flanders. . . . The garden front of the palace has not yet experienced the soothing power of age : it looks almost new ; two hundred years hence it will be magnificent. The long lines of the building, with its two vast wings, are only broken by the top of the chapel rising above the wing on the left. The rich masses of green formed by the clipped yews at the sides of the gardens have the happiest effect, and con- trast vividly with the dark background of chestnuts, of which the lower part is trimmed, but the upper falls in masses of heavy shade, above the brilliant gardens with their population of statues. These grounds are the masterpiece of Lenotre, and of geometrical gardening, decorated with vases, fountains, and orange-trees. Lovers of the natural may find great fault with these artificial gardens, but there is much that is grandiose and noble in them ; and, as Voltaire says : " // est plus facile de critiquer Versailles que de le refaire* THE PALACE OF VERSAILLES. 131 The gardens need the enlivenment of the figures, for which they were intended as a background, in the gay Courts of Louis XIV. and Louis XV. as represented in the pictures of Watteau ; but the Memoirs of the time enable us to repeople them with a thousand forms which have long been dust, centring around the great king, u Se promenant dans ses jar dins de Versailles, dans son fauteuil a roues." The sight of the magnificent terraces in front of the palace will recall the nocturnal promenades of the Court, so much misrepresented by the enemies of Marie Antoinette. Very stately is the view down the main avenue — great fountains of many figures in the foreground ; then the brilliant Tapis Vert, between masses of rich wood ; then the Bassin d'Jpollon, and the great canal extending to distant meadows and lines of natural poplars. Days near Paris (London, 1887). THE CATHEDRAL OF LINCOLN. THOMAS FROGNALL DIBDIN. WELCOME to Lincoln ! Upwards of twenty sum- mer suns have rolled their bright and genia! courses since my first visit to this ancient city, — or rather, to this venerable Cathedral : for the former seems to be merged in the latter. There is no proportion between them. A population of only twelve thousand inhabitants and scarcely more than an ordinary sprinkling of low commonplace brick-houses, are but inharmonious acces- sories to an ecclesiastical edifice, built upon the summit of a steep and lofty hill — pointing upwards with its three beautiful and massive towers towards heaven, and stretch- ing longways with its lofty nave, choir, ladye-chapel, side chapels, and double transepts. For site, there is no Cathe- dral to my knowledge which approaches it. . . . Upon a comparative estimation with the Cathedral of York, Lincoln may be called a volume of more extensive instruction j and the antiquary clings to its pages with a more varied delight. The surface or exterior of Lincoln Cathedral presents at least four perfect specimens of the succeeding styles of the first four orders of Gothic archi- tecture. The greater part of the front may be as old as THE CATHEDRAL OF LINCOLN. 133 the time of its founder, Bishop Remigius, 1 at the end of the Eleventh Century : but even here may be traced invasions and intermixtures, up to the Fifteenth Century. The large indented windows are of this latter period, and exhibit a frightful heresy. The western towers carry you to the end of the Twelfth Century : then succeeds a won- derful extent of Early English, or the pointed arch. The transepts begin with the Thirteenth, and come down to the middle of the Fourteenth Century ; and the interior, especially the choir and the side aisles, abounds with the most exquisitely varied specimens of that period. Fruits, flowers, vegetables, insects, capriccios of every description, encircle the arches or shafts, and sparkle upon the capitals of pillars. Even down to the reign of Henry VIII. there are two private chapels, to the left of the smaller south porch, on entrance, which are perfect gems of art. Where a building is so diversified, as well as vast, it is difficult to be methodical ; but the reader ought to know, as soon as possible, that there are here not only two sets of transepts, as at York, but that the larger transept is the longest in England, being not less than two hundred and fifty feet in length. The window of the south transept is circular, and so large as to be twenty-two feet in diameter ; bestudded with ancient stained glass, now become some- what darkened by time, and standing in immediate need of cleaning and repairing. I remember, on my first visit 1 Remigius was a monk of Fescamp in Normandy, and brought over here by William the Conqueror. He was worthy of all promo- tion. Brompton tells us that he began to build the Cathedral in 1088, and finished it in 1092, when it was consecrated j but the founder died two days before its consecration. 134 THE CATHEDRAL OF LINCOLN. to this Cathedral, threading the whoie of the clerestory on the south side, and coming immediately under this mag- nificent window, which astonished me from its size and decorations. Still, for simplicity as well as beauty of effect, the delicately ornamented lancet windows of the north transept of York Cathedral have clearly a decided prefer- ence. One wonders how these windows, both at York and at this place, escaped destruction from Cromwell's soldiers. . . . The Galilee, to the left of the larger south transept, is a most genuine and delicious specimen of Early English architecture. In this feature, York, upon com- parison, is both petty and repulsive. Wherever the eye strays or the imagination catches a point upon which it may revel in building up an ingenious hypothesis, the exterior of Lincoln Cathedral (some five hundred feet in length) is a never failing source of gratification. . . . Let us turn to the grand western front ; and whatever be the adulterations of the component parts, let us admire its width and simplicity ; — the rude carvings, or rather sculpture, commemorative of the life of the founder, St. Remigius : and although horrified by the indented win- dows, of the perpendicular style, let us pause again and again before we enter at the side-aisle door. All the three doors are too low ; but see what a height and what a space this front occupies! It was standing on this spot, that Corio, my dear departed friend — some twenty years ago — assured me he remained almost from sunset to dawn of day, as the whole of the front was steeped in the soft silvery light of an autumnal full moon. He had seen THE CATHEDRAL OF LINCOLN. 135 nothing before so grand. He had felt nothing before so stirring. The planets and stars, as they rolled in their silent and glittering orbits, and in a subdued lustre, over the roof of the nave, gave peculiar zest to the grandeur of the whole scene : add to which, the awfully deepening sounds of Great Tom 1 made his very soul to vibrate! Here, as that bell struck the hour of two, seemed to sit the shrouded figures of Remigius, Bloet, and Geoffrey Plantagenet, 2 who, saluting each other in formal prostra- tions, quickly vanished at the sound " into thin air." The cock crew; the sun rose; and with it all enchantment was at an end. Life has few purer, yet more delirious enjoyments, than this. . . . The reader may here, perhaps, expect something like the institution of a comparison between these two great rival Cathedrals of Lincoln and York ; although he will have observed many points in common between them to have 1 This must have been " Great Tom," the First, cast in 1610 ; preceded probably by one or more Great Toms, to the time of Geoffrey Plantagenet. " Great Tom," the Second, was cast by Mr. Mears of Whitechapel in 1834, and was hung in the central tower in 1835. Its weight is 5 tons, 8 cwt. ; being one ton heavier than the great bell of St. Paul's Cathedral. ..." Great Tom," the First, was hung in the north-west tower. 2 Robert Bloet was a worthy successor of Remigius, the founder. Bloet was thirty years a bishop of this see — largely endowing it with prebendal stalls, and with rich gifts of palls, hoods, and silver crosses. He completed the western front — and, perhaps, finished the Nor- man portion of the nave, now replaced by the Early English. . . . Geoffrey Plantagenet was a natural son of Henry II., and was elected in 1 173. . . . The latter years of his life seem to be involved in mystery, for he fled the kingdom five years before his death, which happened at Grosmont, near Rouen, in izi2. 136 THE CATHEDRAL OF LINCOLN. been previously settled. The preference to Lincoln is given chiefly from its minute and varied detail ; while its position impresses you at first sight, with such mingled awe and admiration, that you cannot divest yourself of this impression, on a more dispassionately critical survey of its component parts. The versed antiquary adheres to Lin- coln, and would build his nest within one of the crocketted pinnacles of the western towers — that he might hence command a view of the great central tower ; and, abroad of the straight Roman road running to Barton, and the glittering waters of the broad and distant Humber. But for one human being of this stamp, you would have one hundred collecting within and without the great rival at York. Its vastness, its space, its effulgence of light and breadth of effect : its imposing simplicity, by the compara- tive paucity of minute ornament — its lofty lantern, shining, as it were, at heaven's gate, on the summit of the central tower : and, above all, the soul-awakening devotion kindled by a survey of its vast and matchless choir leave not a shadow of doubt behind, respecting the decided superiority of this latter edifice. A Bibliographical, Antiquarian, and Picturesque Tour in the Northern Counties of England and in Scotland (London, 1838). THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK, AMELIA B. EDWARDS. WE now left the village behind, and rode out across a wide plain, barren and hillocky in some parts ; overgrown in others with coarse halfeh grass ; and dotted here and there with clumps of palms. The Nile lay low and out of sight, so that the valley seemed to stretch away uninterruptedly to the mountains on both sides. Now leav- ing to the left a Sheykh's tomb, topped by a little cupola and shaded by a group of tamarisks; now following the bed of a dry watercourse ; now skirting shapeless mounds that indicated the site of ruins unexplored, the road, uneven but direct, led straight to Karnak. At every rise in the ground we saw the huge propylons towering higher above the palms. Once, but for only a few moments, there came into sight a confused and wide-spread mass of ruins, as extensive, apparently, as the ruins of a large town. Then our way dipped into a sandy groove bordered by mud-walls and plantations of dwarf-palms. All at once this groove widened, became a stately avenue guarded by a double file of shattered sphinxes, and led towards a lofty pylon stand- ing up alone against the sky. Close beside this grand gateway, as if growing there on purpose, rose a thicket of sycamores and palms ; while I38 THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK. beyond it were seen the twin pylons of a Temple. The sphinxes were colossal, and measured about ten feet in length. One or two were ram-headed. Of the rest some forty or fifty in number — all were headless, some split asunder, some overturned, others so mutilated that they looked like torrent-worn boulders. This avenue once reached from Luxor to Karnak. Taking into account the distance (which is just two miles from Temple to Temple) and the short intervals at which the sphinxes are placed, there cannot originally have been fewer than five hundred of them ; that is to say, two hundred and fifty on each side of the road. Dismounting for a few minutes, we went into the Temple ; glanced round the open courtyard with its colon- nade of pillars ; peeped hurriedly into some ruinous side- chambers ; and then rode on. Our books told us that we had seen the small Temple of Rameses the Third. It would have been called large anywhere but at Karnak. I seem to remember the rest as if it had all happened in a dream. Leaving the small Temple, we turned towards the river, skirted the mud-walls of the native village, and approached the Great Temple by way of its main entrance. Here we entered upon what had once been another great avenue of sphinxes, ram-headed, couchant on plinths deep cut with hieroglyphic legends, and leading up from some grand landing-place beside the Nile. And now the towers that we had first seen as we sailed by in the morning rose straight before us, magnificent in ruin, glittering to the sun, and relieved in creamy light against blue depths of sky. One was nearly perfect ; the THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK. 139 other, shattered as if by the shock of an earthquake, was still so lofty that an Arab clambering from block to block midway of its vast height looked no bigger than a squirrel. On the threshold of this tremendous portal we again dis- mounted. Shapeless crude-brick mounds, marking the limits of the ancient wall of circuit, reached far away on either side. An immense perspective of pillars and pylons leading up to a very great obelisk opened out before us. We went in, the great walls towering up like cliffs above our heads, and entered the Pirst Court. Here, in the midst of a large quadrangle open to the sky stands a solitary column, the last of a central avenue of twelve, some of which, disjointed by the shock, lie just as they fell, like skeletons of vertebrate monsters left stranded by the Flood. Crossing this Court in the glowing sunlight, we came to a mighty doorway between two more propylons — the doorway splendid with coloured bas-reliefs ; the propylons mere cataracts of fallen blocks piled up to right and left in grand confusion. The cornice of the doorway is gone. Only a jutting fragment of the lintel stone remains. That stone, when perfect, measured forty feet and ten inches across. The doorway must have been full a hundred feet in height. We went on. Leaving to the right a mutilated colossus engraven on arm and breast with the cartouche of Rameses II., we crossed the shade upon the threshold, and passed into the famous Hypostyle Hall of Seti the First. It is a place that has been much written about and often painted ; but of which no writing and no art can convey I40 THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK. more than a dwarfed and pallid impression. To describe it, in the sense of building up a recognisable image by means of words, is impossible. The scale is too vast ; the effect too tremendous ; the sense of one's own dumbness, and littleness, and incapacity, too complete and crushing. It is a place that strikes you into silence ; that empties you, as it were, not only of words but of ideas. Nor is this a first effect only. Later in the year, when we came back down the river and moored close by, and spent long days among the ruins, I found I never had a word to say in the Great Hall. Others might measure the girth of those tremendous columns ; others might climb hither and thither, and find out points of view, and test the accuracy of Wilkinson and Mariette ; but I could only look, and be silent. Yet to look is something, if one can but succeed in remembering; and the Great Hall of Karnak is photo- graphed in some dark corner of my brain for as long as I have memory. I shut my eyes, and see it as if I were there — not all at once, as in a picture ; but bit by bit, as the eye takes note of large objects and travels over an extended field of vision. I stand once more among those mighty columns, which radiate into avenues from what- ever point one takes them. I see them swathed in coiled shadows and broad bands of light. I see them sculptured and painted with shapes of Gods and Kings, with blazon- ings of royal names, with sacrificial altars, and forms of sacred beasts, and emblems of wisdom and truth. The shafts of these columns are enormous. I stand at the foot of one — or of what seems to be the foot ; for the originaj THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK. 141 pavement lies buried seven feet below. Six men standing with extended arms, finger-tip to finger-tip, could barely span it round. It casts a shadow twelve feet in breadth — such a shadow as might be cast by a tower. The capital that juts out so high above my head looks as if it might have been placed there to support the heavens. It is carved in the semblance of a full-blown lotus, and glows with un- dying colours — colours that are still fresh, though laid on by hands that have been dust these three thousand years and more. It would take not six men, but a dozen to measure round the curved lip of that stupendous lily. Such are the twelve central columns. The rest (one hundred and twenty-two in number) are gigantic too ; but smaller. Of the roof they once supported, only the beams remain. Those beams are stone — huge monoliths carved and painted, bridging the space from pillar to pillar, and patterning the trodden soil with bands of shadow. Looking up and down the central avenue, we see at the one end a flame-like obelisk ; at the other, a solitary palm against a background of glowing mountain. To right, to left, showing transversely through long files of columns, we catch glimpses of colossal bas-reliefs lining the roofless walls in every direction. The King, as usual, figures in every group, and performs the customary acts of worship. The Gods receive and approve him. Half in light, half in shadow, these slender, fantastic forms stand out sharp, and clear, and colourless ; each figure some eighteen or twenty feet in height. They could scarcely have looked more weird when the great roof was in its place and perpetual twilight reigned. But it is difficult to imagine the roof on, 142 THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK. and the sky shut out. It all looks right as it is ; and one feels, somehow, that such columns should have nothing between them and the infinite blue depths of heaven. . . . It may be that the traveller who finds himself for the first time in the midst of a grove of Welllngtonia gigantea feels something of the same overwhelming sense of awe and wonder ; but the great trees, though they have taken three thousand years to grow, lack the pathos and the mystery that comes of human labour. They do not strike their roots through six thousand years of history. They have not been watered with the blood and tears of millions. 1 Their leaves know no sounds less musical than the singing of the birds, or the moaning of the night-wind as it sweeps over the highlands of Calaveros. But every breath that wanders down the painted aisles of Karnak seems to echo back the sighs of those who perished in the quarry, at the oar, and under the chariot-wheels of the conqueror. A Thousand Miles up the Nile (London, 2d ed., 1889). 1 It has been estimated that every stone of these huge Pharaonic temples cost, at least, one human life. SANTA MARIA DEL FIORE. CHARLES YRIARTE. THE document by which the council of the munici- pality of Florence decided the erection of her Cathedral, in 1294, is an historic monument in which is reflected the generous spirit of the Florentines. " Considering that all the acts and works of a people who boast of an illustrious origin should bear the character of grandeur^and wisdom, we order Arnolfo, director of the works of our commune, to make the model, or a design of the building, which shall replace the church of Santa Reparata. It shall display such magnificence that no industry nor human power shall surpass it. ... A government should undertake nothing unless in response to the desire of a heart more than generous, which expresses in its beatings the heart of all its citizens united in one common wish : it is from this point of view that the architect charged with the building of our cathedral must be regarded." It must be admitted that it would be difficult to express a more noble idea and a more elevated sentiment than this. The name of the Cathedral is evidently an allusion to the lily, the heraldic emblem of Florence. The ceremony of laying the first stone took place on September 8th, 1298 ; 144 SANTA MARIA DEL FIORE. Pope Boniface VIII. was represented by his legate, Cardinal Pietro Valeriano. Arnolfo's plan was a Latin cross with three naves, each nave divided into four arcades with sharp pointed arches. In the centre of the cross, under the vault of the dome, was reserved a space enclosed by a ringhiera, having open sides, with an altar in its axis, and in each of its little arms five rectangular chapels were placed. The walls were naked, and the architecture alone served for decoration ; the effect, however, was altogether imposing. Arnolfo did not finish his work; he died about 1230, leaving the church completed only as far as the capitals destined to support the arches. In 1332 Giotto was nominated to succeed him, and for about two hundred years the work was continued without interruption, under the direction of the most worthy men. It is to Giotto that we owe that extraordinary annex to the Duomo, so celebrated throughout the world under the name of Campanile; its foundation was laid in 1334, after the little church of San Zanobio was razed. It is 85 metres high ; Giotto, however, had calculated 94 metres in his plan and intended to finish the square column with a pyramid, like the Campanile of Saint Mark's in Venice ; but he was unable to complete his work, and his successor, Taddeo Gaddi, suppressed this appendix. The Campanile has six divisions ; the first and the second, which are easily examined, are ornamented with sculpture executed by Andrea Pisano, after Giotto's designs. . . . Even at the risk of banality, the saying attributed to Charles V. when he entered Florence after the siege should SANTA MARIA DEL FIORE. 145 be mentioned here ; he paused before the Campanile, con- templated it for a long while, and then exclaimed : " They should make a case for the Campanile and exhibit it as a jewel." Mounting to the top of the tower, we can count, one by one, the domes, the towers, and the monuments, and gaze upon the beautiful landscape which surrounds the city of flowers. There are in this tower seven bells, the largest of which, cast in 1705 to replace the one that had been broken, does not weigh less than 15,860 pounds. Among the architects who succeeded Giotto, we must count the master of masters, who was, perhaps, the most incontestably illustrious of the Fifteenth Century archi- tects — Filippo Brunelleschi. It was in 1421 that he began the superb dome which crowns the Cathedral. This was his masterpiece, surpassing in audacity and harmony all the monuments of modern art. Everyone knows that this dome is double : the interior casing is spherical, and between it and the exterior dome are placed the stairways, chains, counter-weights, and all the accessories of con- struction which render it enduring. It was only fifteen years after the death of the great Philippo that this dome was finished (1461). It inspired Michael Angelo for Saint Peter's in Rome, and Leon Battista Alberti took it for his model in building the famous temple of Rimini which he left unfinished. Andrea del Verocchio, the beau- tiful sculptor of the Enfant au dauphin and the Tomb of the Medicis in the old sacristy, designed and executed the ball, and Giovanni di Bartolo completed the node on which the Cross stands. I46 SANTA MARIA DEL FIORE. The church contains several tombs, among others those of Giotto, commissioned to Benedetto da Maiano by Lorenzo the Magnificent, and that of the famous organist, Antonio Squarcialupi, a favourite of Lorenzo to whom " The Magnificent " wrote an epitaph. It is thought that the Poggio rests in Santa Maria del Fiore. The sarcophagus of Aldobrandino Ottobuoni is near the door of the Servi. I have said that the walls are naked, that is to say that architecture does not play a great part on them, but the building contains a number of works of the highest order by Donatello, Michelozzo, Ghiberti, della Robbia, San- sovino, Bandinelli, and Andrea del Castagno. It was by the door of the Servi that Dominico di Michelino on January 30, 1465, painted Dante, a tribute paid tardily to the memory of the prince of poets by the society of Florentines, who were none other than the workmen employed in the construction of the Cathedral. Under these arches where Boccaccio made his passionate words resound to the memory of the author of the Divina Comedia, Michelino painted Dante clothed in a red toga and crowned with laurel, hold- ing in one hand a poem and with the other pointing to the symbolical circles. The inscription states that the execution of this fresco is due to one of Dante's commentators, Maestro Antonio, of the order of the Franciscans. Florence : V histoire — Les Medicis — Les humanistes — Les lettres — ■ Les arts (Paris, 1881). GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE. MRS. OLIPHANT. OF all the beautiful things with which Giotto adorned his city, not one speaks so powerfully to the foreign visitor — the forestiere whom he and his fellows never took into account, though we occupy so large a space among the admirers of his genius nowadays — as the lovely Campanile which stands by the great Cathedral like the white royal lily beside the Mary of the Annuncia- tion, slender and strong and everlasting in its delicate grace. It is not often that a man takes up a new trade when he is approaching sixty, or even goes into a new path out of his familiar routine. But Giotto seems to have turned without a moment's hesitation from his paints and panels to the less easily-wrought materials of the builder and sculptor, without either faltering from the great enter- prise or doubting his own power to do it. His frescoes and altar-pieces and crucifixes, the work he had been so long accustomed to, and which he could execute pleasantly in his own workshop, or on the cool new walls of church or convent, with his trained school of younger artists round to aid him, were as different as possible from the elaborate calculations and measurements by which alone the lofty tower, straight and lightsome as a lily, could have sprung so high and stood so lightly against that Italian sky. No longer mere pencil or brush, but compasses and quaint 148 GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE. mathematical tools, figures not of art by arithmetic, elabo- rate weighing of proportions and calculations of quantity and balance, must have changed the character of those preliminary studies in which every artist must engage before he begins a great work. Like the poet or the romancist when he turns from the flowery ways of fiction and invention, where he is unincumbered by any restric- tions save those of artistic keeping and personal will, to the grave and beaten path of history — the painter must have felt when he too turned from the freedom and poetry of art to this first scientific undertaking. The Cathedral was so far finished by this time, its front not scarred and bare as at present, but adorned with statues according to old Arnolfo's plan, who was dead more than thirty years before j but there was no belfry, no companion peal of peace and sweetness to balance the hoarse old vacca with its voice of iron. Giotto seems to have thrown himself into the work not only without reluctance but with enthu- siasm. The foundation-stone of the building was laid in July of that year, with all the greatness of Florence look- ing on ; and the painter entered upon his work at once, working out the most poetic effort of his life in marble and stone, among masons' chippings and the dust and blaze of the public street. At the same time he designed, though it does not seem sure whether he lived long enough to execute, a new facade for the Cathedral, replacing Arnolfo's old statues by something better, and raising over the doorway the delicate tabernacle work which we see in Pocetti's picture of St. Antonino's consecration as bishop of St. Mark's. It would be pleasant to believe that while the foundations of the Campanile were being laid and the GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE. 149 ruder mason-work progressing, the painter began immedi- ately upon the more congenial labour, and made the face of the Duomo fair with carvings, with soft shades of those toned marbles which fit so tenderly into each other, and elaborate canopies as delicate as foam ; but of this there seems no certainty. Of the Campanile itself it is difficult to speak in ordinary words. The enrichments of the surface, which is covered by beautiful groups set in a graceful framework of marble, with scarcely a flat or unadorned spot from top to bottom, has been ever since the admiration of artists and of the world. But we con- fess, for our own part, that it is the structure itself that affords us that soft ecstasy of contemplation, sense of a perfection before which the mind stops short, silenced and filled with the completeness of beauty unbroken, which Art so seldom gives, though Nature often attains it by the simplest means, through the exquisite perfection of a flower or a stretch of summer sky. Just as we have looked at a sunset, we look at Giotto's tower, poised far above in the blue air, in all the wonderful dawns and moonlights of Italy, swift darkness shadowing its white glory at the tinkle of the Ave Mary, and a golden glow of sunbeams accompanying the midday Angelus. Between the solemn antiquity of the old Baptistery and the historical gloom of the great Cathedral, it stands like the lily — if not, rather, like the great Angel himself hailing her who was blessed among women, and keeping up that lovely salutation, musical and sweet as its own beauty, for century after century, day after day. The Makers of Florence (London, 1876). GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE* JOHN RUSKIN. IN its first appeal to the stranger's eye there is some- thing unpleasing ; a mingling, as it seems to him, of over severity with over minuteness. But let him give it time, as he should to all other consummate art. I re- member well how, when a boy, I used to despise that Campanile, and think it meanly smooth and finished. But I have since lived beside it many a day, and looked out upon it from my windows by sunlight and moonlight, and I shall not soon forget how profound and gloomy appeared to me the savageness of the Northern Gothic, when I afterwards stood, for the first time, beneath the front of Salisbury. The contrast is indeed strange, if it could be quickly felt, between the rising of those grey walls out of their quiet swarded space, like dark and barren rocks out of a green lake, with their rude, mouldering, rough-grained shafts, and triple lights, without tracery or other ornament than the martins' nests in the height of them, and that bright, smooth, sunny surface of glowing jasper, those spiral shafts and fairy traceries, so white, so faint, so crystalline, that their slight shapes are hardly traced in darkness on the pallor of the Eastern sky, that serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morn- GIOTTO'S CAMPANILE. 151 ing cloud, and chased like a sea shell. And if this be, as I believe it, the model and mirror of perfect architecture, is there not something to be learned by looking back to the early life of him who raised it ? I said that the Power of human mind had its growth in the Wilderness ; much more must the love and the conception of that beauty, whose every line and hue we have seen to be, at the best, a faded image of God's daily work, and an arrested ray of some star of creation, be given chiefly in the places which He has gladdened by planting there the fir-tree and the pine. Not within the walls of Florence, but among the far away fields of her lilies, was the child trained who was to raise that head-stone of Beauty above the towers of watch and war. Remember all that he became; count the sacred thoughts with which he filled Italy ; ask those who followed him what they learned at his feet ; and when you have numbered his labours, and received their testimony, if it seem to you that God had verily poured out upon this His servant no common nor restrained portion of His Spirit, and that he was indeed a king among the children of men, remember also that the legend upon his crown was that of David's : — "I took thee from the sheepcote, and from following the sheep." The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London, 184.9). 6— Vol. 3 THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR IN BOURGES. AD. BERTY. CERTAINLY Jacques Coeur, that citizen of humble birth, who, by his merit reached the highest dignity of state at an epoch when aristocracy reigned supreme, this man of genius, who, while creating a maritime commerce for France, amassed so great a fortune for himself that he was able to help towards the deliverance of his own country in supporting at his own expense four armies at the same time, was not one of the least important figures of the Fifteenth Century. Posterity has not always been just to this illustrious upstart : he should be ranked immediately after Jeanne d'Arc, for the sword of the Maid of Domremy would, perhaps, have been powerless to chase the enemy from the soil (which a cowardly king did not think of re- pulsing), without the wise economy and the generous sacri fices of him, who, at a later period, was abandoned by the king to the rapacity of his courtiers with that same ignoble ingratitude which he had shown to the sainte libertrice of the great nation over which he was so unworthy to rule. Jacques Coeur was the son of a furrier, or according to some authorities, a goldsmith of Bourges. He was probably following his father's business when his intelligence and THE HOUSE OF JACQUES CCEUR IN BOURGES. 153 talents brought him into the notice of Charles VII., who had been forced to take refuge in the capital of Berry on account of the English conquests. The king appointed him to the mint, then made him master of this branch of administration, and, finally, argentier, a title equivalent to superintendent of finance. Coeur, in his new and brilliant position, did not abandon commerce to which he owed his fortune ; his ships continued to furrow the seas, and three hundred clerks aided him in bartering European products for the silks and spices of the East and in realizing a fortune. Always fortunate in his enterprises, ennobled : by the king in 1440, and charged by him with many important political missions, he probably did not know how to resist the vertigo which always seizes those of mean origin who attain great eminence,, He exhibited an extraordinary luxury, whose splendours humiliated the pride of the noble courtiers, excited their hatred and envy, and contributed to his ruin. With little regard for the great services which he had rendered to the country, such as, for example, the gift of 200,000 crowns in gold at the time of the expedition of Normandy, the nobles only saw in the magnificent argentier an unworthy gambler, who should be deprived of his immense wealth 2 for their profitc, For this purpose they organized a cabal. Coeur was charged with a multitude of crimes : he was accused of having poisoned Agnes Sorel, who had made 1 The arms of Coeur were what are called parlantes : azure, fess or, charged with three shells or (recalling those of St. James his patron), accompanied by three hearts, gules, in allusion to his name. 1 The fortune of Jacques Cceur became proverbial ; they said 1 (e Riche comme Jacques Cceur,'''' 154 THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COZUR IN BOURGES. him her testamentary executor, of having altered money, and of various other peculations ; he was also reproached for having extorted money for various purposes in the name of the king. . . . The sentence of Jacques Coeur was not entirely executed ; he was not banished, but, on the contrary, was imprisoned in the Convent des Cordeliers de Beaucaire. Aided by one of his clerks, Jean de Village, who had married his niece, he made his escape and went to Rome, where Pope Calixtus III., at that moment preparing an expedition against the Turks, gave him command of a flotilla. Coeur then de- parted, but, falling ill on the way, he disembarked at Chio, where he died in 146 1. His body was buried in the church of the Cordeliers in that island. Of the different houses which Jacques Coeur possessed, the one considered among the most beautiful in all France, exists almost intact, and is still known under the name of the Maison de Jacques Cceur, although it now serves for a hall of justice and mayoralty. This house, or rather this hotel, was built between the years 1443 anc * J 453> and cost a sum equal to 215,000 francs of our money. For its con- struction, Coeur, having bought one of the towers of the ramparts of Bourges, commonly called Tour de la chaussee, from the fief of this name, built on a level with it another and more beautiful tower, and these two towers served as a beginning for the manoir, which was called, in consequence, the Hotel de la chaussee. In building it they used stones taken from the old Roman walls of the town, which were on the site of the new hotel, and which had already been pulled down by virtue of a charter given by Louis VIII. THE HOUSE OF JACQUES CGEUR IN BOURGES. 155 in 1224, by which, permission had been granted for build- ing upon the ramparts and fortifications. At the time of the revision of the law-suit of Jacques Coeur under Louis XL the hotel was given back to his heirs, who in 1552 sold it to Claude de l'Aubespine, secretary of state. By a descendant of the latter it was ceded to Colbert in 1679; Colbert sold it again to the town of Bourges on January 30, 1682, for the sum of 33,000 livres. Jacques Coeur's house was therefore destined to become a hotel-de-ville, and, as we have said, still exists to-day. The plan of the building is an irregular pentagon, com- posed of different bodies of buildings joined without any symmetry, according to the general disposition of almost all mediaeval civil and military buildings. The large towers are Jacques Coeur's original ones. One was entirely recon- structed by him with the exception of the first story, which is of Roman work, as the layers of brick and masonry indicate; the other, on the contrary, received only its crown and a new interior construction, and, like the first, was flanked by a tower destined to serve as a cage for the stair- way. The court of honour is vast, and arranged so that it was easy to communicate with the different parts of the hotel. The facade is composed of a pavilion flanked by two wings. Following an arrangement borrowed from military architecture, two doors were contrived, the little one for the foot-passengers and the large one, which was the door 'of honour, thro is;h which the Cavaliers entered. Both had pointed arches and were ornamented with an archivolt with crockets. One of them still possessed, until about I56 THE HOUSE OF JACQUES COEUR IN BOURGES. a dozen years ago, its ancient sculptured panels and orna- mental iron-work. Above these doors is a large niche with very rich ornamentation, which originally sheltered the equestrian statue of Charles VII. On its right and left is a false window, in which you see the statue of a man-servant in the one and that of a maid-servant in the other, both in the costume of the period. Above this niche the wall is pierced by a large window with four panes, whose tracery reproduces hearts, armes par/antes of the proprietor, and a fleur-de-lis, a sign of his recognition by King Charles. A cornice of foliage forms the top of the wall of the pavilion, which is crowned by a very high roof with four sloping and concave sides. Upon the front and back faces of this roof is a large skylight-window and on its lateral faces, a stock of chimneys. On the summit of the roof is an imposing ridge which ends with two long spikes. The back of the pavilion is exactly like the front, with the exception of a statue of Coeur corresponding to that of the king. To the right of the pavilion there rises an octagonal campanile of great elegance; at its base is a balustrade in whose open-work runs a phylactery, carry- ing the motto, which is frequently repeated in the building and which characterizes perfectly him who adopted it : A ijaillans eceurs l rien d? impossible* Notwithstanding the mutilations to which the house of Jacques Cceur has been condemned by its fate, it is certainly «ne of the most interesting and best preserved of all the civil 1 The word eceurs is indicated by hearts. THE HOUSE OF JACQUES CCEUR IN BOURGES. 157 buildings of the Middle Ages. A vast amount of informa- tion regarding the intimate life of the people, which has so great an attraction for the archaeologist, is to be found here. If the fact that the study of buildings should be the inseparable companion to that of history was less evident, the house of Jacques Coeur would afford us an opportunity to demonstrate the truth ; in reality, when we have studied this building we certainly gain a much clearer idea of the manners of Charles VII. 's reign than could be obtained from a host of lecturers upon history. Jules Gailhabaud, Monuments anciens et modernes (Paris, 1865)0 WAT PHRA KAO. CARL BOCK. THE first glimpse of Siam which the traveller obtains at Paknam is a fair sample of what is to be seen pretty well throughout the country. As Constantinople is called the City of Mosques, so Bangkok may, with even more reason, be termed the City of Temples. And not in Bangkok only and its immediate neighbourhood, but in the remotest parts of the country, wherever a few people live now, or ever have lived, a Wat with its image, or collection of images, of Buddha, is to be found, surrounded by numberless phrachedees, those curious structures which every devout Buddhist — and all Buddhists are in one sense or another devout — erects at every turn as a means of gaining favour with the deity, or of making atonement for his sins. On the rich plains, in the recesses of the forests, on the tops of high mountains, in all directions, these monuments of universal allegiance to a faith which, more perhaps than any other, claims a devotee in almost every individual inhabitant of the lands over which it has once obtained sway, are to be found. The labour, the time, and the wealth lavished upon these structures are beyond calculation. . . , WAT PHRA KAO. 159 The work which, in popular estimation at least, will make his Majesty's reign most memorable in Siam, is the completion and dedication of the great royal temple, Phra Sri Ratana Satsadaram, or, as it is usually called, Wat Phra Kao. The erection of this magnificent pile of buildings was commenced by Phra Puttha Yot Fa Chulalok, " as a temple for the Emerald Buddha, the palladium of the capital, for the glory of the king, and as an especial work of royal piety." This temple was inaugurated with a grand religious festival in the year Maseng, 7th of the cycle, 1 147 (a. d. 1785), but, having been very hastily got ready for the celebration of the third anniversary of the foundation of the capital, it was incomplete, only the church and library being finished. Various additions were made from time to time, but the Wat remained in an unfinished state until the present king came to the throne. The vow to complete the works was made on Tuesday, the 23rd of December, 1879. The works were com- menced during the next month and completed on Monday, the 17th of April, 1882, a period of two years, three months, and twenty days. Thus it was reserved for King Chulalonkorn, at an enormous outlay, entirely defrayed out of his private purse, and by dint of great exertions on the part of those to whom the work was immediately entrusted, to complete this structure, and, on the hundredth anniversary of the capital of Siam, to give the city its crowning glory. The work was placed under the direct superintendence of the king's brothers, each of whom had a particular part of the work allotted to him. One, for instance, relaid the l6o WAT PHRA KAO, marble pavement, and decorated the Obosot with pictures of the sacred elephant ; while a second renewed the stone inscriptions inside the Obosot ; a third laid down a brass pavement in the Obosot ; a fourth undertook to restore all the inlaid pearl work ; another undertook the work of repairing the ceiling, paving, and wall-decoration, and made three stands for the seals of the kingdom ; another changed the decayed roof-beams ; another covered the great phrachedee with gold tiles — the effect of which in the brilliant sunlight is marvellously beautiful — and re- paired and gilded all the small phrachedees ; another renewed and repaired and redecorated all the stone orna- ments and flower-pots in the temple-grounds, and made the copper-plated and gilt figures of demons, and purchased many marble statues ; two princes divided between them the repairs of the cloisters, renewing the roof where re- quired, painting, gilding, paving with stone, and complet- ing the capitals of columns, and so on. Thus, by division of labour, under the stimulus of devotion to the religion of the country, and of brotherly loyalty to the king, the great work was at length completed, after having been exactly one hundred years in course of construction. On the 2 1st of April, 1882, the ceremony of final dedication was performed, with the greatest pomp, and amid general rejoicings. Under the name " Wat Phra Kao " are included various buildings covering a large area of ground, which is sur- rounded by walls decorated with elaborate frescoes. In the centre is a temple, called the Phra Marodop, built in the form of a cross, where on festive occasions the WAT PHRA KAO. l6l king goes to hear a sermon from the prince-high- priest. The walls of this building are richly decorated with inlaid work, and the ceiling painted with a chaste design in blue and gold. The most striking feature, however, is the beautiful work in the ebony doors, which are elab- orately inlaid with mother-of-pearl figures representing Thewedas, bordered by a rich scroll. Behind this chapel- royal is the great phrachedee, called the Sri Ratana Phrachedee, entirely covered with gilt tiles, which are specially made for the purpose in Germany to the order of H. R. H. Krom Mun Aditson Udom Det. There are several other large buildings in the temple- grounds, but the structure in which the interest of the place centres is the Obosot, which shelters the famous " Emerald Buddha," a green jade figure of matchless beauty, which was found at Kiang Hai in a. d. 1436, and, after various vicissitudes of fortune, was at last placed in safety in the royal temple at Bangkok. This image is, according to the season of the year, differently attired in gold ornaments and robes. The Emerald Buddha is raised so high up, at the very summit of a high altar, that it is somewhat difficult to see it, especially as light is not over plentiful, the windows being generally kept closely shuttered. For the convenience of visitors, however, the attendants will for a small fee open one or two of the heavy shutters, which are decorated on the outside with gilt figures of Thewedas in contorted attitudes. When at last the sun's rays are admitted through the " dim religious light," and the beam of brightness shines on the resplendent figure — enthroned above a gorgeous array 162 WAT PHRA KAO. of coloured vases, with real flowers and their waxen imita- tions, of gold, silver, and bronze representations of Buddha, of Bohemian glassware, lamps, and candlesticks, with here and there a flickering taper still burning, and surrounded with a profusion of many-storied umbrellas, emblems of the esteem in which the gem is held — the scene is re- markably beautiful, and well calculated to have a lasting effect on the minds of those who are brought up to see in the calm, solemn, and dignified form of Buddha the repre- sentation of all that is good here, and the symbol of all happiness hereafter. The floor of the Obosot is of tes- sellated brass, and the walls are decorated with the usual perspectiveless frescoes, representing scenes in Siamese or Buddhist history. It is in this Obosot that the semi-annual ceremony of Tunam, or drinking the water of allegiance, takes place, when the subjects of Siam, through their representatives, and the princes and high officers of state, renew or confirm their oath of allegiance. The ceremony consists of drinking water sanctified by the priests, and occurs twice a year — on the third day of the waxing of the Siamese fifth month (i. e., the ist of April), and on the thirteenth day of the waning of the Siamese tenth month (i. e., the 2ist of September). The foregoing description gives but a faint idea of this sacred and historic edifice, which will henceforth 1 regarded as a symbol of the rule of the present Siam dynasty, and the completion of which will mark an ej in Siamese history. Temples and Elephants (London, 1884). THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. THEOPHILE GAUTIER. THE exterior of the Cathedral of Toledo is far less ornate than that of the Cathedral of Burgos : it has no efflorescence of ornaments, no arabesques, and no collarette of statues enlivening the porches ; it has solid buttresses, bold and sharp angles, a thick facing of stone, a stolid tower, with no delicacies of the Gothic jewel-work, and it is covered entirely with a reddish tint, like that of a piece of toast, or the sunburnt skin of a pilgrim from Pales- tine ; as if to make up the loss, the interior is hollowed and sculptured like a grotto of stalactites. The door by which we entered is of bronze, and bears the following inscription : Antonio Zurreno del arte de oro y p/ata, faciebat esta media pueria. The first impression is most vivid and imposing ; five naves divide the church : the middle one is of an immeasurable height, and the others beside it seem to bow their heads and kneel in token of admiration and respect ; eighty-eight pillars, each as large as a tower and each composed of sixteen spindle-shaped columns bound together, sustain the enormous mass of the building ; a transept cuts the large nave between the choir and the high altar, and forms the arms of the cross. The archi- tecture of the entire building is homogeneous and perfect, 164 THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. a very rare virtue in Gothic cathedrals, which have gener- ally been built at different periods ; the original plan has been adhered to from one end to the other, with the excep- tion of a few arrangements of the chapels, which, however, do not interfere with the harmony of the general effect. The windows, glittering with hues of emerald, sapphire, and ruby set in the ribs of stone, worked like rings, sift in a soft and mysterious light which inspires religious ecstasy ; and, when the sun is too strong, blinds of spartium are let down over the windows, and through the building is then diffused that cool half-twilight which makes the churches of Spain so favourable for meditation and prayer. The high altar, or retablo, alone might pass for a church ; it is an enormous accumulation of small columns, niches, statues, foliage, and arabesques, of which the most minute description would give but a faint idea ; all this sculpture, which extends up to the vaulted roof and all around the sanctuary, is painted and gilded with unimaginable wealth. The warm and tawny tones of the antique gold, illumined by the rays and patches of light interrupted in their passage by the tracery and projections of the ornaments, stand out superbly and produce the most admirable effects of grandeur and richness. The paintings, with their backgrounds of gold which adorn the panels of this altar, equal in richness of colour the most brilliant Venetian canvases ; this union of colour with the severe and almost hieratic forms of mediaeval art is rarely found ; some of these paintings might be taken for Giorgione's first manner. Opposite to the high altar is placed the choir, or silleria, according to the Spanish custom ; it is composed of three THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. 165 rows of stalls in sculptured wood, hollowed and carved in a marvellous manner with historical, allegorical, and sacred bas-reliefs. Gothic Art, on the borderland of the Renais- sance, has never produced anything more pure, more per- fect, or better drawn. This work, the details of which are appalling, has been attributed to the patient chisels of Philippe de Bourgogne and Berruguete. The archbishop's stall, which is higher than the rest, is shaped like a throne and marks the centre of the choir ; this prodigious carpentry is crowned by gleaming columns of brown jasper, and on the entablature stand alabaster figures, also by Philippe de Bourgogne and Berruguete, but in a freer and more supple style, elegant and admirable in effect. Enormous bronze reading-desks supporting gigantic missals, large spartium mats, and two colossal organs placed opposite to each other, one to the right and one to the left, complete the decorations. . . . The Mozarabic Chapel, which is still in existence, is adorned with Gothic frescoes of the highest interest : the subjects are the combats between the Toledans and the Moors ; they are in a state of perfect preservation, their colours are as bright as if they had been laid on yesterday, and by means of them an archaeologist would gain a vast amount of information regarding arms, costumes, accoutre- ments, and architecture, for the principal fresco represents a view of old Toledo, which is, doubtless, very accurate. In the lateral frescoes the ships which brought the Arabs to Spain are painted in detail ; a seaman might gather much useful information from them regarding the obscure history of the mediaeval navy. The arms of Toledo — five stars, l66 THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. :able on a field, argent — are repeated in several places in this low-vaulted chapel, which, according to the Spanish fashion, is enclosed by a grille of beautiful workmanship. The Chapel of the Virgin, which is entirely faced with beautifully polished porphyry, jasper, and yellow and violet breccia, is of a richness surpassing the splendours of the Thousand and One Nights ; many relics are preserved here, among them a reliquary presented by Saint Louis, which contains a piece of the True Cross. To recover our breath, let us make, if you please, the tour of the cloisters, whose severe yet elegant arcades surround beautiful masses of verdure, kept green, notwith- standing the devouring heat of this season, by the shadow of the Cathedral ; the walls of this cloister are covered with frescoes in the style of Vanloo, by a painter named Bayeu. These compositions are simple and pleasing in colour, but they do not harmonize with the style of the building, and probably supplant ancient works damaged by centuries, or found too Gothic for the people of good taste in that time. It is very fitting to place a cloister near a church ; it affords a happy transition from the tranquillity of the sanctuary to the turmoil of the city. You can go to it to walk about, to dream, or to reflect, without being forced to join in the prayers and ceremonies of a cult ; Catholics go to the temple, Christians remain more fre- quently in the cloisters. This attitude of mind has been perfectly understood by that marvellous psychologist the Catholic Church. In religious countries the Cathedral is always the most ornamented, richest, most gilded, and most florid of all buildings in the townj it is there that THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. 167 one finds the coolest shade and the deepest peace ; the music there is better than in the theatre ; and it has no rival in pomp of display. It is the central point, the magnetic spot, like the Opera in Paris. We Catholics of the North, with our Vottairean temples, have no idea of the luxury, elegance, and comfort of the Spanish cathedrals; these churches are furnished and animated, and have nothing of that glacial, desert-like appearance of ours ; the faithful can live in them on familiar terms with their God. The sacristies and rooms of the Chapter in the Cathe- dral of Toledo have a more than royal magnificence ; nothing could be more noble and picturesque than these vast halls decorated with that solid and severe luxury of which the Church alone has the secret. Here are rare carpentry-work in carved walnut or black oak, portieres of tapestry or Indian damask, curtains of brocatelle, with sumptuous folds, figured brocades, Persian carpets, and paintings of fresco. We will not try to describe them in detail ; we will only speak of one room ornamented with admirable frescoes depicting religious subjects in the German style of which the Spaniards have made such successful imitations, and which have been attributed to Berruguete's nephew, if not to Berruguete himself, for these prodigious geniuses followed simultaneously three branches of art. We will also mention an enormous ceiling by Luca Giordano, where is collected a whole world of angels and allegorical figures in the most rapidly executed foreshortening which produce a singular optical illusion. From the middle of the roof springs a ray of light 168 THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. so wonderfully painted on the flat surface that it seems to fall perpendicularly on your head, no matter from which side you view it. It is here that they keep the treasure, that is to say the beautiful copes of brocade, cloth of gold and silver damask, the marvellous laces, the silver-gilt reliquaries, the monstrances of diamonds, the gigantic silver candle- sticks, the embroidered banners, — all the material and accessories for the representation of that sublime Catholic drama which we called the Mass. In the cupboards in one of the rooms is preserved the wardrobe of the Holy Virgin, for cold, naked statues of marble or alabaster do not suffice for the passionate piety of the Southern race ; in their devout transport they load the object of their worship with ornaments of extravagant richness ; nothing is good enough, brilliant enough, or costly enough for them ; under this shower of precious stones, the form and material of the figure disappear : nobody cares about that. The main thing is that it should be an impos- sibility to hang another pearl in the ears of the marble idol, to insert another diamond in its golden crown, or to trace another leaf of gems in the brocade of its dress. Never did an ancient queen, — not even Cleopatra who drank pearls, — never did an empress of the Lower Empire, never did a Venetian courtesan in the time of Titian, possess more brilliant jewels nor a richer wardrobe than Our Lady of Toledo. They showed us some of her robes : one of them left you no idea as to the material cf which it was made, so entirely was it covered with flowers and arabesques of seed-pearls, among which there were THE CATHEDRAL OF TOLEDO. 169 others of a size beyond all price and several rows of black pearls, which are of almost unheard-of rarity ; suns and stars of jewels also constellate this precious gown, which is so brilliant that the eye can scarcely bear its splendour, and which is worth many millions of francs. We ended our visit by ascending the bell-tower, the summit of which is reached by a succession of ladders, sufficiently steep and not very reassuring. About half way up, in a kind of store-room, through which you pass, we saw a row of gigantic marionettes, coloured and dressed in the fashion of the last century, and used in I don't know what kind of a procession similar to that of Tarascon. The magnificent view which is seen from the tall spire amply repays you for all the fatigue of the ascent. The whole town is presented before you with all the sharpness and precision of M. Pelet's cork-models, so much admired at the last Exposition de Pindustrie. This comparison is doubtless very prosaic and unpicturesque j but really I cannot find a better, nor a more accurate one. The dwarfed and misshapen rocks of blue granite, which encase the Tagus and encircle the horizon of Toledo on one side, add still more to the singularity of the landscape, inundated and dominated by crude, pitiless, blinding light, which no reflections temper and which is increased by the cloudless and vapourless sky quivering with white heat like iron in a furnace. Voyage en Espagne (Paris, new ed. 1865). THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. JULES LOISELEUR. CHAMBORD is the Versailles of the feudal mon- archy ; it was to the Chateau de Blois, that central residence of the Valois, what Versailles was to the Tuileries-, it was the country-seat of Royalty. Tapestries from Arras, Venetian mirrors, curiously sculptured chests, crystal chan- deliers, massive silver furniture, and miracles of all the arts amassed in this palace during eight reigns and dispersed in a single day by the breath of the Revolution, can never be col- lected again save under one condition : that there should be a sovereign sufficiently powerful and sufficiently artistic, sufficiently concerned about the glory and the memories of the ancient monarchy to make of Chambord what has been made out of the Louvre and Versailles — a museum con- secrated to all the intimate marvels, to all the curiosities of the Arts of the Renaissance, at least to all those with which the sovereigns were surrounded, something like the way the Hotel de Cluny exhibits royal life. It has often been asked why Francois I., to whom the banks of the Loire presented many marvellous sites, selected a wild and forsaken spot in the midst of arid plains for the erection of the strange building which he planned. This peculiar choice has been attributed to that prince's passion THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. 171 for the chase and in memory of his amours with the beauti- ful Comtesse de Thoury, chatelaine in that neighbourhood, before he ascended the throne. Independently of these motives, which doubtless counted greatly in his selection, perhaps the very wildness of this place, this distance from the Loire, which reminded him too much of the cares of Royalty, was a determining reason. Kings, like private individuals, and even more than they, experience the need at times of burying themselves, and therefore make a hidden and far-away nest where they may be their own masters and live to please themselves. More- over, Chambord, with its countless rooms, its secret stair- ways, and its subterranean passages, seems to have been built for a love which seeks shadow and mystery. At the same time that he hid Chambord in the heart of the uncul- tivated plains of the Sologne, Francois I. built in the midst of the Bois de Boulogne a chateau, where, from time to time, he shut himself up with learned men and artists, and to which the courtiers, who were positively forbidden there, gave the name of Madrid, in memory of the prison in which their master had suffered. Chambord, like Madrid, was not a prison : it was a retreat. That sentiment of peculiar charm which is attached to the situation of Chambord will be felt by every artist who visits this strange realization of an Oriental dream. At the end of a long avenue of poplars breaking through thin underbrush which bears an illustrious name, like all the roads to this residence, you see, little by little, peeping and mounting upward from the earth, a fairy building, which, rising in the midst of arid sand and heath, produces the most 172 THE CHATEAU DE CHAMEORD. striking and unexpected effect. A genie of the Orient, a poet has said, must have stolen it from the country of sunshine to hide it in the country of fog for the amours of a handsome prince. At the summit of an imposing mass of battlements, of which the first glance discerns neither the style nor the order, above terraces with orna- mental balustrades, springs up, as if from a fertile and inex- haustible soil, an incredible vegetation of sculptured stone, worked in a thousand different ways. It is a forest of campaniles, chimneys, sky-lights, domes, and towers, in lace-work and open-work, twisted according to a caprice which excludes neither harmony nor unity, and which orna- ments with the Gothic F the salamanders and also the mosaics of slate imitating marble, — a singular poverty in the midst of so much wealth. The beautiful open-worked tower of the large staircase dominates the entire mass of pinnacles and steeples, and bathes in the blue sky its co- lossal fleur-de-lis, the last point of the highest pinnacle among pinnacles, the highest crown among all crowns. . . . We must take Chambord for what it is, an ancient Gothic chateau dressed out in great measure according to the fashion of the Renaissance. In no other place is the transition from one style to another revealed in a way so impressive and naive ; nowhere else does the brilliant butterfly of the Renaissance show itself more deeply imprisoned in the heavy Gothic chrysalis. If Chambord, by its plan which is essentially French and feudal, by its enclosure flanked with towers, and by the breadth of its heavy mass, slavishly recalls the mediaeval manoirS) by its lavish profusion of ornamentation it suggests THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. 173 the creations of the Sixteenth Century as far as the begin- ning of the roofs ; it is Gothic as far as the platform j and it belongs to the Renaissance when it comes to the roof itself. It may be compared to a rude French knight of the Fourteenth Century, who is wearing on his cuirass some fine Italian embroideries, and on his head the plumed felt of Francois I., — assuredly an incongruous costume, but not without character. . . . The chateau should be entered by one of the four doors which open in the centre of the donjon. Nothing is more fantastic, and, at the same time, magnificent than the spectacle which greets the eye. It seems more like one of those fairy palaces which we see at the Opera, than a real building. Neglect and nakedness give it an additional value and double its immensity. On entering this vast solitude of stone, we are seized with that respectful silence which involuntarily strikes us under high and solitary vaults. In the centre of the vast Salle des Gardes, which occupies the entire ground-floor, and to which the four towers of the donjon give the form of the Greek cross, rises a monumental stairway which divides this hall into four equal parts, each being fifty feet long and thirty feet broad. This bold conception justifies its celebrity : the stairway at Chambord is in itself a monument. The staircase, completely isolated and open-worked, is com- posed of posts which follow the winding. Two flights of stairs, one above the other, unfold in helices and pass alternately one over the other without meeting. This will explain how two persons could ascend at the same time without meeting, yet perceiving each other at intervals. 174 THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. Even while looking at this, it is difficult to conceive this arrangement,, These two helices, which are placed above each other and which turn over and over each other with- out ever uniting, have exactly the curve of a double corkscrew. I believe that no other comparison can give a more exact idea of this celebrated work which has exhausted the admiration and the eulogy of all the connois- seurs. " What merits the greatest praise," writes Blondel in his Lemons a" architecture^ " is the ingenious disposition of that staircase of double flights, crossing each other and both common to the same newel. One cannot admire too greatly the lightness of its arrangement, the boldness of its execution, and the delicacy of its ornaments, — per- fection which astonishes and makes it difficult to conceive how any one could imagine a design so picturesque and how it could be put into execution." The author of Cinq Mars taking up this same idea says : " It is difficult to conceive how the plan was drawn and how the orders were given to the workmen : it seems a fugitive thought, a brilliant idea which must have taken material form suddenly — a realized dream." . . . In going through the high halls and long corridors which lead from one chapel to the other, one likes to restore in imagination the rich furniture, the tapestries, the glazed tiles of faience, and the ceilings incrusted with tin fleur-de-lis, which formed its decoration. Each gallery was filled with frescoes by Jean Cousin and the principal works of Leonardo da Vinci. . . . The breath of the Revolution has scattered and destroyed all these rarities. For fifteen days the flippers ran from all points of the THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. 175 province to divide the paintings, the precious enamels, the chests of oak and ebony, the sculptured pulpits, and the high-posted beds covered with armorial hangings. They sold at auction all the souvenirs of the glory of the mon' archy. What they could not sell, they burned. . . . When we descend the noble staircase which Francois I. ordered, which an unknown artist executed, and which deserves to be credited to Primaticcio, it is impossible not to look back upon the Past. What illustrious feet have trod, what eyes have beheld these marvels ! What hands, now cold, charming hands of queens, or courtesans more powerful than those queens, and rude hands of warriors, or statesmen, have traced on these white stones names celebrated in that day, but now effaced from the walls, as they are each day more and more effaced from the memory of men ! The wheel of Time, which broke in its revolution, has only left enough in this chateau for us to observe and reconstruct in imagination personages great enough to harmonize with such grandeur, and to excite in us that pious respect which must always be attached to everything about to end. Another turn of the wheel and ruin will begin. " Ce chateau" a poet has said, u est Jrapp'e de malediction." x . . . To-day, and during two Revolutions, the chief of the eldest branch of the Bourbons has remained the master of Chambord. Between this exiled master and this deserted castle there is an intimate and sad relation which will touch the most unsympathetic heart. Each stone that falls in the grasg-grown court without a human ear to take 1 Chateaubriand, La Vie de Rand. I76 THE CHATEAU DE CHAMBORD. note of the noise, — is it not the parallel of an obliterated memory, a hope that is ever weakening ? In the absence of this master, who, doubtless, will never return, the old chateau falls into the shadow and silence which belong to fallen majesty. It awaits in this grave and slightly morose sorrow those great vicissitudes, which are imposed on stones, as on men, that the Future has in store. Les Residences royales de la Loire (Paris, 1863). THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. PIERRE LOTI. He who has not beheld Nikko, has no right to make use of the word splendour. Japanese Proverb. IN the heart of the large island of Niphon and in a mountainous and wooded region, fifty leagues from Yokohama, is hidden that marvel of marvels — the necrop- olis of the Japanese Emperors. There, on the declivity of the Holy Mountain of Nikko, under cover of a dense forest and in the midst of cascades whose roar among the shadows of the cedars never ceases, is a series of enchanting temples, made of bronze and lacquer with roofs of gold, which look as if a magic ring must have called them into existence among the ferns and mosses and the green dampness, over-arched by dark branches and surrounded by the wildness and grandeur of Nature. Within these temples there is an inconceivable magnifi- cence, a fairy-like splendour. Nobody is about, except a few guardian bonzes who chant hymns, and several white- robed priestesses who perform the sacred dances whilst waving their fans. Every now and then the slow vibra- tions of an enormous bronze gong, or the dull, heavy blows on a monstrous prayer-drum are heard in the deep and 178 THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. echoing forest. At other times there are certain sounds which really seem to be a part of the silence and solitude, the chirp of the grasshoppers, the cry of the falcons in the air, the chatter of the monkeys in the branches, and the monotonous fall of the cascades. All this dazzling gold in the mystery of the forest makes these sepulchres unique. This is the Mecca of Japan ; this is the heart, as yet inviolate, of this country which is now gradually sinking in the great Occidental current, but which has had a magnificent Past. Those were strange mystics and very rare artists who, three or four hundred years ago, realized all this magnificence in the depths of the woods and for their dead. . . . We stop before the first temple. It stands a little off to itself in a kind of glade. You approach it by a garden with raised terraces ; a garden with grottos, fountains, and dwarf-trees with violet, yellow, or reddish foliage. The vast temple is entirely red, and blood-red ; an enormous black and gold roof, turned up at the corners, seems to crush it with its weight. From it comes a kind of religious music, soft and slow, interrupted from time to time by a heavy and horrible blow. It is wide open, open so that its entire facade with columns is visible; but the interior is hidden by an immense white velum. The velum is of silk, only ornamented in its entire white length by three or four large, black, heraldic roses, which are very simple, but I cannot describe their exquisite distinction, and behind this first and half-lifted hanging, the light bamboo blinds are let down to the ground. We walk up several granite steps, and, to permit my THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. 179 entrance, my guide pushes aside a corner of the Veil : the sanctuary appears. Within everything is in black lacquer and gold lacquer, with the gold predominating. Above the complicated cor- nice and golden frieze there springs a ceiling in compart- ments, in worked lacquer of black and gold. Behind the colonnade at the back, the remote part, where, doubtless, the rods are kept, is hidden by long curtains of black and gold brocade, hanging in stiff" folds from the ceiling to the floor. Upon white mats on the floor large golden vases are standing, filled with great bunches of golden lotuses as tall as trees. And finally from the ceiling, like the bodies of large dead serpents or monstrous boas, hang a quantity of astonishing caterpillars of silk, as large as a human arm, blue, yellow, orange, brownish-red, and black, or strangely variegated like the throats of certain birds of those islands. Some bonzes are singing in one corner, seated in a circle around a prayer-drum, large enough to hold them all. . . . We go out by the back door, which leads into the most curious garden in the world: it is a square filled with shadows shut in by the forest cedars and high walls, which are red like the sanctuary ; in the centre rises a very large bronze obelisk flanked with four little ones, and crowned with a pyramid of golden leaves and golden bells; — -you would say that in this country bronze and gold cost nothing ; they are used in such profusion, everywhere, just as we use the mean materials of stone and plaster. — All along this blood-red wall which forms the back of the temple, in order to animate this melancholy garden, at about the height of a man there is a level row of little wooden gods, of all forms l8o THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. and colours, which are gazing at the obelisk ; some blue, others yellow, others green ; some have the shape of a man, others of an elephant : a company of dwarfs, extraordinarily comical, but which express no merriment. In order to reach the other temples, we again walk through the damp and shadowy woods along the avenues of cedars, which ascend and descend and intersect in various ways, and really constitute the streets of this city of the dead. We walk on pathways of fine sand, strewn with these little brown needles which drop from the cedars. Always in terraces, they are bordered with balustrades and pillars of granite covered with the most delicious moss ; you would say all the hand-rails have been garnished with a beautiful green velvet, and at each side of the sanded pathway invari- ably flow little fresh and limpid brooks, which join their crystal notes to those of the distant torrents and cascades. At a height of one hundred, or two hundred metres, we arrive at the entrance of something which seems to indicate magnificence : above us on the mountain in the medley of branches, walls taper upward, while roofs of lacquer and bronze, with their population of monsters, are perched everywhere, shining with gold. Before this entrance there is a kind of open square, a narrow glade, where a little sunlight falls. And here in its luminous rays two bonzes in ceremonial costume pass across the dark background : one, in a long robe of violet silk with a surplice of orange silk ; the other, in a robe of pearl-grey with a sky-blue surplice ; each wears a high and rigid head-dress of black lacquer, which is seldom worn now. THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. l8l (These were the only human beings whom we met on the way, during our pilgrimage.) They are probably going to perform some religious office, and, passing before the sump- tuous entrance, they make profound bows. This temple before which we are now standing is th?* of the deified soul of the Emperor Yeyaz (Sixteenth Cen- tury), and, perhaps, the most marvellous of all the buildings of Nikko. You ascend by a series of doors and enclosures, which become more and more beautiful as you get higher and nearer the sanctuary, where the soul of this dead Emperor dwells. . . . At the door of the Palace of the Splendour of the Orient we stop to take off* our shoes according to custom. Gold is everywhere, resplendent gold. An indescribable ornamentation has been chosen for this threshold ; on the enormous posts are a kind of wavy clouds, or ocean-billows, in the centre of which here and there appear the tentacles of medusae, the ends of paws, the claws of crabs, the ends of long caterpillars, flat and scaly, — all kinds of horrible fragments, imitated in colossal size with a striking fidelity, and making you think that the beasts to which they belong must be hidden there within the walls ready to enfold you and tear your flesh. This splendour has mysteriously hostile undercurrents; we feel that it has many a surprise and menace. Above our heads the lintels are, however, ornamented with large, exquisite flowers in bronze, or gold : roses, peonies, wistaria, and spring branches of full-blown cherry-blossoms ; but, still higher, horrible faces with fixed death's-head grimaces lean toward us; l82 THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO terrible things of all shapes hang by their golden wings from the golden beams of the roof; we perceive in the air rows of mouths split open with atrocious laughter, and rows of eyes half-closed in an unquiet sleep. An old priest, aroused by the noise of our footsteps on the gravel in the silence of the court, appears before us on the bronze threshold. In order to examine the permit which I present to him, he puts a pair of round spectacles on his nose, which make him look like an owl. My papers are in order. A bow, and he steps aside to let me enter. It is gloomy inside this palace, with that mysterious semi-twilight which the Spirits delight in. The impressions felt on entering are grandeur and repose. The walls are of gold and the ceiling is of gold, supported on columns of gold. A vague, trembling light, illuminating as if from beneath, enters through the very much grated and very low windows ; the dark, undetermined depths are full of the gleamings of precious things. Yellow gold, red gold, green gold ; gold that is vital, or tarnished ; gold that is brilliant, or lustreless ; here and there on the friezes and on the exquisite capitals of the columns, a little vermilion, and a little emerald green; very little, nothing but a thin thread of colour, just enough to relieve the wing of a bird and the petal of a lotus, a peony, or a rose. Despite so much richness nothing is overcharged ; such taste has been displayed in the arrangement of the thousands of diverse forms and such harmony in the ex- tremely complicated designs, that the effect of the whole is simple and reposeful. THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. 183 Neither human figures nor idols have a part in this sanc- tuary of Shintoism. Nothing stands upon the altars but large vases of gold filled with natural flowers in sheaves, or gigantic flowers of gold. No idols, but a multitude of beasts, flying or crawling, familiar or chimerical, pursue each other upon the walls, and fly away from the friezes and ceiling in all attitudes of fury and struggle, of terror and flight. Here, a flock of swans hurry away in swift flight the whole length of the golden cornice ; in other places are butterflies with tortoises ; large and hideous insects among the flowers, or many death-combats between fantastic beasts of the sea, medusae with big eyes, and imaginary fishes. On the ceil- ing innumerable dragons bristle and coil. The windows, cut out in multiple trefoils, in a form never before seen and which give little light, seem only a pretext for displaying all kinds of marvellous piercings : trellises of gold entwined with golden leaves, among which golden birds are sporting ; all of this seems accumulated at pleasure and permits the least possible light to enter into the deep golden shadows of the temple. The only really simple objects are the columns of a fine golden lacquer ending with capitals of a very sober design, forming a slight calix of the lotus, like those of certain ancient Egyptian palaces. We could spend days in admiring separately each panel, each pillar, each minute detail ; the least little piece of the ceiling, or the walls would be a treasure for a museum. And so many rare and extravagant objects have succeeded in making the whole a composition of large quiet lines ; many living forms, many distorted bodies, many ruffled wings s 7— Vol. 3 184 THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. stiff claws, open mouths, and squinting eyes have succeeded in producing a calm, an absolute calm, by force of an inex- plicable harmony, twilight, and silence. I believe, moreover, that here is the quintessence of Japanese Art, of which the specimens brought to our col- lections of Europe cannot give the true impression. And we are struck by feeling that this Art, so foreign to us, pro- ceeds from an origin so different ; nothing here is derived, ever so remotely, from what we call antiquities — Greek, Latin, or Arabian — which always influence, even if we are not aware of it, our native ideas regarding ornamental form. Here the least design, the smallest line, — every- thing — is as profoundly strange as if it had come from a neighbouring planet which had never held communication with our side of the world. The entire back of the temple, where it is almost night, is occupied by great doors of black lacquer and gold lacquer, with bolts of carved gold, shutting in a very sacred place which they refuse to show me. They tell me, moreover, that there is nothing in these closets ; but that they are the places where the deified souls of the heroes love to dwell ; the priests only open them on certain occasions to place in them poems in their honour, or prayers wisely written on rice-paper. The two lateral wings on each side of the large golden sanctuary are entirely of marqueterie, in prodigious mosaics composed of the most precious woods left in their natural colour. The representations are animals and plants : on the walls are light leaves in relief, bamboo, grasses of extreme delicacy, gold convolvulus falling in clusters of flowers, birds THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. 185 of resplendent plumage, peacocks and pheasants with spread tails. There is no painting here, no gold-work ; the whole effect is sombre, the general tone that of dead wood ; but each leaf of each branch is composed of a different piece ; and also each feather of each bird is shaded in such a way as to almost produce the effect of changing colours on the throats and wings. And at last, at last, behind all this magnificence, the most sacred place which they show me last, the most strange of all strange places, is the little mortuary court which surrounds the tomb. It is hollowed out of a moun- tain between whose rocky walls water is dripping : the lichens and moss have made a damp carpet here and the tall, surrounding cedars throw their dark shadows over it. There is an enclosure of bronze, shut by a bronze door which is inscribed across its centre with an inscription in gold, — not in the Japanese language, but in Sanscrit to give more mystery ; a massive, lugubrious, inexorable door, extraordinary beyond all expression, and which is the ideal door for a sepulchre. In the centre of this enclosure is a kind of round turret also in bronze having the form of a pagoda-bell, of a kneeling beast, of I don't know what unknown and disturbing thing, and surmounted by a great astonishing heraldic flower : here, under this singular object, rests the body of the little yellow bonhomme, once the Emperor Yeyaz, for whom all this pomp has been displayed. . . . A little breeze agitates' the branches of the cedars this morning and there falls a shower of these little dry, brown needles, a little brown rain on the greyish lichens, on the l86 THE TEMPLES OF NIKKO. green velvet moss, and upon the sinister bronze objects. The voice of the cascades is heard in the distance like per- petual sacred music. An impression of nothingness and supreme peace reigns in this final court, to which so much splendour leads. In another quarter of the forest the temple of the deified soul of Yemidzou is of an almost equal magnificence. It is approached by a similar series of steps, little carved and gilded light-towers, doors of bronze and enclosures of lacquer ; but the plan of the whole is a little less regular, because the mountain is more broken. . . . A solemn hour on the Holy Mountain is at night-fall, when they close the temples. It is even more lugubrious at this autumnal season, when the twilight brings sad thoughts. With heavy, rumbling sounds which linger long in the sonorous forest, the great panels of lacquer and bronze are rolled on their grooves to shut in the mag- nificent buildings which have been open all day, although visited by nobody. A cold and damp shiver passes through the black forest. For fear of fire, which might consume these marvels, not a single light is allowed in this village of Spirits, where certainly darkness falls sooner and remains longer than anywhere else ; no lamp has ever shone upon these treasures, which have thus slept in darkness in the very heart of Japan for many centuries ; and the cascades increase their music while the silence of night enshrouds the forest so rich in enchantment. Japoneries