A CANADIAN IN EUROPE; of ntbd FRANCE, ITALY, SWITZERLAND, GERMANY, HOLLAND AND BELGIUM, GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND. BY WILLIAM H. WITHROW, M.A. OS THE MER DB GLACE. EOSE-BELFORD PUBLISHING COMPANY. WILLIAM BRIGGS, KING STREET EAST. sincccLxxxi. Entered according to Act of the Parliament of Canada, in the year one thousand eight hundred and eighty, by HUNTER, ROSE & Co., in the Office of the Minister of Agriculture. TO M.R. JOHN MACDONALD, IS MEMORY OP A PLEASANT MEETING IN EDINBURGH, AND OF GREAT KINDNESS RECEIVED, IS INSCRIBED WITH THE HIGHEST REGARD, BY Author* 1770013 PREFACE. .HE chief charm of foreign travel is, I think, the pleas- ant memories it bequeaths. I have endeavoured in the following pages to communicate some degree of the enjoyment and profit derived from a hurried run through the old historic lands of Europe. If any, who may favour me with their attention, find half as much pleasure in reading this book as I have found in writing it, I shall consider it very successful. The substance of these chap- ters was contributed, without any idea of their permanent embodiment in book form, to a Monthly Magazine, of which the writer has editorial charge. But the favour with which they were received seemed to indicate that even another book of travel might not be beyond the en- durance of the human mind ; and, at the request of many friends, they have been revised and expanded to their present form. Through the liberality of the publishers the book is more copiously illustrated than any previous Canadian volume of the sort, and I doubt not that the admirable engravings will more than make up for any lack of interest that the text may exhibit W. H. W. TORONTO, October 22, 1880. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE. Getting one's Sea Legs Sunday Service In a Gale The Giants' Causeway Liverpool First ride in England London Hyde Park Smithfield City Road Chapel Fleet Street St. Paul's Westminster Abbey 17-34 CHAPTER II. France Through Normandy Rouen Guthic Art Jeanne d'Arc French Politeness Paris Tragic Memories of the Place de la Concorde The Louvre Old Masters and Modern Paintings Versailles Mus^e de Cluny -Pere Lachaise The Parks Na- poleon's Tomb Morality and Religion Paris from a Balloon 35-57 CHAPTER III. Italy First view of the Alps Mont Cenis Tunnel Italian Man- ners Turin Capuchin Monks Genoa Its Palaces Pisa Its " Leaning Miracle" Early Art The Misericordia The Hunger Tower . 58-71 CHAPTER IV. Rome The Forum Its Utter Desolation The Colosseum The Jews' Quarter Ancient Baths High Mass at St. Peter's- Grave of Shelley Scene of St. Paul's Martyrdom In the Catacombs Their Testimony Their Structure Their Cham- bersTheir Art and Epitaphs The Appian Way Roman Tombs andColumbaria Mammertine Prison The "Holy Stairs" Pantheon Harlequin on an Emperor's Grave Pincian Hill A " Model Family "--Art in Rome Angelo and Raphael The Vatican Up the Tiber Tivoli Falls of Terni Orte Assisi . . 72-114 CHAPTER V. Italian Landscape Peasant Life Naples Strange Sights Lazar- oni Street Scribes Virtuous Donkeys In the Grotto del Cane xii Contents. PAGE. At " Puteoli "Temple of Serapis Adventure in the Sibyl's Grotto At Cumae Baja and its Memories Glories of the Bay of Naples Capri The Blue Grotto -A Midnight Ride Up Vesuvius "Hangers On" A Steep Climb In the Crater Molten Lava Pompeii Old Roman Life Pathetic Relics Ancient Art? Degradation of Woman The Gospel in Italy 115-141 CHAPTER VI. Ride to Florence Its Heroic Memories The Duomo Giotto's Tower The Baptistery Its Gates and Mosaics Santa Croce Art in Florence Boboli Gardens San Marco Memories of Sa- vonarola The "Angelic Brother" Bologna Its Leaning Towers Ferrara Blind Credulity 142-155 CHAPTER VII. Venice Its Past and Present Sunset on the Grand Canal Oriental Character of People Historic Pigeons The Glories of St. Mark's Sunset from the Campanile Doge's Palace Bridge of Sighs The Arsenal The Bucentaur On the Rialto Venetian Superstition The Gondola A Methodist Chapel The Lido Verona Milan The Cathedral Memories of Borromeo, St. Ambrose, Augustine Da Vinci's "Last Supper" 156-176 CHAPTER VIIL The Italian Lakes Sunset on Como Isola Bella Beauties of Mag- giore My First Alpine Climb Peasant Life A Diligence Over the Alps Hospice at Summit The Devil's Bridge Quaint Swiss Inn St. Gotthard Tunnel Memorials of Tell Lake of Uri Tell's Chapel Up the Righi- The Highest Hotel in Eu- rope Magnificent Mountain Prospect Lucerne The "Dance of Death " Thorwaldsen's Lion Organ Concert 177-200 CHAPTER IX. Through the Unterwald Swiss Politeness Briinig Pass Meiringen Illuminated Falls Over the Alps Afoot The Bernese Ober- land Alpine Echoes In an Ice Grotto Climbing Mount Mann- lichen View from the Summit The Jungfrau An Avalanche Lauterbrunnen The Staubach Interlaken Giessbach Falls Bernese Costume The Gemmi Pass Baths of Leuk A Strange Custom 201-218 Contents. xiii CHAPTER X. PAGE. Adventures on Mule Back Gorge of the Trient The T6te-Noire A Swiss Hotel Table d'-Htfte The Mer de Glace A. Perilous Pass Mont Blanc Cr&ins Geneva and its Memories In Cal- vin's Church The Rhone and Arve Castle of Chillon Lau- sanne Fletcher Memorial Freiburg and its Organ 219-236 CHAPTER XL The City of the Bear-The Bears' Den The Alpen-Glow Basle A " Graceful Amenity "Falls of the Rhine Through the Black Forest Quaint Costumes Strassburgh The Minster Mass for the Dead German Domination Heidelburg Its Ruined Castle The Great Tun Students' FSte 237-253 CHAPTER XII. Worms Luther's Monument and Memories Mayence Frankfort The Jews' Quarter Their Persecutions The Kaiser-Saal Art Treasures Luther-House Down the Rhine " Sweet Bin- gen " Character Studies The Legend of the Mouse Tower Robber Castles The Lurlenberg Song of the Sirens Coblentz The "Broad Stone of Honour" The " Wacht am JRhein" Drachenfela Legend of Rolandsbogen Bonn 254-272 CHAPTER XIII. Cologne Its Minster Legend of Ursula The Three Kings Aix- la-Chapelle Tomb of the Great Charles The Netherlands Brussels, Another Paria Historic Sites Hfltel de Ville The Mad Painter Antwerp Rubens His "Descent from the Cross " Matsys " The Beautiful Wild Chimes " 273-281 CHAPTER XIV. Holland Dutch Characteristics A Kermis Vanity Fair Outdone Dutch Manners Dutch Art A Night of Terror Delft The Hague Its Galleries Leyden Haarlem The "Venice of the North " Rembrandt at his Best The Bible House - Jews and Germans Ghent The Bell Roland The Beguinage Bruges A Mediaeval Pageant From the Belfry Ostend England 282-296 XIV Contents. CHAPTER XV. PAGE. London Again Greenwich Palace and Park A Bibulous People The Tower and its Tragic Memories The Heart of London Cheapside St. Paul's The Temple Whitehall The Abbey The Tombs of the Kings Westminster Palace England's Un- crowned King Up the Thames Chelsea Fulham Putney Staines 297-312 CHAPTER XVI. English Lawns Windsor Castle Its Historic Memories State Apartments View from Tower The Royal "Mews " Eton College- What makes a Gentleman Richmond Claremont By Father Thames Zion House Kew Gardens 313-326 CHAPTER XVII. Hampton Court Bushy Park The Maze Historic Chambers- Raphael's Cartoons Oxford Christ Church An Ancient Servi- tor The Bodleian " Maudlin" Strange Customs St. Mary's Church Martyr Memories " Taking Mine Ease in Mine Inn " Stratford - on - Avon - Shakespeare's Grave His Boyhood's Scenes His Birthplace Warwick Castle Drive to Kenil- worth The Wizard's Spell Mervyn's Bower Coventry Rug- by Harrow Sydenham 327-352 CHAPTER XVIII. Cambridge The Fen Country Peterborough York and its Mins- ter Ut Rosa Flos Florum The East Coast Edinburgh Old St. Giles Memorials of Knox His House The Castle Holyrood Memorials of Mary Ancient Wynds The Covenant Stone Calton Hill Musings at Melrose The Spell of Poetry Abbots- ford Sterling Castle The Trosachs Pass Fair Ellen's Lake Loch Lomond Glasgow St. Mungo's Shrine Staffa and Fingal's Cave Belfast Irish Humour A Bad Harvest The Boyne Water Dublin A Preposterous Statue Home Rule The " Jolting Car "Through Wales Chester Its Walls and Rows Home Again 353-376 CHAPTER I. AT SEA. LIVERPOOL LONDON. VISIT to Europe had been for years the dream of my life. To a denizen of this new continent, the monuments and institutions of the past, as seen in the Old World, possess a fascinating interest. In the hoary minsters and crumbling classic fanes, in the many places consecrated by heroism or by song by the martyr's or the patriot's blood, or by the poet's lyre one beholds a crystalized history which thrills the soul with a presence and a power before unimagined. And of all the lands in the world our hearts turn with deepest interest to Great Britain and her sister isle, " the mother of us all," the birthplace of liberty, the vanguard of the world's civiliza- tion. Next we turn to the early cradle-land of Empire, the City of Rome, with its memory-haunted ruins, and to the nations and peoples which have sprung from its de- cay. The arts and monuments of mediaeval and modern Europe, and the sublime or lovely landscapes of its grand- est or softest scenes are also of intense and imperishable interest, and in turn engage our attention. B 18 A Canadian in Europe. In fulfilment of my long-cherished purpose, on the 23rd of May, 1879, I left the good city of Toronto. In four and twenty hours I reached the ancient capital, Quebec. The grand old fortress sat proudly on its throne of rock, the royal standard fluttering gaily in the breeze in honour of the Queen's birth-day. Towards evening, a tender took the passengers on board the good ship " Dominion," Captain Bouchette, master, of the Dominion Steamship line. To one sailing in an ocean steamer for the first time, the arrangements on shipboard are of much interest. What strikes one most is the economy of space, together with the precautions against danger and means adopted to secure steadiness and safety the small port-holes, with their iron shutters, the firmly- lashed tables and seats, the swinging shelf for glasses, etc., all ominous suggestions of the effects of stormy weather. The sail down our noble St. Lawrence is very pleasant, giving good views of the Falls of Montmorenci ; the island of Orleans; Grosse Isle, the quarantine station, where lie the remains of many a poor immigrant ; and of the bold north-shore. Soon we are out in the Gulf, and our good ship feels the effects of the rollers from the Atlantic. The breakfast-table of the second day is a crucial test. More than one countenance becomes " Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought ; " and the ladies, without exception, retire to finish their meditations in the solitude of their state-rooms. Loco- motion becomes difficult on deck, and passengers make At Sea. 19 strange lurches in trying to make their way about. The high lands of the south shore of the Gulf are covered with snow, as are also those of Newfoundland ; and quite a snow-storm occurs on the 27th of May. As we cross the Grand Banks of Newfoundland we thread our way through a fleet of vessels engaged in the cod-fishery. Our steam whistle and fog-horn keep up a continuous warning, and a sharp look-out is maintained for their lights amid the darkness. Next day two ice-bergs, one a huge and triple- towered snowy mass, a quarter of a mile long and a hun- dred and thirty feet high, come into view and pass slowly astern. Strange lonely birds also appear and ac- company us far out to sea, and some all the way across the Atlantic. The most striking impression as we sail on day after day is one of the littleness and loneliness of man in the midst of this immensity of waters. On every side swings the far horizon, unbroken by a single object. Around us roll and toss, like a chained giant tugging at his fet- ters, the tumultuous waves of the multitudinous seas, "Vast-heaving, boundless, endless and sublime." Still across the trackless main, in spite of adverse winds or waves, the good ship finds, to the destined port, her unerring way. I never appreciated so much the beauty and fidelity of the description, in the one hundred and seventh Psalm, of God's wonders in the deep, as when read at sea. After a few days, old Ocean smooths his rugged front. 20 A Canadian in Europe. His billows ripple with a thousand smiles. The tables again are filled. The passengers promenade the deck, or group in wind-sheltered and sunny spots. The ship's library is ransacked. The setting of the sails, the chang- ing of the watch, casting the log, taking the sun's altitude, and exchanging signals with a passing vessel, excite their lively interest. Everybody affects nautical language. It is no longer noon, but " eight bells." We do not go to bed, but " turn in ;" and " Ay, ay, sir ! " does duty for an affirmative response. On Sunday morning at half-past ten the ship's bell tolls for service. The officers who are off duty, dressed in their best blue jackets, with the passengers muster in the cabin. At the head of the long dining-table is placed a cushion covered with the Union Jack, which serves as a reading- desk and pulpit. The beautiful service of the Church of England is read, every body joining heartily in the re- sponses. The comprehensive petitions of that service, with its form of prayer for those at sea, for all who travel by land or water, and the prayer to be used during a storm, are realized with fresh power. Then follows a short and practical sermon, with special references to our needs as voyagers together over life's solemn main. Keble's exquisite " Sun of my soul," and Lyte's pathetic " Abide with me, fast falls the eventide," have a new charm as sung amid the restless tossing of the main and the hoarse roaring of the billows. As we neared the Irish coast a heavy easterly gale set in as if to baffle our efforts to reach the " Isle of Saints." A Gale at Sea. 21 The " white horses " raced past our vessel, and the sea smote with tremendous shock her iron bulwarks, and then rose high in the air in a column of spray and drenched the deck. With close-reefed sails the good ship forged her way in the very teeth of the gale, mounting up, up on the waves as it would climb the skies, and then sinking down, down into the hollow of the seas, producing a sensation of deadly qualm in those of the passengers who were affected by the awful mal de mer. At the dining-table one has an excellent opportunity to study the law of hydrostatics by observing the efforts of his soup to main- tain its level notwithstanding the oscillations of the ship. This being rocked in the cradle of the deep, as one lies in his berth, rolled from side to side with now his feet and then his head pointing to the stars, is a rather queer sen- sation. It is rather difficult, too, to walk the deck when it keeps sinking away from you, as though the bottom had fallen out of everything, or rising up like a hill under your foot. And through all the storm the fearless sea- gulls on tireless wing skim the waves and soar and circle around the ship, the very poetry of motion. With scarce a motion of the wing they beat up against the wind, then glide down its yielding slope, ascending and descending like the angels of the patriarch's vision, the invisible stars of heaven. Sometimes they sit brooding on the stormy wave that breaks into foam all around them, as quietly as if brooding on their nest on the shore ; and they will fly so close that we can see the form of their beak and the colour of their eyes, The Giant's Causeway. 23 At length the blue hills of Old Ireland come in view, and a welcome sight they are to eyes weary with the un- broken sweep of the far horizon. The first land seen is the north-west coast of Donegal. Behind a bold and rocky shore are seen, rolling away in purple billows, the Derry- veagh Mountains, some peaks of which rise to the height of over two thousand feet. They are not crowned with trees like our hills in Canada, but with a beautiful green sward, through which the naked rock at times breaks forth, rising in sharp peaks and rugged crags. Before evening we came abreast of the entrance to Lough Foyle, with its thrilling memorials of the siege of Londonderry. About sunset we passed in full view of the Giant's Causeway, where, according to the veracious legend, " Fin McCoul," an Irish giant, cast up a highway across the Channel that a Scotch giant might walk across in order to have a trial of strength between them. Fin was of course victor ; but he generously allowed his beaten ad- versary to settle in Ireland ; so there being no longer any necessity for the Causeway, it was allowed to be washed away by the action of the waves. Its remains, however, may still be seen for the confutation of the sceptical. At Fingal's Cave, in Scotland, and on the Irish coast, the tombs of the respective giants are also pointed out ; and what better proof can one ask than that ? " Dark o'er the foam-white waves, The Giants' pier the war of tempest braves ; A far-projecting, firm basaltic way Of clustering columns, wedged in close array, 24 A Canadian in Europe. With skill so like, yet so surpassing art, With such design, so just in every part, That reason pauses, doubtful if it stand The work of mortal or immortal hand. " In the purple gloaming, which here lasts far into the night we are six hundred miles north of Toronto we passed within half a mile of the noble cliff of Fair Head, rising five hundred feet in the air, with remarkable columned rocks, known as the Giant's Organ ; and loom- ing on the left was the Mull of Can tyre, in Scotland. The Irish Sea was tranquil as a sea of glass, as we passed the Isle of Man, and twenty miles from Liverpool took on board our pilot. Keen was the interest to hear what had been happening in the great world from which, ten days before, we had been cut off, and the newspapers were eagerly scanned and discussed. A score of ocean steamers were gliding out on ebb-tide as we entered the Mersey, and beheld its seven miles of docks and its forest of masts. From the turbid condition of the river it is evident that " The quality of Mersey is not strained." The busy aspect of the scene forcibly recalls the des- cription of a local bard : " Behold the crowded port, Whose rising masts an endless prospect yields, With labour burns, and echoes to the shout Of hurried sailors, as they hearty wave Their last adieu, and loosening every sail, Resign the speeding vessel to the wind." Liverpool bears little of the impress of antiquity. The splendid public buildings that we see, the palace-like hotels, the crowded and busy streets are all of comparatively Liverpool. 25 recent construction. It has more the air of New York or Chicago, than that of an Old World town. The famous St. George's Hall, the Exchange, the City Hall and especi- ally the massive warehouses and miles on miles of docks give a striking impression of its commercial greatness. It was Whitsuntide when I landed, and the streets were crowded with holiday visitors, many of them of a decidedly bucolic appearance. The knee-breeches, smock frocks and naming neck-ties of the rustic yokels, and the " Dolly Varden " dresses, bright ribbons and blooming cheeks of the country lasses were just like the pictures that Leech and Dickens give us with pencil and pen. The Walker Art Gallery was visited, I was told, by 24,000 persons in two days. This ministry of art in the aesthetic education of the people must be very salutary. Few things in Liverpool pleased me more than a visit to the new Temperance Coffee-house just opened. It is a handsome stone building, on the main street. Inside it is elegantly painted and frescoed. Up stairs are rooms with handsome pictures and panelled walls, marble-topped tables, and a luxurious bar, with huge burnished tea and coffee urns. To test the food furnished I ordered coffee and a large bun both excellent, for which I paid one penny ! There are thirty-seven of these Temperance Coffee-houses in Liverpool, under the same Limited Lia- bility Company. They pay a profit of ten per cent., and I believe will yet be the solution of the drink question in England the greatest social problem of the age. Taking the Midland Railway for London next day, I 26 A Canadian in Europe. passed through some of the finest scenery in England ; through the celebrated Peak of Derbyshire, and down the beautiful valley of the Derwent. The memories of that first ride through this dear old historic land will never be effaced the soft-rounded hills, the lovely vales, the stately parks and mansions, the quaint farmsteads and granges, the red-tiled or straw-thatched cottages, the ivy- grown churches, the fields cultivated like a garden, and the hawthorn hedges in full bloom just as we see them all in Birket Foster's pictures. In traversing Bedford- shire, I passed many places hallowed by the footprints of the immortal dreamer, John Bunyan ; Finchley Com- mon, where he spoke bold words on behalf of religious freedom; Luton, where he spread the glad tidings of free salvation, and censured what he believed to be in- iquities of priestcraft ; Dallow Farm, in a loft of which he took refuge when pursued because of the truths he had spoken ; the Village of Elstow, in which he was born, and where in his reckless youth he had led a dissolute life ; Elstow Church, a venerable pile, the notes of whose bells had often been wafted on the air as he pulled the ropes; and then Bedford, where he was imprisoned, and within the walls of the old gaol wrote " The Pilgrim's Progress to the Celestial City." On this gentle pastoral scenery of the still-flowing Ouse, with its many windings, its pollards, and its moated granges, his eyes have often gazed ; and from that soft green sward he may have taken his description of " Bypath 28 A Canadian in Europe. Meadow." Was his " Vanity Fair," I wonder, copied from the London of his day ? I reached London at the St. Pancras Station, the largest in the world, with its vast sky of glass and palatial hotel, and was driven in a " Hansom," but not handsome, cab an odd-looking two-wheeled gig, in which the driver sits aloft behind the hood to a quaint old hotel in a pleasant square filled with trees, in Bloomsbury the scene of the Gordon riots. The somewhat formal air of its great breakfast-room, the neatness of the table service, the re- spectful attentions of the servants, the clean and comfort- able chambers, the quiet home-like feeling of the house were a pleasant contrast to the splendid cheerlessness of an American caravansary. My first walk is up Oxford Street to Hyde Park. It is a fine day, and the world of fashion is abroad hand- some carriages, high-stepping horses, liveried and silk- stockinged footmen some with their hair powdered white as snow. The broad acres of the Park, with its stately trees, its soft green turf, its moving throngs, make as pretty a picture in the afternoon light as one need wish to see. Here flows a ceaseless stream of open carriages containing the flower of the English nobility, enjoying their afternoon drive. There is probably no such collec- tion of beautiful ladies and exquisite toilets in the world fair, fresh English faces, with a delicate bloom, fine-cut profile, an air of high-born culture, and an indefinable but unmistakable tone and refinement acquired through gen- erations of hereditary descent. Beside the carriage drive London : City Road Chapel. 29 is a promenade and a row of chairs in places four rows for the less aristocratic portion of the community ; and the fair faces were by no means confined to the carriage people. Parallel with this fashionable drive runs the Rotten Row derived, say the antiquaries, from route du roi, or royal road the favourite resort of fair equestrians, and their gallant attendants ; and a pretty sight it is to see the elegant and accomplished riders, and the curvettings of their spirited and high-bred horses. One of the strongest impressions felt in London is that of its wealth and its poverty, its greatness and its misery, the immense differences of rank, the luxury of the rich, the wretchedness of the poor. Poverty is everywhere apparent, notably in the itinerant venders of toys, trin- kets, combs, pencils almost anything for a penny; and, in the poorer regions, the wayside stalls for cheap food pigs' feet, tripe, and the like. I noticed these especially at the great Smithfield market, with its memories of the martyrs, where the cries of the chapmen and venders vociferously seeking custom were bewildering. From Smithfield I visited a spot dear to the heart of every Methodist the wide world over City Road Chapel, the mother church of Methodism. It seems to bring one nearer to the springs of Methodism to stand in the old pulpit in which its early fathers preached ; to sit in "Wes- ley's chair ; to see the room in which he died ; the study, a very small room, in which he wrote many of his books ; the very time-worn desk at which he sat ; and then to SO A Canadian in Europe. stand by the grave in which he is buried. In the old parsonage I saw the teapot, of generous dimensions, from which Wesley used to regale the London preachers every Sunday. On one side was the verse beginning "Be present at our table, Lord," and on the other, the words " We thank Thee, Lord, for this our food," etc. At his grave I plucked an ivy leaf as a memento of the visit. Near by rest the ashes of Clarke, Benson, and other fathers of Methodism. In the Bunhill Fields Cemetery, on the opposite side of the street, I visited the graves of probably the three most widely-read writers in the Eng- lish or in any language, John Bunyan, Isaac Watts, and Daniel Defoe. To walk down Fleet Street transports one back to the reign of Good Queen Anne, and further. One would scarce- ly be surprised to meet the burly figure of Dr. Johnson walking down the street, carefully touching certain stones by the wayside, and if he missed one, going back and be- ginning over again. I patronized a barber shop, which the owner announced on his sign was a former palace of Henry VIII. In the old timbered ceiling, his monogram is still seen, and some of the old furniture is preserved. I visited Dick's Tavern at Temple Bar ; and the Cheshire Cheese Inn, in Wine Office Court, built in 1400, where Johnson, Goldsmith, Bos well, Richardson, Garrick, and the rest of their goodly fellowship were wont to hold their Olympic symposia. Of the Bar itself, on which the heads of rebels used to be impaled, only a fragment re- mains. My First Sunday in England. 81 In the afternoon I visited the Spring Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, in their noble rooms at Burling- ton House. The collection was of great excellence the finest specimens of recent British art. It was a treat to hear the fine-flavoured English that was spoken, especially by ladies, with a purity of intonation not common in Canada, and to receive the high-bred courtesies which were graciously accorded to every inquiry. I had heard that the English were cold and repellant in their manners to strangers. I found them the very reverse ; cheerfully giving every information in their power, and even putting themselves to inconvenience to do so. My first Sunday in England was a red-letter day. I had the privilege of visiting two of the grandest temples of Protestant Christendom. The first glimpse of the mighty dome of St. Paul's made my heart leap. But a closer inspection of the building is disappointing. It is blackened with London smoke and corroded with the gases in the air, so that parts are covered with a whitish incrustation like nitre. Within, the dome is vast and solemn, and the view down the nave is awe-inspiring, but to me it conveys no religious impression. " Gothic archi- tecture," says Ruskin, " confesses Christ ; classic architec- ture denies Christ." The sentiment is extreme, but to me it expresses the difference between St. Paul's and West- minster Abbey. In the latter the clustering shafts spring- ing toward the sky, and the groined arches leaping from their summit and supporting the sky-like vault overhead, must kindle in the coldest nature a religious aspiration. 32 A Canadian in Europe. Then it is hoary with the associations of at least eight hun- dred years. I saw the crumbling effigies in the cloisters of the Norman Abbots, from A. D. 1068-1214. The pious hands that carved the fret-work I beheld had mouldered to dust eight hundred years ago. A full choral service was rendered the sublime anthems pealing through the vaulted aisles, as they have for so many centuries. The retention of so much of the old Ro- man liturgy in the Anglican services is an illustration of the conservative tendency that characterizes the English treatment of all ancient institutions. And all around were England's mighty dead, laid to rest in this great Walhalla of the nation her kings and warriors, and statesmen ; and mightier than they, her kings of thought and literature the anointed priests and sages and seers of the " Poets' Corner," in which I sat. And I felt that in all this, though a stranger from over-sea, I was not an alien, but that I shared the inheritance in those spirit- stirring memories of the English-speaking race throughout the world ; and tears of deep and strong emotion filled my eyes. Dean Stanley, the greatest of all the deans of the vener- able abbey, whom, most of living men, I longed to hear, preached the sermon. It being Trinity-Sunday,he discours- ed on the text, " In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." He is a little old gentleman, wears a skull cap, and has an indistinct utterance, but the sermon was one of the most impressive I ever heard. He reminded us that five hundred years ago, that very day, the eighth Westminster Abbey. 33 of June, Edward the Black Prince died, the knight of the Holy Ghost ; and exhorted us in the name of the blessed Trinity to be faithful soldiers of the Holy Cross. The painted light that streamed through the crimson and purple robes of the apostles and prophets in the great rose window grew fainter and fainter ; and before the service was over a solemn gloom began to fill the shadowy vaults and aisles of the vast minster. Among the many monuments upon the wall I noticed as I passed out of the abbey the medallions of John and Charles Wesley and the bas-relief of John Wesley preaching on his father's grave. I attended also the old Ludgate Church in the city, and found a congregation of only eight persons. I visited, too, the old Savoy Church, now partly under ground, where the celebrated Savoy Conference, for the revision of the Prayer-Book, was held. In my walk I passed half-a-dozen palaces, each haunted with the memory of English Sovereigns Buckingham Palace, the residence of the Queen ; the town-houses of the Prince of Wales and Duke of Edinburgh ; St. James' Pal- ace, the residence of the English Kings from William III. to George IV. ; Whitehall, from the window of which Charles I. stepped to the scaffold ; and Somerset House, the home of three unhappy English Queens. But almost every street has memories of the past, which seem almost more real than the experiences of the present. From Westminster Bridge, shown in the cut on page 27, is obtained one of the grandest views in Europe the c A Canadian in Europe. noble river front of the New Houses of Parliament on one side, and St. Thomas's Hospital and Lambeth Palace, with its memories of Cranmer and the Lollards, on the other. Along the river side, on either hand, are the splendid Victoria and Albert Embankments, one of which is shown in the initial cut of this chapter. Midway in this rises the famous Cleopatra's Needle, a memorial of the oldest civilization in the world erected in the heart of the newest. In the middle distance is Waterloo Bridge, and to the left the long facade of Somerset House. CLEOPATRA'S NEEDLE, ON ORIGINAL SITE. CHAPTER II. FRANCE : ROUEN PARIS. N the fourth of June I left London for my contin- ental trip. Passing through the beautiful south- ern shires of England, I sailed from Newhaven for the French fishing-town of Dieppe. The chalk cliffs of Beachy Head soon disappeared and the French coast came into view. Dieppe is a very fitting introduction to con- tinental life. Everything has a decidedly foreign flavour the red-legged French soldiers ; the nut-brown women with their high-peaked, snow-white Norman caps, knit- ting in the sun ; the fish-wives with enormous and ill- smelling creels of fish upon their backs ; the men wear- ing blue blouses and chattering a jargon of Norman-French. The ride to Rouen was a succession of beautiful pictures of quaint rural life, queer old chateaux with pepper-pot turrets ; red-tiled or straw-thatched, low-walled granges, embowered amid orchards in full bloom ; old rnoss-grown villages with their mouldering church, tiny mill, and rustic inn. I spent my first night in France at Rouen, the ancient capital of Normandy, and the richest of French cities in mediaeval architecture. In Paris almost every thing that is old has disappeared before the modern improvements. 36 A Canadian in Europe. At Rouen, on the contrary almost everything and every- body, even the children, seemed at least five hundred years old. It was stepping back into the middle ages. The ancient timbered houses, with quaintly carved and high-pitched gables lean over the narrow crooked streets till they almost meet overhead. The Cathedral dates from 1207, and contains the tombs of Hollo of Normandy and of our English William Longue Epe*e, and the heart of Co3ur de Lion. The shrine of the latter bears the in- scription, " Hie jacet cor Ricardi, Regis Anglorum, cor leonis dicti." It was in the dim twilight that I entered the church, and the deep shadows filling the vast and solemn nave and aisles, the tapers faintly burning before the various altars and shrines, the haif-seen figures kneeling in the gloom all conspired to produce a strangely weird impres- sion far more profound than that felt in the garish light of day. The architectural gem of the city, however, is the Church of St. Ouen, one of the most beautiful gothic churches in existence. Its sculptured arch and niche and column ; its great rose windows, stained with brightest hues; its carved effigies of saint and martyr, and of knights and kings and noble dames praying on their tombs ; and the deep-toned organ peeling through the vaulted aisles, and the sweet singing of the choir- boys and chanting of the priests gave me my first vivid impression of the grandeur and strange fascination to its adherents of the Rouen. 37 old historic Romish ritual, which for hundreds of years cast its spell over mediaeval Christendom. One can walk completely around the roof of the church and thus get a near view of the grinning gargoyles through which the water is poured out. The monkish imagina- tion seems to have run riot in carving quaint and grotesque devices dragons, griffins, strange twi-formed creatures with the head of a goat or monkey or bird, and the body of a man, or vice versa, in every possible com- bination. One door is called the " Portail des Marmou- sets," from the little animals that gambol over its arches. Over the central door of many of these old churches are carved with admirable skill and infinite patience, elabor- ate groups representing scenes from the life of Christ and frequently the awful scene of the Last Judgment. At Notre Dame at Paris, for instance, Christ sits upon His throne, the Archangel sounds a trumpet, the dead burst from their tombs, and Satan is weighing their souls in a balance. Devils drive the lost to the left and torture them in flames, while angels lead the saved to the joys of Paradise. In the arch of a single door are no less than two hundred separate figures one of them St. Denis, carrying his head in his hands a symbol of the mode of his martyrdom. In those early days art was religion, and the churches were a great stone Bible, of ten the only Bible the people had or could read. Over and over again is told the story of a man from his creation and fall to his final resurrection. 38 A Canadian in Europe. But most frequently and most fully is rehearsed the story of the life and sufferings of our Lord, and of the seven joys and seven sorrows of Mary. I was not prepared however, to find the presence of the comic element in this church decoration the grinning and grimacing monkeys, the grotesque conflicts of saints and demons, in which the latter are sorely discomfited, and similar scenes. I stood with painful interest upon the spot where well nigh five hundred years ago, by English hands, the heroic Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for the alleged crime of witchcraft. It is a page which one would gladly blot from his country's history. The patriot Maid of Orleans is a favourite subject of French art. I saw in Paris a beautiful statue representing her hearing the Divine voice which called her to conflict, to victory, and to martyrdom, for her country. The air of eager listening and the rapt inspiration of the noble and beautiful features was one of the grandest things I ever beheld. A more agreeable reminiscence of the international re- lations of England and France is an elaborate series of stone reliefs representing the pomp and pageants of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. May no less friendly inter- course ever take place between the English and the gay, kind-hearted French race 1 I saw a striking instance of their cheerful gaiety during an evening stroll at Rouen. In an open square about thirty full-grown men and women, in their respective blue blouses and snowy Nor- man caps, but dusty with toil, were merrily playing in a French Politeness. 39 ring, as I have seen school children in Canada, and sing- ing a simple childish rhyme. They seemed as happy as a school let loose. I observed no rudeness or indecorum; but it looked very odd to see men and women at such child's play. The Duke of Wellington was once asked how he spoke French. " With the greatest intrepidity, Madam," was his reply. In like manner I carried on my intercourse with these interesting people. Even when they spoke Eng- lish I found that rather harder to understand than the French, so I made the most of my slender linguistic acquirements in that language. They never laughed at my mistakes or awkward phrases, although I had often to laugh at them myself. They are very quick and bright- witted, and I had slight difficulty in getting any inform- ation I wanted. I found the English very polite ; but I must confess the French surpassed them. For instance, riding in an omnibus I happened to ask my next neigh- bour the way to some place. In a minute there was a council of war over my map, several persons, including one or two ladies, proffered advice, and it ended by one of the gentlemen getting out with me to show me the spot. And that is but a specimen of the treatment every- where in France. One lady, indeed, assured me that they looked upon Canadians almost as fellow-countrymen. " We used to own all that country," she said. But even when my nationality was unknown the politeness was the same. At a fine museum in Paris, the Muse"e de Modern Paris. 41 Cluny, to which admission is granted by a special order, but without a fee, I recorded my name as desiring an order, and soon received a large official document containing it. Before it arrived, however, happening to be in the neigh- bourhood, I asked admission, which was courteously granted, and every assistance given in studying the valu- able collections. I have said that I was disappointed at the brand-new appearance of the greater part of Paris. I was also struck with the monotony a splendid monotony it is true of its street architecture. Broad boulevards and streets radiate from numerous points, so, according to Baron Haussmann's design, I was informed, as to be commanded by cannon from these strategic points. On either side of these streets rise uniform blocks and wedges of houses, of cream-coloured stone, five, six, or seven stories high, with iron balconies, and bright shop fronts. Many of the bou- levards are lined with noble trees, giving a refreshing shade and coolness amid the glare and heat of the city. Many of them are also paved with concrete or asphalt, which has the double advantage of being noiseless and of furnishing poor material for the erection of barricades the favourite amusement of the Parisians in times of polit- ical excitement. At night the streets are brilliant with light electric lamps, glowing like mimic suns ; the cafe's ablaze with gas, and occupying with their little round tables half of the broad side-walks; and the numerous shops flashing with jewellery or glowing with costly fabrics. 42 A Canadian in Europe. The public squares, of which there are many, are full of life and movement and rich in colour, adorned with noble trees, flashing fountains and snowy statuary, and filled with brilliant equipages and promenaders, with every- where the ubiquitous gens d'armes. Of all the parks in the world I suppose the Champs Elyse'es is the grandest not so much in natural beauty, for it shares the splen- did monotony of the city, but in the stately architecture by which it is surrounded, the noble vista it presents, and the brilliant concourse by which it is thronged ; and over all is thrown an intense historic interest by the tragic memories with which it is haunted. On its broad Place de la Concorde, the guillotine began its bloody work with the execution of Louis XVI. Then in swift succession followed the judicial murders of his ill-fated and lovely queen Marie Antoinette, his sister Madame Elizabeth, and Philippe Egalite', Duke of Orleans ; and here, too, the arch- conspirator Robespierre with many of his companions in crime met a stern retribution. Nearly three thousand persons in all here became the victims of that tremendous social earthquake, which overthrew both throne and altar in the dust, and shook all Europe with its throes. And here, within the last eight years, were renewed, in the wild orgies of the Commune, the darkest tragedies of the Reign of Terror. The crumbling and crannied walls of the Tuileries, blackened and blasted with fire, the seat of the pomp and pride of the late Empire, look down upon the stately palace-garden, as striking a proof of the mutability Old Masters and Modern Painters. 43 of earthly greatness as the ruins of Caesar's imperial pal- ace, near which I pen these lines*. And even as I write come the tidings of the tragic death, by a Zulu assegai in an obscure African jungle, of the young prince, bom in the purple in those now ruined halls, the prospective heir of all their splendour and imperial power. I was surprised on the whole to see so little evidence of the most memorable siege of history. Except the ruins of the Tuileries, the Hotel de Ville and a few other public buildings, there was little to remind one of the dreadful scenes of the Commune or the siege. The Colonne de Ven- dorne, hurled from its base in detestation of the Imperialism which it commemorates, again rears its majestic form in air ; and soon, throughout the gay pleasure-city all trace of its " baptism of fire " shall have disappeared. The Tuileries, however, even in their best estate would not compare with the stately architecture of the Louvre, the abode of a long line of sovereigns, and now the home of the immortal works of the mightier sovereigns of art. Its majestic fagades with their sculptured and columned fronts, its noble statuary, its spacious courts, its vast gal- leries and its priceless treasures of art make it almost with- out a rival in the world. Here I must confess a heresy on the subject of art. I cannot feel the enthusiasm for the " old masters," which seems to be expected of all beholders. Ruskin says that nobody ever painted a tree correctly till Turner showed the way. I think that, at least in lands- * This chapter was written in Rome. 44 A Canadian in Europe. cape, modern artists surpass those of any former age. In reverent sympathy with nature and faithful interpretation of her varied moods, I have seen nothing that, in my judg- ment, will compare with the modern galleries. Even the religious art of the great masters to me seems often con- ventional and insipid, and lacking soul and vitality. They possessed a mastery of form and colour, it is true ; but in this I think they are equalled by the moderns; and better than many of the famous pictures of the Louvre I liked the exhibition of works of living artists in the Palais de 1'Industrie. The portraits seemed almost to speak, the water to flow, the flowers seemed not painted but modelled, the texture of armour, glass, ivory, and woven fabric was of startling realism. Hamlet's words to his mother, " Seems, madam ; nay, it is" kept continually coming to my mind. In religious teaching they seemed also more direct and intense. A picture of our Lord and the Family at Bethany, instead of giving the conventional types of the art of the Renaissance, gave real portraits of living men and women grave, earnest, intensely real, and speaking with strange power to the heart. In another, our Lord, with a counten- ance of ineffable and infinite love and pity, calls the af- flicted unto Him, and varied types of wretchedness and sorrow clustered in sacred restfulness at His feet. In an- other, entitled " The Last Port of Refuge," the souls of shipwrecked voyagers are dimly seenstruggling up through the whelming waves to the open gate of heaven, where Christ stands to welcome them home. And still another The Palais Royal. 45 was more exquisitely suggestive than any of the scores of Renaissance " Flights into Egypt " that I have seen. The dark form of the Sphinx, as if propounding its awful rid- dle, fills the picture with gloom. Cradled in its arms, where He has been laid by Mary, lies the Holy Child, emitting a glory of Divine radiance, as if to show that He was the solution of the dark problem of the ages. In the fore- ground a thin column of smoke from Joseph's camp-fire climbs the sky, giving an intense conception of the vast- ness and loneliness of the desert. But mere words can give a very faint idea of the power and impressiveness of these pictures. Delaroche's famous " hdmicycle " at the Palais des Beaux- Arts is one of the most impressive paintings I ever saw. It has seventy-five colossal figures, twenty- three feet high, representing the arts. The effect is majestic. Several of the old French palaces are surrendered to purposes of trade. One of these, the Palais Royal, is en- tirely occupied by shops and cafe's. It was built by Car- dinal Richelieu, and was the palace of Anne of Austria, Louis XIV. and Philip of Orldans. Here were celebrated those disgraceful orgies which helped to bring on the Revolution. It -is a vast court adorned with fountains, statuary, trees, and surrounded by the palace buildings. One of the cafe's overlooking the garden was a favourite place for dining after a hard day's work in the adjacent Louvre. Here in the ancient halls of kings, regaled with music by the band of the Garde Rdpublicaine one of the 46 A Canadian in Europe. best in the world I could obtain an excellent dinner of soup, three courses and dessert, with wine or coffee I took the coffee in the company of priests, abbe's, artists, and ladies, for the sum of fifty cents and be waited on, too, by a magnificent gentleman in full dress. The most interesting palace, however, in or near Paris, is the Palace of Versailles. I made the trip it is twenty miles by rail in the company ,of a French gentleman from Canada who crossed in the same ship. We rode in the " Imperial " or open upper story of the railway car- riage, and thus enjoyed a fine view of the country. The omnibuses and street-cars have also these upper stories, which are much the best for sight-seeing. The palace cost the treasury of Louis XIV. the enormous sum of a thou- sand million francs, and at one time 36,000 men and 6,000 horses were employed in constructing its terraces. When the starving people sent a deputation demanding, " What shall we eat ? " they received the mocking answer, " Eat grass." No wonder a revolution swept away the evil dynasty with a besom of destruction. The chief consola- tion in visiting these monuments of royal tyranny is the fact that they are no longer the palaces of kings, but the palaces of the people the private apartments of once mighty sovereigns, and the boudoirs of queens, are open to the poorest in the land. How time brings its revenges ! We were shown the Legislative Chamber, in which the day before it had been decided to restore the seat of government to the City of Paris, which felt sorely Palace of Versailles. 47 aggrieved at the long deprivation it had endured. The palace is a quarter of a mile long and contains some of the grandest courts, galleries, and saloons in the world, adorned with priceless paintings one of Vernet's battle- pieces is seventy-one feet long and sixteen feet high Sevres vases, malachite tables, marble mantels and the like, beyond computation. During the late war these stately apartments were turned into hospitals for the German wounded ; and in the celebrated Salle des Glaces, by a strange irony of fate, the King of Prussia was pro- claimed Emperor of United Germany. Here also is shown the bed-chamber of Louis XIV. where the Grand Mon- arque used to receive his courtiers as he rose from bed hence our word levee and the royal chamberlains had the honour of arraying his sacred majesty in his wig, robes, and shoes and stockings. Here also is shown the state-bed on which he died, and the window where the herald proclaimed, " Le Roi est mort ! Vive le Roi !" Of greater interest, however, are the private apartments of the amiable and unfortunate Louis XVI. and of his high- born but low-laid consort, Marie Antoinette. Here is her boudoir, her writing- and work-table, her library and on the doors are the identical locks, of excellent workman- ship, wrought by the royal locksmith, her husband. From the window is seen the long and noble avenue, up which swarmed the riotous mob of enraged men and women clamouring for blood. On this marble stairway the gentlemen of the guard kept the mob at bay, faithful CHURCH OF ST. DENIS. Church of St. Denis. 49 unto death. The narrow passage through which the Queen attempted to escape is also pointed out. It makes the tragic story of those horrible days very real to see these mementoes of their horrors. The vast and monotonous park, with its formal parterres, its long avenues of trees clipped into accurate cubes, its terraces and fountains with their Neptunes and Tritons and river-gods have a weary monotony that palls upon the mind. The Great and Little Trianons, built for royal mistresses, and the collection of unwieldy and heavily gilt state-carriages recall only memories of guilty pomp and pride. Far more beautiful, because more natural, is the noble park of St. Cloud, with its avenues of stately trees, its bosky solitudes, its swelling hills and magnificent pan- orama of Paris and the winding Seine. From the win- dows of Versailles, it is said, was visible the distant Church of St. Denis, the mausoleum of a long line of French Kings. To shut out the unwelcome view, there- fore, Louis XIV. erected the pleasure palace of St. Cloud, and filled it with every luxury that despotic power could command. The shells of the Prussians, however, spared not the pride of kings, and the blackened walls of the ruined palace are a monument of the vicissitudes of earthly greatness. One of the most interesting places in Paris is the Hotel de Cluny. Here the Roman Emperor Constantius Chlorus in the third century founded a palace, the vast D 50 A Canadian in Europe. baths of which are still in good preservation. Here Julian was proclaimed Emperor in 360, and here the early Frankish monarchs resided. On the site of the palace the Monks of Cluny in the 15th century built the present exquisite mediaeval abbey which became again the resi- dence of the sovereigns of France. It is now one of the most interesting museums of mediaeval relics in the world. In the very heart of the crowded and busy city one may lounge in the quaint old monkish garden or explore the still older Roman baths, carrying one back to the very dawn of Gallic history. I attended a vesper service at the venerable Cathedral of Notre Dame, which was very impressive. As the organ pealed through the vaulted aisles I thought of the many Te Deums for famous victories, coronations, marriage and funeral pomps of the sovereigns of France thathad here been celebrated ; and then of the orgies of the Reign of Terror, when a ballet-dancer was here enthroned as the Goddess of Reason ; and of its more recent desecration, when the Communists made it a military depot, and when compelled to retreat set it on fire. The jeweled wealth of its sacristry is of priceless cost, and of rare historic interest. Near by is that chamber of horrors, the Morgue, where six hundred unknown dead, chiefly suicides, are, during the year, placed for recognition. A morbidly curious throng were surging in and out, as I passed, to gaze on the dishon- oured relics of mortality exposed on marble slabs within. Cemetery of Pere Lachaise. The dark secrets of that house, could they be told, would reveal deeper tragedies than poet ever feigned. I visited with especial interest the celebrated cemetery of Pere Lachaise the last resting place of so many of the noblest dead of France. My feet turned first to the tomb of Abelard and Heloi'se, whose tale of love and sorrow, after the lapse of seven long centuries, still touches the heart of the world with perennial power. Their effigies lie, with hands clasped in prayer, side by side, and the simple inscription reads " Lesrestes d'Heloi'se et d'Abdlard sont reunis dans ce tombeau." Dissevered in their lives, their dust mingles together with its kindred clay. Gar- lands of fresh and fragrant flowers, placed by loving hands upon their tomb, attested the living sympathy which is still felt for their sorrows. Here, too, is the narrow house of the money-king, Rothschild, and of those queens of tragedy, Rachel and Menken. Among the other distinguished dead interred in this populous city of the dead are Fourier, Champollion, Abbd Seiyes, Pastor Monod, Eugene Scribe, Michelet, Talma, Cherubini, Chopin, Rossini, BeVanger, La Fontaine, Moliere, Gay-Lussac, Laplace, Arago, Madame de Genlis, Alfred de Musset and many another whose name and fame have filled the world. The French exhibit much kindly sentiment in decorat- ing the graves of their departed with wreaths of flowers and immortelles ; and over many of these are constructed glass pent-houses for their protection. I noticed, too, 52 A Canadian in Europe. that even rough fellows in their blouses reverently took off their hats when a funeral passed. On many tombs I observed the prayer for the dead: "Requiem seternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eos." In the mortuary chapel was a beautiful marble angel crowned with living flowers, bearing a Bible, open at the text so full of hope for all the sorrowing ; " Beati mortui qui in Domino morientur." The cemetery was one of the last strongholds of the Commune, and amid the funereal cypress and marble monuments of the dead were waged one of the most desperate conflicts of the living. In the neigh- bouring prison of LaRoquette, was perpetrated one of the most lurid crimes of that reign of terror. The venerable Monseigneur Darboy, Archbishop of Paris, with four other distinguished ecclesiastics, were, after a mock trial and gross outrage, ruthlessly shot in the court-yard of the prison. The robes of the murdered archbishop, stained with his blood, are shown at the sacristy of Notre Dame. Near Pere Lachaise, rise the heights of Les Buttes- Chaumont, the most picturesque park in Paris. It is sit- uated in the Belleville faubourg, the very heart of the Commune despotism. To reach it, I had to pass through streets crowded with men and women of the labouring class, many of whom looked quite capable of repeating the dark deeds of those dreadful days. The park was a waste where the rubbish of the city was deposited till the civic government of the late Emperor converted it into a garden of fairy-like loveliness. Artificial lakes, cascades, Les Buttes-Chaumont. 53 and grottoes; cliff and crag mantled with foliage and climbing-plants, and gay with flowers of brightest hue; and a magnificent view from a Belvidere crowning a lofty height, make it the most attractive bit of scenery in the city. The large and fashionable Bois de Boulogne is tame and uninteresting in comparison. The latter was denuded of its trees during the siege, and those since planted have attained only a rather meagre growth. Its walks and bosky vistas, its lakes and cascades,'and its mag- nificent parterres of flowers, and masses of rich shrubbery are very charming. But it is, I think, inferior in natural beauty to Fairmount at Philadelphia, and in artificial picturesqueness to Central Park, New York. My visit was made at sunset's pensive hour, when the world of fashion had retired from its pleasant drives, and its syl- van scenes were as silent and lonely as a desert. The water fowl splashed in their quiet ponds as fearlessly as though they were in some far-off forest solitude. In the long purple twilight and through the deepening dusk, I found my way back to the gay and brilliant city. But my time and space would fail before I could enu- merate half the attractions of this pleasure city. One of the most delightful of these is the Luxembourg Palace, with its noble galleries of sculpture and painting, its vast and elegant though rather formal garden, its pleasant promenade concerts, where Fair France appears in her most tasteful toilette and very tasteful it is. Ladies of the wealthier class always wear bonnets or hats ; women 54 A Canadian in Europe. of the poorer class, domestic servants and the like, wear a very neat and snowy white muslin cap ; those of an in- termediate grade trip through the streets with their heads covered only by a somewhat elaborate arrangement of their hair. The flower markets are also very bright and pleasant places, with the gay colours ; the fragrance, and the exqui- site beauty of their flowers. The Jardin des Plantes and Jardin d'Acclimatation, with their noble trees, fountains, flowers, and collections of strange animals, are very inter- esting and instructive resorts. At the latter it is very amusing to see the children enjoying their rides on the camel or elephant, or in the ostrich or zebra carriage. The tomb of Napoleon I. beneath the vast dome of the Church des Invalides, is the noblest mausoleum I think, I ever saw. In the centre of a large circular crypt sunk in the marble floor lies the huge sarcophagus hewn out of a single block of Finland granite, weighing sixty-seven tons. Twelve colossal marble Victories, with wreath and palm, guard the dust of that stormy heart now still for ever, which shook all Europe with its throbs. A faint bluish light streams down from the lofty dome, and the sombre aspect of the crypt and its surroundings contri- bute greatly to the solemn grandeur of the scene. The Pantheon and the Madeleine are more like pagan temples than like Christian churches ; but in the Sainte Chapelle, gothic architecture has achieved one of its most splendid triumphs. Of sinister interest is the Church of Morality and Religion in Paris. 55 St. Germain 1'Auxerrois; for from its tower the fatal tocsin tolled forth the funeral knell of the awful night O of St. Bartholomew's dread massacre. At the Church of the Trinity I witnessed an imposing funeral ceremony or " pompe " as the Parisians call it sable palls and plumes with silver mountings, a lofty bier, burning tap- ers, incense, and sonorous chanting. And at Ste. Clotilde I witnessed a wedding in high life the bride, veiled in white, and the bridegroom kneeling at the high altar; the priests, robed in golden tissue, repeating the mar- riage service, while a very fashionable company "assisted" by their presence. I had not much opportunity of judging of the moral or religious condition of Paris. There may be vice, but it certainly does not flaunt itself on the highway. Nowhere have I seen public order or decorum better observed. On Sunday many of the stores, it is true, were open ; but many of them also were closed. I was surprised to find French Protestantism so strong. Some of the largest churches of the city belong to the old Calvinistic commun- ion, which shares with Romanism the support of the State. A grand evangelical work is going on through the agency of Mr. Me All, but I had no opportunity of judging of its modes. One painful evidence of a deadly moral cancer eating out the heart of the nation came under my notice. The walls were placarded with large posters, soliciting sub- scriptions to a new social journal, established to counter- 56 A Canadian in Europe. work a threatened agitation in favour of divorce. It was a cry to her fellow-women wrung from a woman's heart. " In the name of maternity," it read, " in the name of the family, down with divorce a bas le divorce ! " " Do you forget," it went on, " that we have all the evils ? Will you not protest against this crime against humanity ? " Beneath the fair and gay exterior of Parisian life there must be many aching hearts and many joyless homes. This question was evidently attracting much attention, for I saw other placards announcing public lectures in defence of this agitation. If the French are wise they will do nothing to weaken the already too feeble restraints of conjugal obligation. The family is the foundation of the State. If the family bonds be loosened, the State will fall to ruin. It was so with ancient Rome ; it will be so with modern France. My last view of this beautiful city, the night before I left, was a bird's eye view from the grand balloon which ascends from the Place des Tuileries. It is tethered to the earth by a strong cable which is coiled upon a huge drum, turned by two engines of three hundred horse-power. Its diameter is thirty-six yards, and its contents of gas 25,000 cubic yards. It ascends about 1,500 feet, and takes up fifty persons at a time. In mounting and des- cending there is an absolute unconsciousness of motion ; but when grappled by the anchors on returning, the huge thing sways and strains at its fetters like a thing of life. As one ascends the horizon seems to rise and the city to sink A Bird's-eye View of Paris. 57 till the latter is spread out like a map beneath him every street and square and house and tree clearly shown. The people and carriages look like emmets crawling on the ground. It looked like a toy city, or like the models of the French ports shown in the Mu.se'e de Marine in the Louvre. The noble vista of the Champs Elysdes, the far- winding Seine, the grand environment of the city and glory of the setting sun made up a picture of natural beauty and historic interest not soon to be forgotten. A few days after my ascent this great balloon collapsed in a gale of wind, and has not since been used. CHAPTER III. ITALY : MONT CENIS TURIN GENOA PISA. Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree ; E'en in thy desert, what is like to thee ? Thy very weeds are beautiful, thy waste More rich than other climes' fertility, Thy wreck a glory, and thy ruin graced With an immaculate charm which cannot be effaced. Childe Harold. t~ T is a railway ride of five hundred miles from Paris <* to Turin, the first city at which I stopped in Italy.* The journey through South-eastern France is rather monotonous, till we reach the valley of the Rhone, and soon after the foot-hills of the Cottian Alps. Long processions of tall Lombardy poplars march in close files, like plumed grenadiers, on either side of the road, and picturesque villages nestle amid their orchards and their vines. Many a city of old renown also lifts its embattled towers above the far-extending plain Melun, Fontainebleau, Sens, Dijon, Chalons, and others of lesser note. * On the top of an omnibus in Paris I made the acquaintance of a young gentleman from New York State, who became my companion in travel during a month's wandering in Italy. We shared, accordingly, all the adventures herein described, till I crossed the Alps into Switzerland. Tlie Alps of Savoy. 59 Soon after crossing the swift and turbid Rhone, the train begins to climb the broad slopes of the foot-hills. It was with a great leap of the heart that I first beheld MOUNTAIN TORRENT. the snowy range of the Alps of Savoy, with their sharp serrated outline, cut like a cameo against the deep blue sky. Higher and higher wound the train by many a zig- 60 A Canadian in Europe. zag, giving broader, grander views over a sea of moun- tains at every turn. The pinnacled crags reveal in their tortured strata the energy of the primeval forces, by which they were heaved high in air. The mountain villages cling like eagles' nests to the face of the clifls; and down the mountain sides leap foaming torrents, "like tears of gladness o'er a giant's face." At length the train plunges into the heart of the mountain, four thousand feet beneath its summit, through the Mont Cenis Tunnel. The tunnel is nearly eight miles long, and four thousand men were employed for ten years in its construction. Emerging from midnight darkness to the glare of snow-clad mountains, the train glides rapidly down the wild valley of the Dora, giving views of a dizzy gorge up which winds, in many folds, like a huge serpent, the old post road over the mountain pass. At Susa, an ancient town, is an old Roman triumphal arch, dating from the year 8 A.D. Descending the beautiful chestnut- covered slopes, and traversing a broad and fertile plain, we reach at length the ancient capital of Piedmont, the fair city of Turin. My first impressions of Italian peasant life, as caught from the windows of a railway carriage, were of its ex- treme poverty. I saw hundreds of poor peasants return- ing from market, brown as berries, riding in their paltry little carts, or on their meagre donkeys, but mostly toil- ing on foot along the hot and dusty highway, driving a few goats or gaunt and hungry-looking swine both men Turin. 01 and women coarsened with field labour, unintelligent, and in appearance anything but the light-hearted, picturesque race they are so often portrayed by poet or painter. The Italians of the better class who shared our railway car- riage, possessed more of the vivacity and spi ightliness attributed to their race. I was much amused at the im- passioned gesticulation and intonation of a young lady and a military officer, who seemed to converse as much by gesture and tone of voice as by articulate expression. Our military friend was very polite, and took evident pleasure in answering my questions, and pointing out the points of interest on the road, and on leaving the car- riage, raised his hat, as I found was the general custom, to each person in the compartment. Turin is a stately city of 200,000 inhabitants. From 1859 to 1865, it was the capital of United Italy and the residence of the King. It was somewhat of a surprise to find that the royal palace, although inferior in extent to that of Versailles, was much more sumptuous in its in- ternal decoration. The royal armoury is especially mag- nificent. Turin, although a town upon its site was destroyed by Hannibal, B.C. 218, is essentially a modern city, abound- ing in handsome squares, and adorned with splendid street architecture. A peculiar feature is the open arcades which run beneath the buildings, upon which the elegant shops open. The foot-passenger is thus protected from sun and rain, and from the reckless driving of Italian Jehus, The 02 A Canadian in Europe. only striking bit of mediaeval architecture is the grim Palazzo Madama, a stern fortress of the 13th century, dominating the heart of the city. The Chapel of the Holy Napkin which is said to contain the linen in which our Lord's body was wrapped is a circular chamber of dark brown marble, approached by thirty-seven marble steps, and lighted with Rembrandt-like effect from a lofty dome. At Turin I obtained my first view of full-blown Mariolatry. It was at the Church of La Consolata, a huge structure, which contains a miracle-working image of the Madonna. The vast church, with every approach to it, was crowded with worshippers, and mass was be- ing celebrated at several altars at once. The street with- out was thronged like a fair, with booths for the sale of sacred pictures, medals, tapers, rosaries ; and boys and women were hawking printed accounts of the latest mir- acle of the Saint. In the corridors of the church were hundreds of votive offerings and pictures, commemora- ting her wonder-working power. The pictures were, for the most part, wretched daubs, representing miraculous escapes from accidents and violent deaths of every con- ceivable character. The whole scene was coarse, mer- cenary, and degrading in the last degree. In the afternoon I walked out to visit the ancient Capu- chin monastery II Monte. It is situated on a lofty hill, commanding a magnificent view of the city, of the " wan- dering Po," and of the snowy-peaked Alps in the back- ground, The rule of the Order is very austere. Their Genoa. C3 garb is a coarse brown tunic, fastened with a girdle. Their only head-covering is an ample hood, and on their naked feet they wear coarse sandals. The cells, which open on gloomy cloisters, are narrow vaults, scarce larger than a grave, and here the monks are buried alive for their lives of poverty and indolence are little better than a living death. One venerable looking old fellow kindly drew from a deep well, with an old-fashioned wheel, water to quench my thirst. A ride of a hundred miles, for the most part through grand mountain scenery, brings one to the ancient city of Genoa. On the way we pass the famous field of Marengo, where, in 1800, was fought during twelve long hours, the battle which changed the destinies of the whole of Europe. With its noble terraces of frescoed palaces rising tier above tier from the sea, Genoa sits like a queen on the slopes of the lovely Gulf, and well deserves the proud name of La Superba. No city in Italy contains so many old ducal palaces. These are, for the most part built in a hollow square, with magnificent marble stair- ways leading to' the stately halls and apartments of the upper stories. The outer walls bear elaborate frescoes, which still preserve much of their original brightness. The lower windows are heavily barred with iron, which gives the streets a narrow, gloomy and prison-like ap- pearance. At the entry to the great houses stands the concierge, magnificent in gold-laced livery, silk stockings and gold -headed staff of office. Many of the palaces, with 64 A Canadian in Europe. their priceless art treasures, are freely thrown open to the inspection of tourists ; and though now exhibiting " a faded splendour wan," they recall its golden prime, when Genoa vied with Venice for the mastery of the Mediter- ranean. Some of the most interesting memories of Genoa are connected with that intrepid genius who first unveiled the western world to European eyes. A noble marble monument of the great discoverer, with reliefs of the principal scenes of his life, graces one of its squares. In the Municipal Palace I saw the famous bust of .Columbus, about which Mark Twain so bothered his unfortunate guide, also the ill written autograph letters, which any American boy could surpass. I noticed that the signa- ture was a sort of play upon his name XPOFERENS. Genoa has a thoroughly foreign aspect the narrow streets, some are not more than five feet wide ; the trains of laden mules, with jingling bells on their necks ; the gloomy arcades under many of the buildings ; the black- lace veils, worn as the only head-dress of ladies in the streets ; and other peculiarities remind us that we are in Italy. It was the festa of St. John the Baptist, and the churches were gay with floral decorations. The cathedral of San Lorenzo, especially, was festooned with wreaths, and at night illuminated with countless lamps. I stood in the square and listened to the sweet- toned clangour of the joyous festa bells. In this same old church is preser- ved, with great veneration, the so-called " Holy Grail," or vessel out of which our Lord partook, it is said, the Last Supper with His disciples. Italian Courtesy. G5 The most sumptuous church in Genoa is that of S. An- nunziata, an ugly brick structure without, but within a perfect blaze of gold and marble, lapis lazuli and precious stones. The city is wonderfully irregular in surface. The Ponte Carignano is a bridge leaping across a densely- peopled valley, a hundred feet deep some of the houses are nine stories high while the still higher grounds are crowned with villas and gardens. From these an enchant- ing view is obtained of the far-shimmering surface of the BIRD'S-EYE VIEW OF GENOA.* blue Mediterranean, the majestic sweep of the coast-line, and the noble and fortress-crowned heights that girdle the city. As an illustration of Italian courtesy, I may mention that I made the casual acquaintance, in the public gardens, of Signor Di Rossi, a leading merchant of the city, who showed me much attention, gave me valuable information and invited me to share the hospitality of his own house. * The accompanying small bird's-eye view of the city will give an idea of its splendid harbour and engirdling chain of forts on the surrounding hills. E G6 A Canadian in, Europe. The ride from Genoa to Pisa, about a hundred miles, is oiie of the most magnificent in Italy. The railway skirts the wild and romantic sea coast, with its bold and rocky promontories. In that short distance it traverses no less than eighty tunnels an indication of the rugged character of the country. On one side stretches the deep blue sur- face of the Mediterranean whose surf dashes in snowy foam upon the rocky coast, and on the other the vine-and - olive-clad slopes of the Appenines, dotted with villas, orange PISA BIRD'S EYE VIEW. and lemon plantations, with clumps of cypress, palms, and stone pines, citrons, oleanders and myrtles. We swept round the noble gulf of Spezzia, to which the memory of Shelley who was drowned in its waters and his body burned on its shore, lent a pathetic interest. Pisa presents probably the most wonderful group of buildings in the world the Cathedral, Leaning Tower, Bap- tistery, and Campo Santo, the general relations of which are indicated in the small bird's eye view. The Cathe- dral is a vast structure, dating, except its restorations, Pisa. 67 from the eleventh century. Its alternate bands of black and white marble, with its magnificent fagade of co- lumned arcades, gives it a unique and striking appearance. The effect of the interior is of unusual solemnity and awe. From the vast and shadowy dome looks down, in act of benediction, a mosaic effigy of Christ, by Cimabue, in the austere Byzantine style, of date A.D. 1302. The gilded roof is supported by sixty-eight ancient Greek and Roman monolithic marble or porphyry columns, captured by the Pisans in war. No two of these columns are quite alike in height or thickness ; but a sort of symmetry is given by adding capitals and bases of different heights. The effect of the whole is far from unpleasing. In the nave hangs the large bronze lamp, whose swaying to and fro is said to have suggested to Galileo the idea of the pendulum. I visited, in an obscure back street, the house in which the great astronomer was born. The Baptistery is a circular marble building, a hundred feet in diameter, surrounded by columned arcades, and sur- mounted by a lofty dome. The pulpit and large octagonal font are marvels of marble fretwork like exquisite lace hardened into stone. That which, to me at last, gave its chief interest to the building, was its exquisite echo. My guide sang over and over again a series of notes, and the softened sounds fell back from the lofty dome, faint and far, yet clear and distinct, and with an unearthly sweet- ness, like elfin notes in fairy land. More famous than any other building of the group is the 68 A Canadian in Europe. Leaning Tower a structure of remarkable beauty. It consists of eight stories of marble colonades, rising one hundred and seventy-nine feet high, and leaning thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. It causes a strange sensa- tion of fancied insecurity to look down from the over- hanging edge of the airy structure. One involuntarily begins to pick out the place where he is going to fall, for to fall seems for the moment inevitable. Yet for five hundred years and more, this lovely " leaning miracle" has reared its form of beauty to the wondering gaze of successive generations. The Campo Santo is a large quadrangle surrounded by spacious arcades, with gothic tracery of exquisite beauty. The enclosure contains fifty-three shiploads of earth brought from Mount Calvary, in order that the dead might repose in holy ground. The walls are covered with fres- coes by Orcagna and other early Tuscan artists. Among the more striking of these are representations of the Tri- umph of Death and the Last Judgment. In the former a group of gay and gallant horsemen co'me suddenly upon three open coffins, from which even the horses shrink with shuddering horror. In the latter the crude and dreadful representations of the regions of eternal gloom, which Dante afterwards set forth in undying verse, are por- trayed with a repulsive vividness in fading fresco. The Italians seem fond of multiplying such morbid me- mentoes of death and the under world. For five long centuries these realistic paintings have been reading their The Misericordia. G9 ghastly lessons of mortality to successive generations of mankind. At the very door of the cathedral on that briglit and sunny morning, I was confronted by another strange me- mento mori, a hideous figure, dressed in a long robe of black, with a black hood over his head, through the ghastly eye-holes of which his dark eyes looked out on the world without. With a hollow voice he asked alms for the burial of the dead for to that sad office the brethren of the Misericordia devote their lives. A striking con- trast to this dismal apparition was a brilliant procession of ecclesiastics in scarlet and purple and gold, proceeding from the church to the Baptistery ; but it was but another illustration of the manner in which Rome employs out- ward pomp and pageantry to impress the imagination of her devotees. With peculiar interest I visited the site of the famous Hunger Tower, immortalized by Dante in one of the most tragic episodes of the Inferno. For the alleged crime of treason Count Ugolino and his sons were condemned to be starved to death in this gruesome prison, 1288. The closing scene is thus vividly described. The ghost of Ugolino addresses the Tuscan poet in the world of gloom. " Both hands for very anguish did I gnaw, They thinking that I tore them with desire Of food, rose sudden from their dungeon straw, And spoke : ' Less grief it were, of us, O sire ; If thou would'st eat These limbs, thou, by our birth, Did'at clothe. Despoil them now if need require ! ' 70 A Canadian in Europe. Not to increase their pangs of grief and dearth, I calmed me. Two days more all mute we stood : Wherefore didst thou not open, pitiless earth ! Now when our fourth sad morning was renewed, Gaddo fell at my feet, outstretched and cold, Crying, ' Wilt thou not, father, give me food?' There did he die ; and as thine eyes behold Me now, so saw I three, fall one by one, On the fifth day and sixth ; where in that hold, I, now grown blind, over each lifeless son, Stretched forth mine arms. Three days I called their names Then Fast achieved what Grief had not yet done." From Pisa to Rome, by way of the sea coast, is a jour- ney of over two hundred miles. The route is a rather monotonous and uninteresting one, leading through the low and marshy Maremme a region almost abandoned by its inhabitants during the summer, on account of the much dreaded malaria.- Those who remain, by their hol- low eyes and cadaverous features, bear witness to the in- salubrity of the climate. Here I first saw the long-horned, mouse-coloured buffalo of the Roman marshes, fhe gaunt and hungry-looking Italian swine looked more like grey- hounds than like their obese and rounded congeners of a Canadian farm -yard. The lithe lizards gliding in the sun, the noisy cicada, sung by Sappho two thousand years ago, and the crimson poppies flaunting in the meadows, all give evidence of our southern latitude. Civita Vec- chia, and Ostia, the ancient port of Rome, with a melan- choly mediaeval fortress, are at length reached, and tra- versing a dreary tract of the Campagna, with the Alban and Sabine Mountains in the background, right and left, From Pisa to Rome. 71 I arrived late at night at the city of Rome. It was rather a disenchantment of my dream of romance to behold a splendid new railway station, and be hailed by a mob of vociferous cabmen, and driven through a gas-lighted street to an elegant hotel with electric bells, and all the other appliances of the latest civilization. But the wondrous spell of the ancient city soon reasserted itself. OLD FORT AT OSTIA. CHAPTER IV. ROME: THE FORUM COLOSSEUM ST. PETER'S CATACOMBS AP- PIAN WAY SANTA SCALA PANTHEON ST. CLEMENT THE VATICAN UP THE TIBER. The Niobe of nations ! there she stands Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe ; An empty urn within her withered hands, Whose holy dust was scattered long ago. . . . The Goth, the Christian, Time, War, Flood, and Fire, Have dealt upon the seven-hilled city's pride ; She saw her glories star by star expire, And up the steep barbarian monarchs ride. Where the car climbed the Capitol ; far and wide Temple and tower went down, nor left a site. . . . Alas ! the lofty city, and alas ! The trebly hundred triumphs ! and the day When Brutus made the dagger's edge surpass The conqueror's sword in bearing fame away ! Alas ! for Tully's voice, and Virgil's lay, And Livy's pictured page ! but these shall be Her resurrection ; all beside decay. Childe Harold. OME at last ! The goal of a thousand hopes " the city of the soul" "the Mecca of the mind"- -"lone mother of dead Empires" the city of the Ciesars and the Popes. Nothing so struck me in my first drive through Rome through the Forum to the Colosseum and the Palatine Hill as the appalling desolation of those once proud abodes of imperial splendour. The scene of some of the most heroic achievements of the Republic and Empire is The Ruins of Ancient Rome. 73 now a half buried chaos of broken arch and column. Here stood the rostrum where Tully fulmined against Cataline> and where, after death, his eloquent tongue was pierced through and through by the bodkin of a revengeful woman. Here the Roman father slew his child to save her from dishonour. Here, "at the base of Pompey's statue," the well-beloved Brutus stabbed the foremost man of all ST. PETER'S AND THE CASTLE OF ST. ANGELO. this world. Here is the Via Sacra, through which passed the triumphal processions to the now ruined temples of the gods. But for a thousand years these ruins have been the quarries and the lime-kilns for the monasteries and churches of the modern city, till little is left save the shadow of their former greatness. More utterly desolate than aught else were the pleasure palaces of the proud emperors of the world the Golden 74 A Canadian in Europe. House of Nero, the palaces of Tiberius, Caligula, the Flavii, monuments of the colossal vice winch called down the wrath of Heaven on the guilty piles. All are now mere mounds of splendid desolation, amid whose broken arches I saw fair English girls sketching the crumbling halls where ruled and revelled the lords of the world. Cypress and ivy, wind and wallflower grown Matted and massed together, hillocks heap'd On what were chambers, arch crush'd, column strewn In fragments, choked- up vaults, and frescoes steep'd In subterranean damps, where the owl peep'd, Deeming it midnight. INTERIOR OF THE COLOSSEUM. Near by rise the cliff-like walls of the Colosseum, stern monument of Rome's Christless creed. Tier above tier rise the circling seats, whence twice eighty thousand cruel eyes gloated upon the dying martyr's pangs, " butchered to make a Roman holiday." Ten thousand Jewish captives were employed in its construction, and at its inauguration five thousand wild beasts were slain in bloody con- conflict with human antagonists. The dens in which the The Colosseum. 75 lions were confined, the gates through which the leopards leaped upon their victims may still be seen ; and before us stretches the broad arena where even Rome's proud darnes, unsexed and slain in gladiatorial conflict, lay tram- pled in the sand. EXTEHIOR OF THE COLOSSEUM. As I clambered over those time-defying walls, and plucked from their crannied niches the bluebell and ane- mone, the soldiers of King Humbert were drilling in the meadow near its base, and the sharp words of command came softened by the distance. Save these, no sound of life was audible in this once humming hive of human passion and activity. The accompanying cuts give inte- rior and exterior views of this world-famous ruin. A ruin yet what ruin ! from its mass Walls, palaces, half -cities have been rear'd ; Yet oft the enormous skeleton we pass, And marvel where the spoil could have appear'd. Hath it indeed been plundered or but clear'd ? Near the walls of the Colosseum rises one of the most interesting monuments of ancient Rome the Arch of The Ghetto, or Jews Quarter of Home. 77 Titus, erected to commemorate the destruction of Jerusa- lem, A.D. 70. On the crumbling frieze is carved a relief of the triumphal procession bearing the spoils of the Temple, with the table of shew-bread,the seven-branched candlestick, and a group of captive Jews. To this day, it is said, the Jews of Rome refuse to pass beneath this monument of their national degradation. A drive through the Ghetto, or Jews' quarter, reveals the squalor and degradation in which these long-suffering and bitterly persecuted people still dwell. Whenever the carriage stopped, they swarmed out of the crowded shops in which they hive, and almost insisted in rigging me out from top to toe, in a suit of clothing most probably second hand. I visited one of the synagogues, on which, instead of their homes, they seem to lavish their wealth. A dark- eyed daughter of Israel did the honours, but kept a keen eye meanwhile for the expected fee. Nothing, perhaps, gives a more vivid conception of the boundless wealth and pomp and luxury of the Roman emperors than the vast public Baths of which the very ruins are stupendous. The most notable of these are the Baths of Caracalla, covering several acres of ground. They contained not only hot, cold, and tepid chambers, large enough to accommodate 1,600 bathers at once, but also vast palestra} or gymnasia, a racecourse, and the like. Solid towers of masonry crowned with trees and matted foliage rise high in air ; vast chambers once cased with marbles or mosaic, with hypocausts for hot and caleducts in the walls for cold air, bear witness to the Sybaritic 78 A Canadian in Europe. luxury of the later days of the Empire. From the sum- mit of one of these massy towers I enjoyed a glorious sunset view of the mouldering ruins which rose above the sea of verdure all around, and of the far-spreading and desolate Campagna. The most notable of the churches of Rome is, of course, St. Peter's. I shall not attempt to describe what defies description. Its vastness awes and almost overwhelms the beholder. Its mighty dome swells in a sky-like vault overhead, and its splendour of detail deepens the impres- sion made by its majestic vistas. The interior effect is incomparably finer than that from without. The vast sweep of the corridors and the elevation of the portico in front of the church quite dwarf the dome which the genius of Angelo hung high in air. But the very har- mony of proportion of the interior prevents that striking impression made by other lesser piles. Enter : the grandeur overwhelms thee not ; And why? it is not lessened, but thy mind, Expanded by the genius of the spot, Has grown colossal. It is only when you observe that the cherubs on the holy water vessels near the entrance are larger than the largest men ; when you walk down the long vista of the nave, over six hundred feet ; when you learn that its area is 26,163 square yards, or more than twice that of St. Paul's at London, that the dome rises four hundred feet above your head, that its supporting pillars are 230 feet in circumference, and that the letters in the frieze are High Mass in St. Peters. 79 over six feet high, that some conception of the real dimensions of this mighty temple enters the mind. It covers half a dozen acres, has been enriched during three hundred years by the donations of two score of popes, who have lavished upon it $60,000,000. The mere cost of its repair is $30,000 a year. No mere enumeration of the wealth of bronze and vari- coloured marbles, mosaics, paintings and sculpture can give an adequate idea of its costly splendour. The view, from the summit of the dome, of the gardens of the Vati- can, of the winding Tiber, the modern city, the ruins of old Rome, the far-extending walls, the wide sweep of the Campagna, and in the purple distance the far Alban and Sabine hills, is one that well repays the fatigue of the ascent. It was my fortune to witness the celebration of the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul in this very centre of Romish ritual and ecclesiastical pageantry. The subter- ranean crypts, containing the shrine of St. Peter, a spot so holy that no woman may enter save once a year, were thrown open and illuminated with hundreds of lamps and decorated with a profusion of flowers. Thousands of per- sons filled the space beneath the dome priests, barefooted friars of orders white, black, and gray ; nuns, military officers, soldiers, civilians, peasants in gala dress, and ladies all standing, for not a single seat is provided for the comfort of worshippers in this grandest temple in Christ- endom. High mass was celebrated at the high altar by a very exalted personage, assisted by a whole college of priests 80 A Canadian in Europe. in embroidered robes of scarlet and purple, and of gold and silver tissue. The acolytes swung the jewelled cen- sers to and fro, the aromatic incense filled the air, officers with swords of state stood on guard, and the service for the day was chanted in the sonorous Latin tongue. Two choirs of well-trained voices, accompanied by two organs and instrumental orchestra, sang the majestic music of the mass. As the grand chorus rose and swelled and filled the sky-like dome, although my judgment could not but condemn the semi-pagan pageantry, I felt the spell of that mighty sorcery, which, through the ages, has beguiled the hearts of men. I missed, however, in the harmony the sweet tones of the female voice, for in the holy precincts of St. Peter's no woman's tongue may join in the worship of her Redeemer. The bronze statue of St. Peter in the nave, originally, it is said, a pagan statue of Jove, was sumptuously robed in vestments of purple and gold, the imperial robes, it is averred, of the Emperor Charlemagne a piece of frip- pery that utterly destroyed any native dignity the statue may have possessed. It was a very notable day in my experience that I drove out to the Abbey of the Three Fountains, the Cata- combs, and the Appian Way. On the route I stopped to visit the Protestant cemetery, where sleep the remains of many pilgrims from a foreign land, for whose return their loved ones wait in vain. Overshadowed by a melancholy cypress, I found the grave of the erring genius Shelley. Churches of St. Paul's and the Three Fountains. 81 On his tombstone are the simple words "cor cordium" only his heart is buried there. His body was burned in the Bay of Spezzia, where it was washed ashore. I plucked a rose from his grave, heaved a sigh to his memory, and turned away. Close by is the grave of the gentler spirit, Keats, with its touching inscription, " Here lies one whose name was writ in water." The Church of St. Paul's without the Walls is a restora- tion of an early Basilica built by Constantino. Accord- ing to tradition, it covers the crypt in which the body of St. Paul was buried. It is now a vast and sumptuous structure, supported on eighty monolithic columns, and paved and walled with costliest marbles in striking contrast to the lowliness of the humble tent-maker whose name it bears. Of still greater interest is the Church of the Three Fountains, on the alleged scene of the Apostle's martyrdom. According to the legend, the martyr's head made three leaps on the ground after his decapitation, and at each spot where it touched the earth a fountain gushed forth. These are now walled with marble, and covered by a stately church. A Trappist monk recounts the story, and offers the faithful water from the fountain, which is supposed to possess great spiritual efficacy. My guide showed me the cells of the monks bare, bleak apartments. The brotherhood long occupied the position as a sort of forlorn hope, so unhealthy was the site on account of the malaria ; but its sanitary condition has been greatly improved by planting the eucalyptus or 82 A Canadian in Europe. Australian gum tree. Some which I saw had attained a large growth and diffused an aromatic odour through the air. A drive across the Campagna soon brings one to the Church of St. Sebastian the only entrance to the Cata- combs which remained open during the middle ages. In an adjacent crypt is shown the very vault in which tra- dition affirms that the bodies of St. Peter and Paul lay for forty years, till stolen away. Unbolting a side door of the church, a serge-clad monk, giving us each a taper, led the way down a long steep stairway to the dark and gloomy corridors of the Catacombs. Through the wind- ing labyrinth we advanced, our dim lights shedding a feeble glimmer as we passed, upon the open graves that yawned weirdly on either side. Deep shadows crouched around, and the unfleshed skeletons lay upon their stony beds to which they had been consigned by loving hands in the early centuries so long ago. Much more interest- ing, however, on account of its greater extent and better preservation, is the adjacent Catacomb of Calixtus, of which I made a more thorough inspection. Here are large and lofty chambers, containing the tomb of St. Cecilia, virgin and martyr, and of several of the perse- cuted bishops of the early Church. The fading frescoes, pious inscriptions, and sacred symbols on the walls all bring vividly before us, as nothing else on earth can do, the faith and courage and moral nobleness of the primitive Church of the Catacombs. The Catacombs. These Christian cemeteries are situated chiefly near the great roads leading from the city, and, for the most part, within a circle of three miles from the walls. From this circumstance they have been compared to the " encamp- ment of a Christian host besieging Pagan Rome, and driving inward its mines and trenches with an assurance of final victory." The openings of the Catacombs are scattered over the Campagna, whose mournful desolation ENTRANCE TO THE CATACOMB OF ST. PRISCILLA. surrounds the city ; often among the mouldering mau- solea that lie, like stranded wrecks, above the rolling sea of verdure of the tomb-abounding plain. On every side are tombs tombs above and tombs below the graves of contending races, the sepulchres of vanished generations : " Plena di sepolture k la Campagna." From a careful survey and estimate it has been computed that the aggre- gate length of all the passages is 587 geographical miles, 84 A Canadian in Europe. equal to the entire extent of Italy from Etna's fires to Alpine snows ; and they contain between three and four million tombs. How marvellous that beneath the remains of a proud pagan civilization exist the early monuments of that power before which the myths of paganism faded away as the spectres of darkness before the rising sun, and the religion and institutions of Rome were entirely changed. Beneath the ruined palaces and temples, the crumbling tombs and dismantled villas, of the august mistress of the world, we find the most interesting relics of early Christianity on the face of the earth. In traversing these tangled labyrinths of graves we are brought face to face with the primitive ages ; we are present at the worship of the infant Church ; we observe its rites ; we study its in- stitutions ; we witness the deep emotions of the first be- lievers as they commit their dead, often their martyred dead, to their last long resting-place ; we decipher the touching record of their sorrow, of the holy hopes by which they are sustained, of " their faith triumphant o'er their fears," and of their assurance of the resurrection of the dead and of the life everlasting. We read in the tes- timony of the Catacombs the confession of faith of the early Christians, sometimes accompanied by the records of their persecution, the symbols of their mart3 T rdom, and even the very instruments of their torture. For in these halls of silence and gloom slumbers the dust of many of the martyrs and confessors, who sealed their testimony Testimony of the Catacombs. 85 with their blood during the sanguinary ages of persecu- tion; of many of the early bishops and pastors of the Church, who shepherded the flock of Christ amid the dangers of those troublous times ; of many who heard the word of life from teachers who lived in or near the apos- tolic age, perhaps from the lips of the Apostles themselves. Indeed, if we would accept ancient tradition, we would even believe that the bodies of St. Peter and St. Paul were laid to rest in those hallowed crypts a true terra sancta, inferior in sacred interest only to that rock-hewn sepulchre consecrated evermore by the body of our Lord. These re- flections lend to the study of the Catacombs an interest of the highest and intensest character. The entrance to the abandoned Catacomb is sometimes a low-browed aperture like a fox's burrow, almost concealed by long and tangled grass, and overshadowed by the melancholy cypress or gray-leaved ilex. Sometimes an ancient arch can be discerned, as at the Catacomb of St. Priscilla, or the remains of the chamber for the celebra- tion of the festivals of the martyrs. In all cases there is a stairway, often long and steep, crumbling with time and worn with the feet of pious generations. The following illustration shows the entrance to the Catacomb of Prae- textatus on the Appian Way, trodden in the primitive ages by the early martyrs and confessors, or perhaps by the armed soldiery of the oppressors, hunting to earth the persecuted flock of Christ. Here, too, in mediaeval times, the martial clang of the armed knights may have awaked 86 A. Canadian in Europe. unwonted echoes among the hollow arches ; or the glid- ing footstep of the sandaled monk scarce disturbed the silence as he passed. In later times pil- grims from every land have visited, with pious reverence or idle curiosity, this early shrine of the Christian faith. The Catacombs are excavated in the volcanic rock which abounds in the neighbourhood of Rome. It is a gran- ulated,grayish rock, of a coarse, loose tex- ture, easily cut with a knife, and bear- ing still the marks of the mattocks with which it was dug. In the firmer volcanic rock of Naples the excavations are larger and loftier than those of Rome ; but the latter although they have less of apparent majesty, have more of funereal mystery. The Catacombs consist essentially of two parts corridors and chambers, or cubicula. The ENTRANCE TO A CATACOMB. In the Catacombs. 87 former are long, narrow and intricate passages, forming a complete underground net-work. They are for the most part straight, and intersect one another at approximate right angles. The main corridors vary from three to five O O * GALLERY WITH TOMBS. feet in width, but the lateral passages are much narrower, often affording room for but one person to pass. They will average about eight feet in height, though in some places as low as five or six. The ceiling is generally &8 A Canadian in Europe. vaulted, though sometimes flat ; and the floor, though for the most part level, has occasionally a slight incline. The walls are generally of the naked tufa, though some- times plastered ; and where they have given way are in places strengthened with masonry. At the corners of these passages there are frequently niches, in which lamps were placed, without which, indeed, they must have been an impenetrable labyrinth. Cardinal Wiseman recounts a touching legend of a young girl who was employed as a guide to the places of worship in the Catacombs, be- cause, on account of her blindness, their sombre avenues were as familiar to her accustomed feet as the streets of Rome to others. Both sides of the corridors are thickly lined with loculi or graves, which have somewhat the appearance of berths in a ship, or of the shelves in a grocer's shop ; but the contents are the bones and ashes of the dead, and for labels we have their epitaphs. The cut on the preced- ing page will illustrate the general character of these gal- leries and loculi. These graves were once all hermetically sealed by slabs of marble, or tiles of terra cotta. The former were gener- ally of one piece which fitted into a groove or mortice cut into the rock at the grave's mouth and were securely cemented to their places, as, indeed, was absolutely neces- sary, from the open character of the galleries in which the graves were placed. Most of these slabs and tiles have disappeared, and many of the graves have long been Cubicula of the Catacombs. 89 rifled of their contents. In others may still be seen the mouldering skeleton of what was once man in his strength, woman in her beauty, or a child in its innocence and glee. If these bones be touched they will generally crumble into a white, flaky powder. The engraving shows one in which this " dry dust of death " still retains the out- line of a human skeleton. Verily, "pulvis et umbra sumus." VALERIA SLEEPS IN PEACE. The other constituents of the Catacombs, besides the corridors mentioned, are the cubicula, as they are called. These are chambers from eight or ten to as much as twenty feet square, generally in pairs on either side of the passage, and for the most part lined with graves. They were probably family vaults, though the}' were sometimes used for worship or for refuge in time of perse- cution. These chambers were lighted by shafts leading up to the open air, through which the brilliant Italian sunshine to-day lights up the pictured figures on the walls as it 90 A Canadian in Europe. must have illumined the fair brow of the Christian maiden, the silvery hair of the venerable pastor, or the calm face of the holy dead, in those long bygone early centuries. But frequently " beneath this depth there is a lower deep" or even three or four tiers of galleries, to which CHAMBER IN THE CATACOMB OF ST. AGNES, WITH SEATS FOB CATECHI8TS AND CATECHUMENS. access is gained by stairways cut in the rock. The awful silence and almost palpable darkness of these deepest dungeons is absolutely appalling. They are fitly described by the epithet applied by Dante to the realms of eternal gloom : loco d'ogni luce muto a spot mute of all light Painted Chambers in the Catacombs. 91 Here death reigns supreme. Not even so much as a lizard or a bat has penetrated these obscure recesses. Nought but skulls and skeletons, dust and ashes, are on every side. The air is impure and deadly, and difficult to breathe. "The cursed dew of the dungeon's damp" dis- tils from the walls, and a sense of oppression, like the SECTION OF DOUBLE CHAMBER, CORRIDOR AND LIGHT AND AIR SHAFT. patriarch's " horror of great darkness," broods over the scene. Many of these chambers are beautifully painted with symbolical or Biblical figures. Indeed the whole story of the Bible from the Fall of Man in the Garden to his redemption by Christ is represented in these sacred paintings. In the cut on page 92 it will be observed that the Good Shepherd occupies the position of prominence 92 A Canadian in Europe. and dignity in the compartment over the arched tomb balanced by Daniel in the lion's den and the three Hebrews in the furnace. On the left hand is a shelf for lamps, magnified in Romish imagination into a Credence Table for supporting the elements of the Eucharist. In the ceiling are praying figures and lambs. PAINTED CHAMBER IN THE CATACOMB OF ST. AGNES. The New Testament cycle, as it is called, depicting the principal events in the life of our Lord, and the miracles which He wrought is very complete, especially in the sculptures of the sarcophagi or stone coffins, of which many examples are preserved in the Lateran Museum. In the Inscriptions of the Catacombs. 93 fine example shown in the cut, which is of the 4th or oth century, we have first Simon the Cyrenian bearing the cross, then Christ crowned not with thorns, but with flowers, as if to symbolize His triumph ; then Christ guarded by a Roman soldier; and in the last compart- ment He witnesses a good confession before Pontius Pilate. SARCOPHHAGUS IN THE LATEUAN MUSEUM. In the Catacombs have also been found large quanti- ties of lamps, vases, gems, rings, seals, toilet articles, and other objects of much interest even children's jointed dolls and toys, placed by loving hands in their tiny graves long, long centuries ago. The inscriptions of the Cata- combs also throw great light on the doctrines and insti- tutions of the Primitive Church, and on the domestic and social relations and conjugal and filial affections of the early Christians. The present writer has elsewhere treated this subject with great fulness of detail and copious pictorial illustrations.* * The Catacombs of Rome and their Testimony relative to Primitive Christi- anity, by the Rev. W. H. WITHROW, M.A. New York : Phillips & Hunt ; London : Hodder & Stoughton, 3rd ed. Cr. 8vo. , 560 pages, 134 engravings. Price 2.50. A Canadian in Great was the contrast between the cold, damp crypts of the Catacombs and the hot glare of the Italian sun- shine as with my companion in travel I emerged from their gloomy depths and rode along the Appian Way. But greater still was the contrast between the lowly tombs of the early Christians and the massy monuments of pagan pride that lined that street of tombs, now mere crumbling mounds of ruins, majestic even in decay. Most striking of all is the stately mausoleum of Csecilia Me- tella, wife of the triumvir Crassus. There is a stern round tower of other days, Firm as a fortress with its fence of stone, Such as an army's baffled strength delays, Standing with half its battlements alone, And with two thousand years of ivy grown, The garland of eternity, where wave The green leaves over all by time o'erthrown : What was this tower of strength ? within its cave, What treasure lay so locked, so hid ? A woman's grave. I entered and explored several of these proud patrician tombs, but found naught but crumbling arch and column and shattered marble effigies of their former tenants. But only the wealthy could be entombed in those stately mausolea, or be wrapped in those " marble cerements." For the mass of the population columbaria were pro- vided, in whose narrow niches, like the compartments of a dove-cote the terra cotta urns containing their ashes were placed, sometimes to the numberof six thousand in a single columbarium. They also contained sometimes the urns of the great. Columbaria. I visited several of these; a description of one will suffice. Steep steps lead down into a square vault, sup- ported by a central pier which, like the walls, contains a number of niches. Each niche contains two or more cinerary urns, with covers. Removing several of these I found within the ashes and charred bones of the depen- dants of great Roman houses, whose bodies had undergone TOMBS ON THE APPIAN WAY. cremation. The brief epitaphs of the deceased were often inscribed above the 'niche. These structures take their names from their resemblance to a dove-cote colum- barium. A striking contrast to the pomp of the tombs on the Appian Way are these columbaria in which for the most part the ashes of the slaves are deposited. 96 A Canadian in Europe. Over the lava pavement of this Queen of Roads, as the Romans proudly called it,* along which I drove for miles, once thundered the legions that conquered the world ; and by this very way St. Paul and his companions entered the great Imperial City. Now, the gardens and villas which studded the Campagna are a desolation, and only ruins rise, like stranded wrecks, above the tomb-abounding plain. The most conspicuous and beneficent monuments of the power of ancient Rome are the vast aqueducts which bestride, with their long series of arches the undu- lating Campagna. Most of these are now broken and crumbling ruins, but some of them, restored in modern times, still supply the city with streams of the cool and limpid water from the far-off Alban hills. Here I may remark that no city I have seen has such an abun- dant supply of pure water as Rome. It leaps and flashes in the great fountains of the public squares, and ripples and gurgles in its mossy channels in almost every court- yard and quadrangle. In several of these I observed ancient sarcophagi, which once perhaps held the body of a prince, converted into a horse-trough. One of the most ancient structures of Rome is the Mammertine Prison. It consists of two chambers, one be- low the other. The lower was originally accessible only through a hole in the ceiling. In this dismal dungeon Jugurtha, the British king Vercingetorix, and other con- quered enemies of Rome perished. Here also tradition * " Rcffina Viarum." Stat Syl, The Scala Santa. 97 affirms St. Peter was imprisoned, in confirmation whereof is shown the deep depression in the solid stone said to have been made by the head of the Apostle when his jailor knocked it against the wall, and the fountain averred to have sprung up miraculously that he might baptize the remorseful man. If you doubt the fact, the custode points in triumph to these occular evidences still extant. It being the anniversary of the Saint on which I visited this ancient prison, a constant stream of devo- tees passed through, to whom a priest in much-soiled vestments was giving drafts of water from the sacred fountain. Of still greater sanctity are the so-called Scala Santa or Holy Stairs. These consist of twenty-eight marble steps, said to have been those of Pilate's house, which were ascended by our Lord. They were brought from Jerusalem, so runs the legend, by the Empress Helena, A.D. 326. No one may ascend them except on his knees. It was while Luther was painfully toiling up their long incline, just like a bare-footed monk whom I saw repeat- ing, with many prayers, the same act, devoutly kissing each step, that there flashed through his mind the eman- cipating message, " The just shall live by faith." " Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus" says a marble legend, "There is on earth no holier spot than this." I came upon another relic of Luther in the Augustinian monas- tery in which he resided during his sojourn in Rome. Here I witnessed a Roman funeral, rendered as ghastly as G 98 A Canadian in Europe. possible by the sable velvet pall embroidered with skulls and cross-bones and skeletons. A procession of bare- footed friars bore the body on a bier to the church, where, THE PANTHEON, ROME. surrounded by burning tapers, it kept its solemn state while darkness filled the shadowy vault. One of the most impressive churches of Rome is that still best known by its Pagan name of " The Pantheon." It is the only building of ancient Rome which still retains its i oof and walls intact. It is almost as perfect to-day as The Pantheon. 99 when it was erected over nineteen hundred years ago. Its external appearance is well shown in the cut. The odious little campaniles which destroy the majestic effect of the fa$ade are the addition of Bernini, 1640, after whom they are named " ass's ears." As one enters the door, and the great dome the largest in the world spreads its vault above his head, he feels the sublimity of the grand old pile. The effect is still further enhanced by the broad opening, twenty-eight feet across, in the centre of the vault, through which pours down a flood of bright Italian sun-light on the shrines and altars and worship- pers beneath. Here where the incense arose of old at the altars of the Pagan gods it still ascends at the shrines of the papal saints, amid surroundings of gorgeous pageantry surpassing even that of the priests and augurs of ancient Rome. A small plain slab in the wall marks the tomb of Raphael, and a more sumptuous monument that of King Victor Emanuel. Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods, From Jove to Jesus spared and blessed by time, Looking tranquility, while falls or nods Arch, empire, each thing round thee, and man plods His way through thorns to ashes- glorious dome ! Shalt thou not last ? Time's scythe and tyrant's rode Shiver upon thee sanctuary and home Of art and piety Pantheon ! pride of Rome. One other church in Rome I must mention on account of the unique and extraordinary character of its burial 100 A Canadian in Europe. crypts. This is the Church of the Capuchins. Its vaults are filled with 'sacred soil, from Jerusalem, in which the monks were buried. After several years' interment the skeletons were exhumed and arranged in architectural devices columns, niches, and arches a figure of Justice with her scales, a clock-face, and the like, all in human bones. In several of the niches stood the unfleshed skele- tons, wearing the coarse serge gown and hood the living monk had worn, with his name, Brother Bartholomeo, or Brother Jiacomo, written on his skull a ghastly mockery of life. In all, the remains of (5,000 monks are contained in these vaults. The Government has forbidden the con- tinuance of this revolting custom. At the Church of St. Clement the oldest in Rome I met with the only instance I encountered in Italy of dis- courtesy from an ecclesiastic ; they are, generally, exceed- ingly polite. The monk in charge, I am sorry to say, was so much under the influence of wine that he was quite incapable of carrying the taper and exhibiting the relics a task which he had to delegate to a boy. Beneath the upper church have recently been discovered, and in part excavated, two earlier churches one reaching back to the third century. The frescoes and mosaics on the walls are many of them quite like those of the Catacombs, a proof of their early date. The various collections of sarco- phagi, inscriptions, lamps, vases, and other objects from those repositories of the early Christian dead in the various museums were studied with profound interest. The Mausoleum of Augustus. 101 I was fortunate in obtaining a few specimens of these antiquities, both Christian and pagan, as souvenirs of ancient Rome. I went one afternoon with a friend to see the Mauso- leum of Augustus, where the great Emperor with many of his successors were buried. We found a huge circular building open to the sky, in whose substructions the mortuary tombs of the ancient lords of the world may still be seen ; and here in later days the body of Rienzi, " the last of the Tribunes" was buried. But what a sar- castic comment on human greatness ! we found the vast arena used as an open air summer theatre, and a mock emperor, with snowy toga and gilded wreath was enact- ing some story of the heroic days of Rome. Sometimes, I was informed, the ancient mausoleum is used as a circus, and harlequin plays his pranks upon an emperor's tomb. Few things in Rome bring up more vividly the recol- lections of the storied past than the walk along the banks of the Tiber, the Flavus Tiberis of our school -boy days. Through the city it steals its way between lordly palaces or beneath the crowded and towering piles of Trastivere and the Ghetto its tawny current turbid with the sand of the Campagna which it sweeps down to the sea. Of the many bridges by which it is bestrode, the most interesting is that of St. Angelo, the ^lian Bridge of ancient Rome. (See initial cut of this chapter, page 73.) On 102 A Canadian in Europe. either side are majestic figures of angels, so that, as Clement IX. expressed it, " an avenue of the heavenly host should welcome the pilgrim to the shrine of the great Apostle." Here as St. Gregory, during a fatal pestilence, passed over at the head of a penitential procession, chanting solemn litanies, he saw, or feigned that he saw, the avenging angel alight on the mausoleum of Hadrian and sheath his sword in token that the plague was stayed. And there the majestic figure of St. Michael stands in bronze to-day, as if the tutelary guardian of Rome. On this very bridge, too, took place the fierce hand to hand conflict during the sack of Rome by the ferocious mercenaries of the Con- stable of Bourbon, while the Tiber beneath ran red with blood The island of the Tiber with its picturesque twin bridges is rich in ancient memories. But of special interest to me was the site of the Milvian Bridge, where in his conflict with Maxentius for the empire of the world, Constantine saw, or thought he saw, the sign of the cross in the midday heavens, and adopted the sign of salvation as his standard of battle. Of this scene there is a strik- ing picture in the Vatican. Here, too, the seven-branched candlestick from the temple at Jerusalem was thrown into the Tiber, where it probably still remains, and may yet be recovered. Although admonished that I should remain indoors in the evening on account of the malaria, I could not resist the temptation to visit this memory- The Pincian Hill and the Villa Borghese. 103 haunted spot, and the famed Pincian Hill and the Villa Borghese at " twilight's enchanted hour." No public resorts furnish so good an opportunity for the study of Roman life and character as the gardens of the Pincian Hill and those of the Villa Borghese. The former is on the site of the famous gardens of Lucullus, where the Empress Messalina afterwards celebrated her orgies. It is now the fashionable evening drive of Rome, where the gay and pleasure-loving aristocracy pay and receive visits in their open carriages. The long arcades are adorned with busts and statues ; a curious clypsydra or water-clock marks the hours, and a moving multitude of promenaders give life and variety to the scene. The sunset view from the terrace is magnificent St. Peter's dome, the round castle of St. Angelo, and many a stately campanile are defined like a silhouette against the glow- ing western sky. A long range of the engirdling wall of the city, rising in places sixty or seventy feet, is also brought into view. (See frontispiece.) From one point of view in the bosky glades of the garden the dome of St. Peter's may be seen as if surrounded by a leafy frame. DOME OF ST. PETER S. 104 A Canadian in Europe. The gardens of the Villa Borghese are without the walls. They have a strangely antique appearance. In the grounds is a ruined temple, its pillared portico half broken down and the statue of an un worshipped goddess standing on her deserted shrine. Marble seats, fountains, and statues chipped, moss-grown, and time-stained are seen beneath FALLS OF TIVOLI. the vistas of venerable trees. The stately villa itself, the property of one of the noblest families of Rome, contains a superb art gallery and museum. I saw several times the King and Queen of Italy driving through the gardens A " Model Family." 105 and streets without escort, and graciously returning the loyal greetings that they received from all ranks of the people. I was somewhat surprised at the absence of the pictur- esque national costume. I saw, however, some very good examples in a family of artists' models, who took the evening air at an antique fountain near my hotel. The family consisted of a venerable-looking old peasant woman, her son, and two daughters. I found the young man, who spoke French very well, quite intelligent and com- municative. They came, he said, from Tivoli, and made their living by sitting for their portraits in the picturesque ORVIKTO. 106 A Canadian in Europe. costume of the country. The daughters had an air of modest refinement one would hardly expect in the peas- ant class. Their portraits would make admirable Madon- nas of the type which so abounds in Italian religious art. The subject of fine art in Rome is too large to treat, however cursorily, in these brief notes. As I lingered for hours in the corridors of the Vatican and Museum of the Capitol, entranced with the treasures rescued from the dSbris of the Old Roman World, and, wondered, in mute amazement, how great was the glory of its mighty prime, I felt that ancient sculpture had never been equalled by the work of the modern chisel. The achievements of Canova, Thorwaldsen, Gibson, and other masters, how- ever, almost rival in my humble judgment the finest works of antiquity. With painting it is otherwise. I cannot feel the enthusiasm that many express concern- ing the great Italian masters. Even the celebrated " Last Judgment" of Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel, failed to impress me as other than a grand tour de force, whose chief object seemed to be the display of the master's skill in the foreshortened representation of the human figure in every possible attitude of contortion. These dimly-lighted pictures, blackened with the smoke of cen- turies are, however, an unfavourable exhibition of his powers. I liked much better the works of Raphael in the Stanze and Loggie, which bear his name ; although my untutored taste cannot subscribe to the dictum which pronounces them " unquestionably the noblest works of The Vatican and its " Prisoner." 107 modern art in existence." I have seen many pictures that impressed me more. The Vatican itself, in which these much-prized art treasures are housed, is the most extensive and magnifi- cent palace in the world. It is said to contain eleven thousand halls, chapels, saloons, and private apartments, besides extensive courts and gardens. Here the Papal power is supreme. The successor of the humble fisher- man of Galilee is attended by a guard of armed soldiers, accoutred in a singularly bizarre-looking uniform of yel- low and red, like one of earth's proudest monarchs. Yet 108 A Canadian in Europe. we read of " the prisoner of the Vatican," and Peter's pence are collected from the poor throughout Catholic Christendom for the maintenance of this unapostolic state. Conditions of time and space forbid further account of the innumerable objects of antiquarian interest in the City of the Seven Hills, " that was eternal named." New Rome, under the vigorous administration of its constitu- tional government, is fast asserting its place and influence as the political centre of United Italy. But its chief and imperishable interest to the pilgrims from many lands who visit its storied scenes, consists of the memories of its mighty past, and while time endures these memories shall never lose their power. One of the most charming excursions from Rome is that to the ancient town of Tivoli, with its furze-clad slopes, its sparkling waterfalls and its vast Villa of Ha- drian, where the lord of the world revelled in a pleasure- place which, with its gardens, grounds, temples, theatres and baths filled a circuit of ten miles. (See page 104.) More lovely than even the falls of Tivoli are those of Terni shown in our engraving. The impetuous Velius hurls its water in three successive leaps down a rugged ravine, clad with richest verdure. The contrast between the snowy foam and the vivid foliage ever glistening in the spray is intense, and poets' song and painters' skill alike fail to give an adequate conception of this most beautiful of Italian waterfalls. The Banks of the Tiber. 109 Following up the banks of the Tiber, we reach the ancient town of Orte, commanding from its castle height a magnificent view of the far-winding stream. A peculiarity of this region is the number of small thick-walled fortress towns, each perchedupon the summit of an island of tufa rising above the sea of verdure of the surrounding country. Along the steep road leading to these eagle- like eyries toil beneath the burning sun the peasant men and women and their patient don- keys, looking exceed- ingly picturesque and uncomfortable. A good example of these relics of the old feudal times is the Civita Bagnorea shown on page 111. FALLS OF TERNI. 110 A Canadian in Europe. Orvietois anothersimi- lar hill-fortress, a strong- hold of the Guelphs,and graced with a cathedral of peculiar sumptuous- ness and splendour. (See page 105.) On the steeply slop- ing banks of the Tiber is Todi, so steep that through many of its streets carriages may not pass. Here was I born the author of the I immortal hymn Stabat Mater Dolorosa, wedded | to immortal music by | the genius of Rossini. Not far from Todi is the littlet own of Assisi, with the famous con- vent and church of St. Francis. The story of the life and labours of the "Seraphic Doctor" who is reported to have enjoyed in life the bea- tific vision of the Lord THE TIBER FROM ORTE. 112 A Canadian in Europe. he served with such entire devotion and to have retained in his body the marks of His passion lend an intenser in- TEMPLE OF THE CLITUMNU8. terest to the stately architecture and sumptuous adorning of the church and convent erected over his bones. (See page 114.) The Source of the Tiber. 113 Near Assisi on the banks of the crystal Clitumnus is the beautiful temple of the deity of the stream, so sweetly besung by Byron's classic muse, the picturesque surround- ings and historic associations of which make it a favourite subject for the study of both artist and scholar. THE SOURCE OF THE TIBER. Following still further the course of the storied Tiber, the traveller reaches its birthplace among the rugged Appenines. Beneath the shadow of a vast beech forest, A Canadian in Europe. the crystal stream, so often dyed with blood of contend- ing races, gambols on its way through a daisy-dappled sod of richest green, laughing and leaping from ledge to ledge like an innocent child at play. CONVENT AND CHOKCH OF ST. FRANCIS, ASSI8I. CHAPTER V. NAPLES PUTEOLI BALE CAPRI VESUVIUS POMPEII. " Vedi Napoli e poi mori." " See Naples and then die." Neapolitan Proverb. 'ROM Rome to Naples is a railway ride of a hundred and sixty miles. The road for a considerable part of the way leads along the slopes of the Appe- nines, their splintered and pinnacled crags rising in ver- dureless desolation in the fierce blaze of an almost tropi- cal sun. I was surprised at the sparseness of the foliage; that of the olive tree, which chiefly abounds, being of a thin and meagre quality, and of a dull grey colour. I saw nothing to compare with the rich fresh foliage of our Canadian forests, except where natural or artificial irri- gation obtains. There, indeed, the foliage and flowers of the fig, orange, and lemon groves, and of the oleander and magnolia, were of richest luxuriance and exquisite fra- grance. The grape-vines are dwarfed-looking growths, more like our garden peas than what I expected a vine- yard to be like. Where they are festooned from tree to tree in the orchards, they are, however, of much finer growth. The blood-red poppies in the fields look like cups of wine borne by Maenads in a Bacchic dance. Among the places of interest passed en route are Aquino, the birth-place of the satirist Juvenal, and of the 116 A Canadian in Europe. " Angelic Doctor/' Thomas Aquinas ; the celebrated castle- like monastery of Monte Casino, founded by St. Benedict, A. D. 529, with one of the" most precious libraries in the world, crowning a lofty height ; and Capua, once the second city in Italy, famed in Roman story. It had, in ancient times, 300,000 inhabitants, but has now shrunk to a miserable town. In its vast amphitheatre, next in size to the Colosseum, broke out the dangerous " Gladia- tors' War," under Spartacus, whose stirring speech is dear to every school-boy's heart. The modern villages we pass look poor and mean ; and the peasantry anything but the picturesque objects we see in artists' sketches. The women were toiling in the fields and quarries, and at- tending the railway crossings, and gave slight indications of the classic beauty for which this region was once famous. At the railway stations nut-brown girls, with hair and eyes black as night, cried, with musical voices, their aqua gelata, or iced water, and fruits so grateful to the hot and thirsty traveller. It was with keen interest that I first caught sight of the distant cone of Mount Vesuvius, with its lofty column of smoke and steam, a pillar of cloud by day, of fire by night. My first impressions of Naples were anything but favourable. After escaping from the hands of importu- nate " commissionaires," who attempted to force their services upon me in spite of my protests, I was driven through miles of narrow streets, flanked by lofty and monotonous houses, and crowded with pedestrians, over- Naples. 117 laden donkeys, clamorous venders of fruit, vegetables, ice- water, etc., and tinkers, cobblers, and artizans of every class, working out of doors, the population is about half a million. The magnificent prospect from the balcony of my hotel, however, far up the slope of the amphitheatre on which the city lies, more than fulfilled my highest anticipations. There, in the soft sunset light, glanced and shimmered the blue waters of the lovely bay its shore sweeping like a huge sickle in majestic curve to the base of far off Vesuvius, the white walled houses gleam- ing fair, in a continuous street, beyond the rippling sea. Naples received its name Neapolis, " the new city" nearly three thousand years ago what a strange misno- mer it seems ! to distinguish it from Palaeopolis, " the old city," founded by Greek colonists at a still earlier date Yet here, on the site of one of the oldest civilizations in the world, from my hotel windows I saw a man watering the streets by means of two barrels with the bungs out, on a rude cart drawn by an ox and a horse. The city itself contains little of special interest. Its history, like its volcanic soil, has been disturbed by many social convulsions, which have left little of antiquarian value or architectural beauty to reward the attention. Its five forts are vast, some of them strikingly picturesque structures. It has two curious mediaeval gates, and nu- merous churches, most of them in a debased Renaissance style of architecture. The Church of St. Januarius is the largest and most sumptuous. Here takes place, thrice a 118 A Canadian in Europe. year, the alleged miracle of liquefaction of the martyr's blood. Nowhere did I witness such abject Mariolatry as here. I observed one tawdry image of the Virgin, decked out in a figured silk dress, a silver crown on her cluster- ing curls, rings on her fingers, and a bouquet in her hand, like a fine lady dressed for a ball. One woman I saw raise the robe of the Virgin to her lips and reverently kiss it; another, I saw lying prostrate and motionless on the stone floor before the altar ; and everywhere I beheld such abject superstition as I. never witnessed before. I had been told that, in Naples, I should see the lazaroni lying around like lizards in the sun, basking in luxurious idleness. But I did not. On the contrary, everybody seemed as busy as could be. Indeed, so poor is the com- munity that they have to work or starve. The squalor of the lanes and alleys, in which the poor swarm like bees, is painful to witness. One street is called the Street of Seven Sorrows an allusion to the woes of the Virgin. I thought it significant of the sevenfold sorrows, the poverty, ignorance and superstition and other miseries, of her de- votees. Very few of the people can read : in a public arcade, I saw several writers at their desks, to one of whom a woman was dictating a letter. They seem also very impulsive and quick-tempered, and possess very little self-control. They beat their donkeys unmercifully ; they gesticulate violently, and seem disposed to quarrel about merest trifles. I noticed one handsome black-eyed woman make a rush at her little girl who had displeased Neapolitan Donkeys. 119 her in something, and with a panther-like fierceness raise her arm to her teeth and bite it. I thought it the most vicious-looking thing I ever saw. I shall have a higher respect for the whole race of donkeys as long as I live, on account of the patient toil of the donkeys of Naples. Such loads as they carry ! such huge panniers of fruits, vegetables, snow from the distant mountains just as described by Horace eighteen hundred years ago, and wine and water jars, and every conceivable burden ! Often you can hardly see the don- key for the load he bears. But a great offset to their virtues is the frightful noise of their nocturnal braying. Of all the lugubrious sounds that ever murdered sleep and made night hideous, commend me to the melancholy long- drawn braying of the Neapolitan donkey. The harness of the horses is the most extraordinary thing of the sort I ever saw. On the animal's back is a kind of saddle, on which towers, a foot or more in height, a brass-covered, brightly burnished structure, terminating in a little vane or a cluster of bells which swing and ring at every step. The drivers, true to the genius of their craft the world over, are an extortionate set of rascals ; but after you once drive a bargain with them they will serve you faithfully at least such was my experience. If Naples itself has few attractions, its immediate sur- roundings present many objects of surpassing interest One of the most delightful excursions in the neighboui hood is that to Pozzuoli the Puteoli where St. Paul 120 A Canadian in Europe. " tarried seven days" on his way to Rome and Baja, the ancient Bai?e of Horace's epistle. The road leads first through the Grotta di Posilipo a tunnel through a sand- stone rock nearly half a mile long, and in places a hundred feet high. It dates from the time of Augustus and is ascribed by the peasants to the arts of the great magician, Virgil. Emerging from the gaslit grotto into the glorious Italian sunlight, one enters a region once crowded with stately Roman palaces and villas, long since reduced to ruins by the tremendous volcanic convulsions of which it has been the theatre. But Nature clothes with perennial beauty this lovely strand ; and the golden sunshine falls, and the sapphire sea expands, and the summer foliage mantles every peak and cape and crag. I visited the celebrated Grotta del Cane, in which carbonic acid gas accumulates so as instantly to extinguish a lighted torch thrust into it. It is said that a pistol cannot be fired be- neath its surface, as the powder will not ignite. I waded in some distance and stooped for a moment beneath the surface of the gas, but experienced a strange suffocating sensation. The guide thrust into the gas one of the numerous dogs who earns his living by dying daily; but the poor animal looked up so wistfully that I ordered his release, and he bounded eagerly away. The Solfatara an extinct crater and sulphurous exhalations from the rocks, are evidences of volcanic action. In places the soil was so hot that I could not hold my hand near it. Pozzuoli, once the most important commercial city in The Temple of Serapis. 121 Italy, is now a mere shadow of its former greatness. In St. Paul's day it was the chief depot for the corn ships and trade in spices, silks, ivory, and oriental luxuries from Egypt and the remoter East. Here he " found brethren," probably Jewish converts from Alexandria or Jerusalem. Here was early established a Christian church, and in the third century, Januarius, its bishop, was, by the orders of Diocletian, exposed to wild beasts in its vast amphitheatre. This is one of the most perfect in Italy. The dens of the lions and leopards, the cells of the gladiators, and the subterranean passages and conduits can be distinctly seen. Even more interesting is the ruined temple of Serapis. The oscillations of level are shown by the water- marks and borings of marine worms on the surface of the ancient columns of the temple, which are shown in the accompanying engraving. The importunities of the beg- gars and would-be guides of Pozzuoli would be amusing if not so annoying. One picturesque-looking rascal ran beside the carriage, on a hot day, for nearly a mile. I could only get rid of him by buying the torch he was de- termined to sell. This whole region is rife with memories of Virgil and his immortal poem. I drove around the gloomy Lake Avernus, the scene, according to the poet, of the descent of ^Eneas into the netherworld. It lay like " the dark tarn of Auber, in the mystic, mid-region of Weir." Over its haunted surface, local tradition asserts, no bird will fly. With my travelling companion, who was a classical 122 A Canadian in Europe. enthusiast, I visited the so-called Sibyl's Grotto, where ^Eneas consulted that mythic personage. Entering an opening in the hillside, we penetrated by torchlight a long, dark, winding passage. Coming to a steep incline iny OF BB&API8. guide, a grisly old fellow, with a decidedly bandit look, stooped down and said, " Montez." I mounted on his back accordingly, and he plunged into a stream of inky black- The Bay of Baja. 123 ness the River Styx he called it and waded into a little cell, which he described as the Sibyl's Chamber. By the red glare of the torch light our grisly guide, who looked grim enough for Cerberus himself, pointed out the Sibyl's bed, her bath, her chair, and the very hole in the wall through which she uttered her oracles ! Who could doubt the story with such an evidence before him ? In this uncanny place our guides demanded their fee, but we insisted on their carrying us back to daylight before pay ing them. On our way to the ruins of ancient Cumse we passed through another long and lofty tunnel, constructed by Agrippa, and lighted at infrequent intervals by large shafts from above. Oar stock of matches gave out, so we could not light our torch. Our guides had therefore to grope their way through the darkness from one light hole to another which only illumined a very limited area. The bright Italian sunshine, as we emerged from that sepul- chral gloom, was especially grateful. Cumae was founded B.C. 1050, and was the place where Greek civilization first found entrance to Italy. We were shown its foliage- mantled amphitheatre and lofty Acropolis. Here dwelt the Cum^an Sibyl, hence came the mysterious Sibyline books, and from hence Greek letters and the arts were dffused throughout Etruscan Italy. " Nothing in the world," says Horace, " can be compar- ed with the lovely bay of BaiaB." Even in its ruinous es- tate this once gay Roman pleasure scene deserves all the 124 A Canadian in Europe. praise which can be given it. The whole region abounds with the ruins of temples, and of the palaces and villas of the ancient masters of the world. Here Julius Csesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Nero, Lucullus, and many a wealthy Roman had their pleasure-palaces and gardens. In one of these Nero planned, and in the Lucrine Lake near by BAY OF BAJA. was attempted, the murder of his mother, Agrippina. A guide who had picked up a little English, strangely twist- ed into Italian idioms, conducted us through the temples of Diana, Venus and Mercury ; the latter, a large, dome- shaped structure with a fine echo. The most remarkable ruin is the Piscina Mirabilis, a vaulted cistern with lofty The Piscina Mirabilis. 125 arches supported by forty-eight huge columns. It is a vast reservoir, fed by the Julian Aqueduct from far-distant springs, and intended for watering the Roman fleet in the harbour of Misenum far below. Of this fleet the elder Pliny, who perished in the irruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79, was commander. I chipped off some of the lime de- CAPE MISENUM. posit from the walls, which showed that it had been in use for a long period. The flat-roofed white stone houses have a singular oriental look. I climbed over stone thresh- ing floors, on elevated places, and saw the cattle treading out the corn. It was then winnowed by tossing it into the air, that the wind might blow the chaff away. Stone oil and wine presses accented the Eastern aspect of the 126 A Canadian in Europe. scene. The interiors of the houses were crowded and com- fortless, and uncleanly. The food was coarse, and cooked in earthenware vessels at a rude fire-place. The holiday costume of the peasants red upper garment and gold embroidery betrayed their Greek origin. They offered for our refreshment black bread and cheese, fruit and wine. The view from the house-top was superb the rocky Cape Misenum, the lovely Bay of Baj a, in the offing the volcanic islands of the Procida and Ischia, and at our feet a gloomy lake in an old crater called Mare Morto, the Sea of Death. The ride back to Naples in the golden afternoon light was glorious. The blue waves broke in snowy spray upon the silver strand ; bronzed fishermen, with eager gestures and much noise, were hauling their nets, rich with finny spoil, ashore ; and muleteers were urging their slow con- voys along the dusty highway. The road climbs the broad shoulder of a hill, gaining ever wider views, till all at once the glorious Bay of Naples, with its painted villas, its gardens of richest foliage, its rocky cliffs and sheltered coves, and the magical sunset sheen on its blue waves, bursts upon the sight. It is a memory of delight that no words can reproduce. I stopped the carriage over and over again to gaze and gaze upon the charming scene, and could sca-rcely tear myself away. One feels with Rogers : " This region, surely, was not of the earth. Was it not dropped from Heaven ? Not a grove, Sorrento and Capri. 127 Citron or pine or cedar, not a grot Sea-worn and mantled with the gadding vine, But breathes enchantment. Not a cliff, but flings On the clear wave some image of delight." Among the evil memories of this lovely coast is that of the Villa of Vedius Pollio, with the fish ponds where he used to feed his lampreys with the flesh of his slaves. The Grotto of Sejanus, Tomb of Virgil, and, more remote, the Villa of Cicero, are also places of interest. " Another delightful excursion is that to Sorrento and the island of Capri. As one embarks on the steamer, half- naked boys disporting in the water cry out, " Monnaie, signor, monnaie." When coins are thrown them, they dive like dolphins and bring them up in their teeth. Sor- rento, the birth-place of Tasso, sits like a queen on a throne of rock, embowered amid groves of orange, olive, mulberry, pomegranates, figs, and aloes a very garden of delight. A few miles out in the gulf lies the beautiful island of Capri. If I had not seen it, I could not have believed it possible that water could be so intensely blue as that of this lovely bay. In the sunshine it was a light, and in a shadow a deep, ultra marine ; but as clear as crystal. I could see the star fish on the bottom in from five to ten fathoms of water, and the dolphins, disporting in the waves, were visible at a much greater distance. These favourites of Apollo can outstrip the swiftest steamer, so rapidly do they swim. To them the principle shrine of Apollo owed its name, also the French Province of Dauphind, which gave the title to the heir to the 128 A Canadian in Europe. throne of France* They could not be eaten during Lent without sin, because they are not really fish but mammals. Capri consists of two craggy peaks, so precipitous that at only two points can a landing be effected. Covered with foliage, it gleams like an emerald set in sapphire. Here the Emperor Tiberius, when sated and sickened with ruling the world, retired to indulge in the most infamous vices, and truculent cruelty. The ruins of his villa still crown the summit of the island, a part of it is now used as a cow-byre. The gem of the island, however, is the celebrated Blue Grotto. It is entered from the sea by a low arch scarce three feet high. The visitor must lie down in the bottom of the boat. Within, it expands to a large vaulted chamber. The effect of the blue refraction of the light is dazzling, and the body of the boatman who swims about in the water gleams like silver. I climbed the cliff by a steep and rugged path, dined at an inn where the orange blossoms filled the air with fragrance, and descending on the other side to a delightfully pictur- esque harbour, sailed round the island in a boat manned by three stout-armed fishermen. We penetrated the White Grotto, where the waves looked like curdled milk, the Green Grotto, and the Stalactite Grotto; and sailed beneath a magnificent natural arch, and under volcanic cliffs ris- ing precipitously a thousand feet in air. The grandest excursion from Naples, however, is that to Mount Vesuvius. In order to avoid the heat, I left Ascent of Mount Vesuvius. 129 Naples with a friend, by carriage, shortly after midnight, and rode through the silent streets of the beautiful city the tall white houses gleaming like marble in the glorious moonlight. At many of the corners lamps were burning before a shrine of the Virgin. Like the red eye of Cyclops burned the dull fire of the mountain. But all day long the mysterious column of white smoke ascends " solemn and slow as erst from Ararat " the smoke of the patriarch's sacrifice. After an hour's drive we reached Resina, a village at the foot of the mountain. Our veturino knocked loudly at a door, and we were almost instantly surrounded by a swarm of guides, all anxious to prey upon their victims. I suppose they sleep in their clothes and turn out at a moment's notice. Making a bargain with the chief we were soon mounted, with the aid of much officious assist- ance, on good stout horses. Through the stone-paved streets of the little town we clattered, and soon began to climb the mountain, between luxuriant vineyards and fig and almond orchards growing upon the fertile volcanic soil. Our train was soon increased by four hangers-on, besides the guide. They well deserved this name, in its most literal sense, for they would catch hold of our horses' tails, and so for part of the way we helped them instead of their helping us. At length the road became so steep that horses could no longer climb, and we were forced to dismount. Now the use of the guides whom our horses had dragged I 130 A Canadian in Europe. up became apparent. It was their turn to drag us up. One stout fellow tied a leather strap to a stick and gave me the stick, which I held with both hands while he took the other end of the strap over his shoulder, and another guide pushed me from behind. Between the two, by scrambling in zig-zags up the mountain's side the most fatiguing climb I ever had in my life, I at last reached the top and stood on the edge of the crater. The weird grandeur of the sight well repaid the toil of the ascent. CRATER OF MOUNT VESUVIUS. A crumbling ledge of rock ran round the summit, sloping suddenly down to a large irregular depression which was covered, and floored as it were, with black lava, which had cooled and hardened, retaining the form in which it had boiled up and flowed forth. This floor was studded with a number of smaller cones from which gas and steam were escaping with a violent hissing noise. Among them was one very much larger than the others the active Interior of the Crater, 131 crater from which issued the most frightful bello wings. About every two minutes came a violent explosion, and a large quantity of stones and scoria were thrown high in the air, and fell back into the fiery throat of this tre- mendous furnace. The general appearance of the scene is shown in the accompanying small engraving. " Do you wish to go down into the crater ? " asked our guides. " Of course we do, that is what we came for," was the answer. Then they haggled for an extra three francs apiece. At length we scrambled down the steep and crumbling wall amid almost suffocating sulphurous fumes, and clambered over the tortured and uneven lava floor. Through numerous cracks and crevices steam and gas were escaping ; the rocks were stained yellow, red, and purple with the sulphur incrustations, and I could feel the heat through the thick soles of my boots. In many of the crevices the rock was seen to be red hot, and when I thrust in my staff it suddenly caught fire. Soon one of the guides gave a loud cry, and called us to see the mol- ten lava which we found boiling up through the black floor, and flowing along in a thick, viscid stream, like tar, only of a fiery colour. The heat was great, but I could approach so near as to take some of it on the end of my staff, and press into it some copper coins which I had in my pocket, having first been shown how by the guides. When the lava cooled these were firmly imbedded, and I brought them away as souvenirs of the occasion. 132 A Canadian in Europe. . My guide climbed a small cone and broke off the top with his staff. Instantly, with a violent noise, a jet of steam escaped, throwing fragments of rock into the air. As may be imagined, I hurried down as fast as possible. I should have liked very much to have looked down into the active crater ; but it was quite unsafe, so frequent were the showers of falling stones; yet the guides offered to take us up for 300 francs. I suspect, however, it was mere bravado on their part. From the summit we had a mag- nificent view of the distant city and beautiful bay with the wide sweep of its sickle-shaped shore. After luncheon on the mountain top, part of which consisted of eggs cooked by the natural heat of this great furnace, we de- scended much more rapidly than we went up. All we had to do was to lift our feet well out of the cinders and down we went with tremendous strides. By means of the inclined railway up the cone tourists may now ascend in a few minutes what cost us weary hours. We remounted our horses and rode down through vast slopes covered with the black lava of recent eruptions, which in places had flowed far over the plain, destroying numerous houses and vineyards in its progress. In the eruptions of 1872 many lives were lost ; in that of 1794, four hundred perished; and by one earlier still, three thousand. In the recent great eruption, ashes and scoria were hurled eight thousand feet in the air and carried by the wind a distance of one hundred and forty miles. Pompeii. 133 It was a bright sunny afternoon that I drove, with my companion in travel, from Mount Vesuvius to Pompeii. It is about a ten miles' drive through what is almost one continuous city a humming hive of industry scarce sur- passed in Naples itself. A prominent employment is the making of maccaroni and vermicelli, in the manufacture of which multitudes of half naked men and boys were employed. The long loops and festoons of this favourite food were hanging in the sun to dry and almost bake, so intense was the heat. Pompeii, it will be remembered, was buried beneath twenty feet of volcanic ashes and pumice stone, just eighteen hundred years ago. About the middle of the last century it was re-discovered, and ever since its excavation has been prosecuted with vary- ing energy. A large part has now been disinterred, and the result is a revelation of the conditions of old Roman life, such as is exhibited nowhere else. You may follow its minutest details. You may accom- pany the rich patrician to the public forum and the court ; to the amphitheatre and share his seat, and look down with him into the arena where the gladiators fight ; to the temple and behold the altars still stained with the smoke of sacrifice, and see, what he could not, the secret opening behind the image of the god, through which the priest spoke his oracles. You may go to the public baths and see the hypocausts for fire, the aqueducts and cale- ducts for hot water and cold air, the cabinets for his cloth- ing, and niches for his soaps, strjgils and unguents. You 134 A Canadian in Europe. may enter the privacy of his home and behold the images of his ancestors, and the lares and penates of his fire-side. You may criticise the frescoes on his walls, the furnish- ings of his house, and his mode of entertaining his friends. You may enter his kitchen and examine the domestic economy of the family. You may even penetrate the privacy of his wife's apartment, and behold the interest- ing mysteries dear to the female heart of her toilet table, the rouge pots, cosmetics, and mirrors, the jewellery and other articles of personal adornment. You may examine the surgeon's instrument case, its lancets and scalpels, and probes, and cupping-glasses three hundred instruments in all. You may visit the baker's shop and see the kneading-troughs, the ovens, even the loaves of bread stamped with the baker's name. You may study the different avocations and modes of work of the fuller, dyer, miller, barber, colour-man, grocer, perfumer, and wine-merchant, and may examine the commodities which they sold, and note the stains of the wine-cup on the marble counters, and the amphorae on the floor. The houses, of course, are roofless, the woodwork hav- ing been ignited by the red-hot ashes and scoria. But their internal arrangements, their paintings, and their contents are perfectly preserved. It produces a strange sensation to walk down the narrow streets of this long- buried city they vary from fourteen to twenty -four feet wide to observe the ruts made by the cart-wheels eigh- teen centuries ago, and to see the stepping-stones across The Dwelling-houses of Pompeii. 185 the streets, bearing the marks of horses' hoofs. On either side are small shops, just like those of Naples to-day, for the sale of bread, meat, oil, wine, drugs, and other articles. The signs of the shop-keepers can, in places, be seen. A barber shop, a soap factory, a tannery, a fuller's shop, a bakery with eighty loaves of bread in the oven, and several mills have also been found. At the street corners are stone fountains worn smooth by lengthened use, to which the maidens used to trip so lightly. The dwelling-houses have a vestibule opening on the street, sometimes with the word " Salve," " Welcome," or a figure of a dog in mosaic on the floor with the words, " Cave canem," " Beware of the dog." Within is an open court surrounded by bedrooms, kitchen, triclinium or dining-room, etc. The walls and columns are beautifully painted in bright colours, chiefly red and yellow, and adorned with elegant frescoes of scenes in the mythic history of the pagan gods and godesses, landscapes, etc. In public places may be read election placards and wall- scribblings of idle soldiers and school-boys. Opposite one shop I observed the warning in Latin, " This is no place for lounging, idler depart." The public forum, the basilica, or court of justice, with its cells for prisoners; the temples of the gods, with their shrines and images, their altars stained with incense smoke and the chambers of the priests ; the theatres with their stage, corridors, and rows of marble seats one will hold five thousand, another twenty thousand persons ; the public baths with 136 A Canadian in Europe. marble basins for hot and cold water, etc. ; the street of tombs lined with the monuments of the dead ; and the ancient city walls and gates, may all be seen almost as they were when the wrath of Heaven descended upon the guilty city. About two thousand persons, in all, are supposed to have perished in the ruins. In the house of Diomedes, in the wine-vaults, whither they had fled for refuge now a capacious crypt the bodies of seventeen women and children were found crowded together. At the gar- den gate was discovered the skeleton of the proprietor, with the key in his hand, and near him a slave with money and jewels. In the gladiators' barracks were found sixty-three skeletons, three of them in prison with iron stocks on their feet. In the museum are observed several casts made by pouring plaster into the consoli- dated matrix of ashes which had formed around the living body long since returned to dust of the ill-fated inhabit- ants in the attitude of flight, and in the very death-strug- gle. Among these are a young girl with a ring on her finger, a man lying on his side with remarkably well pre- served features, and others. The very texture and em- broidery of the dress, and the smooth, round contour of the young girl's arm, may be distinctly seen. At the entry to the guard-house was found the skeleton of a Roman sentinel a man of giant mould, with his firm- laced sandals, his iron greaves, his sword, his shield, and grasping still his bronze-tipped spear a. monument of A Buried City. 137 Roman valour and fidelity keeping his post even unto death. A priest of Isis was overtaken by the mephitic gases while endeavouring to break through the wall of the temple. Even the remains of the dumb animals have a pathetic interest the horses in the stable of Albinus, the mule in the bakery, the dog in his kennel, and the dove upon her nest. The sight of this dead city, called forth from its grave of centuries, made that old Roman life more vivid and real to me than all the classic reading I had ever done. The poet Rogers thus vividly describes the impression produced by a visit to the buried city : " But lo, engraven on a threshold-stone, That word of courtesy, so sacred once, HAIL ! At a master's greeting we may enter. And lo, a fairy-palace ! everywhere, As through the courts and chambers we advance, Floors of mosaic, walls of arabesque, And columns clustering in Patrician splendour. But hark, a footstep ? May we not intrude ? And now, methinks, I hear a gentle laugh, And gentle voices mingling as in converse ! And now a harp-string as struck carelessly, And now along the corridor it comes I cannot err, a filling as of baths ! Ah, no, 'tis but a mockery of the sense, Idle and vain ! We are but where we were ; Still wandering in the City of the Dead ! " In the National Museum at Naples are preserved a very large collection of the paintings and mosaics and other ob- jects found at Pompeii. The frescoes are wonderfully fresh- looking, and the drawing is full of character arid ex- 138 A Canadian in Europe. pression, although many of the subjects betray a depra- vation of morals, shocking every sentiment of propriety. A curious collection of articles of food and other objects found at Pompeii is also shown. Among these are speci- mens of oil, wine, meat, fish, eggs, loaves of bread with the baker's name stamped on them, almonds, dates, peas, onions, sandals, a purse with coins, etc. A veiy large collection of bronzes, objects of art, household utensils and STREET IN POMPEII. the like, gives a vivid conception of the life and habits of the inhabitants of the buried city. The following is a list of articles I jotted down as I walked through the rooms : Statuettes and images of the gods ; candalabra and lamps of very ornate character ; musical instruments, flutes, cymbals, plectra, etc. ; surgical instruments in cases, many varieties, also cases of medicines; toilet articles, combs, mirrors, beautiful bracelets, brooches, amulets, rings, seals, gold ornaments and jewellery; spoons, buckles, Ancient Life and Character. 139 spears, weapons of all sorts ; cake cutters, and moulds for cakes in the form of pigs, rabbits, hearts, etc. ; tongs, fire- irons, griddles, pots, pans, funnels, steel-yards, scales, large and small with weights, marked I., n., ill., v., x., etc.; measures, chains, nails, tacks, screws, door-knockers, hinges, locks and keys for doors, spades, mattocks, hay-forks, sickles, pruning -knives, axes, shears, hammers, adzes, planes, iron beds and baths, vases of every size and shape, lead pipes and brass water-taps. Many of these are almost identical in shape with those used by the Italian peasantry of the present day. Of special interest, however, to me was the gallery of portrait statues and busts. They were not ideal figures, but faithful copies from life, full of character and expres- sion magistrates or consuls, grave matrons, beautiful children, pure-faced vestal virgins, merry school boys and arch-looking Roman girls. It was the best presentation of ancient life and character I have seen. At Rome, also, I was greatly impressed by a domestic group. It was the portrait busts of a husband and wife of middle age, and of grave, almost austere, expression. The man held his wife's hand in his, while her arm was thrown confidingly over his shoulder. This was so admired by the historian Niebuhr, as a symbol of early Roman virtue, that he ordered a copy of it to be placed upon his own tomb. Amid all the natural beauty of this lovely land, there is one thought that continually haunts one like a night- 140 A Canadian in Europe. mare. It is the consciousness of the depressed and de- graded condition of the people, and especially of the hard lot of woman. On her, unfitted by nature for such toil, some of the heaviest burdens fall. While the cities swarm with idle priests and sturdy mendicant friars, and uni- formed soldiers swagger around the railway stations, I saw women toiling, like beasts of burden in the field, and performing the hardest and most menial drudgery. I saw one old woman carrying up large stones on her head out of a quarry. I saw another harnessed to a cart, and my travelling companion saw a woman and a cow har- nessed together to a plough. I sometimes tried to alleviate a little their burdens, but what was my poor help against this mass of human misery ! As I witnessed their suffer- ings, I often felt tears of pity start unbidden to my eyes. Yet this is the land where Christianity won some of its earliest triumphs, and where the lips of an Apostle preached the New Evangel to the dying Roman world. And here, in this heart of Catholic Christendom, the self- named Vicar of Christ for centuries has had almost un- bounded sway and these be the results. It seems to me that no greater accusation can be brought against the Papacy than the ignorance and superstition and social de- gradation of the essentially noble race which it has had beneath its fostering care. The only hope for the moral and social elevation of these people is the pure Gospel of Christ. This is the lever of more than Archimedian power which can lift them to a higher plane of being. Tlie Gospel in Italy. 141 And this divine agency is exerting its energising influence as never before, since the days of the Church of the Catacombs. English and American Methodism and other forms of Evangelical religion are, from many centres, leavening the surrounding mass. In this land, long groaning under pagan, and then under Papal persecution, the Gospel has now free untrammelled course. Under the shadow of the Vatican is the propaganda of the Bible Society, and on one of the best streets in Rome rises the handsome f^ade of a Methodist church. To use the figure of Bunyan, Giants Pope and Pagan may both munch with their toothless gums, but they cannot come at the pilgrims to harm them. EOMAN RUINS IN SOUTHERN ITALY. CHAPTER VI. FLORENCE AND BOLOGNA. than is elsewhere seen on earth. The crowded streets, the far- winding Thames, the distant parks and engirdling hills, make a majestic picture, whose impressiveness is deepened by the thought that the pulsations of the heart of iron throbbing in the mighty dome vibrate upon the ears of more persons than people the vast extent of Canada, from sea to sea. I was surprised to see in the churchyard, near the site of the famous St. Paul's Cross, an old fashioned wooden pump, which seemed to have done duty from time immemorial. The strange names of Amen Corner, Ave Maria Lane and Paternoster Row commemorate the ancient sale of religious books, which still makes up much of the local trade. Passing down Ludgate Hill, we enter Fleet Street, the heart of newspaperdom, and enter the purlieus of the law, Lincoln's Inn, and the secluded chambers and gardens of the Temple. The Temple Church, a thick-walled, round Norman structure, dating from 1185, is like a fragment of the middle ages in the busy heart of London. Here once preached the "judicious Hooker." On the paved floor lie stone effigies of the old Knights Templar, in full armour, with legs crossed, in token that they had fought in Palestine. The knights are dust, Their swords are rust, Their souls are with the saints we trust. Beside a simple slab in the church-yard, every visitor pauses with feelings of peculiar tenderness. It bears the Trafalgar Square : WhiteJialt. 303 brief, yet pregnant inscription, " Here lies Oliver Gold- smith." An old gardener showed me a tree which he said was planted by Henry VIII., under which Goldsmith and Johnson used to sit. Passing through Temple Bar and following the Strand, so named from its skirting the bank of the river, we pass the Savoy Church, half under ground, where Chaucer was married, and the vast Somerset House, on the site of the Protector's palace, where languished three unhappy Queens. It is now used as public offices, employs nine hundred clerks, and contains, it is said, 3,600 windows. At Charing Cross is a copy of the stone cross erected where the coffin of Queen Eleanor was set down during its last halt on the way to Westminster, six hundred years ago. Opposite is Trafalgar Square, and the noble Nelson's Monument, with Landseer's grand couchant lions at its base. On this grandest site in Europe is one of the ugliest buildings in existence, the National Gallery the home of British Art ! with its paltry facade and absurd flat domes, like inverted wash-bowls. Right op- posite is Whitehall named from England's once grandest palace. Only the Banquetting Hall now remains. Here Wolsey gave his splendid fetes ; here the Royal voluptu- ary, Henry VIII., fell in love with the hapless Anne Boleyn; and here Charles I. stepped from the palace win dow to the scaffold. Here the bard of Paradise Lost wrote Latin despatches for the Great Protector who died within these walls; here Charles II. held his profli- 304 A Canadian in Europe. gate court, and here he also died. The Hall is now a Royal chapel. I arrived late for service and found it locked ; a little persuasion induced the guardian to open the door ; but the haunting memories of the grand old hall, I am afraid, distracted my mind from the sermon. Across the street is the Horse-Guards, with its statue- like mounted sentries, and the splendid new Government Offices flanking each side of Downing Street, from whence has been ruled for a hundred years a Colonial Empire vaster than that of Rome in its widest range. Passing through a narrow street, we come upon one of the grandest groups of buildings in the world the ven- erable Westminster Abbey, St. Margaret's Church, and the new Palace of Westminster. Of course the Abbey first chal lenges our attention. Grand and gloomy and blackened by time without, it is all glorious within a Walhalla of England's mighty dead. A very courteous and cleri- cal looking verger, wearing a much be-f rogged gown, escorted our party through the chapels. I only discovered that he was not the Dean or Canon by the promiscuous manner in which he dropped his h's. After he had par- roted his piece, I asked permission to stroll through the chapels alone. It was kindly accorded, and for hour af- ter hour I mused amid the mouldering effigies of the kings, and queens, and princes, and nobles who slumber here. The exquisite stone fretwork of Henry VII.'s chapel can scarcely be over praised. But its chief interest is in the tombs of two women, " not kind though near of Westminster Abbey. 305 kin" the proud and lonely Queen Elizabeth, who found her crown but a gilded misery ; and the beautiful and un- happy Mary Stuart, who even in prison and on the scaffold commanded the homage of thousands of leal hearts. Here, too, are the tombs of many of England's sovereigns from the time of Edward the Confessor, who died eight hundred years ago. Beneath those moth-eaten banners and their fading escutcheons and crumbling effigies they keep their solemn state in death. Above the tomb of Henry V. hangs the armour which he wore at Agincourt, the helmet still exhibiting the gash made by a French battle-axe. The Coronation Stone, affirmed to have been Jacob's pillar at Bethel, is geologically iden- tical with the Scottish stratum at Scone, whence it last came. But a yet stronger claim upon the homage of our hearts have the kings of mind who still rule our spirits from their sceptred urns. I stood with feelings strangely stirred before the tombs or cenotaphs of the genial Chaucer, father of English verse ; of Spencer, " the prince of poets of his tyme," as his epitaph reads ; of Johnson, " O rare Ben;" of Cowley, Dryden, Addison, Soufchey, Campbell, Newton, Wilberforce, Macaulay, Lytton, Thackeray, Livingston, and many another whose written words have often given instruction or delight. The Chapter House of the Abbey, a large and lofty , octagonal room, from 1282 to 1547 was the Commons Chamber of England the cradle of Constitutional Gov- T 306 A Canadian in Europe. eminent, and the scene of some of the stormy conflicts by which were won the civil liberties we now enjoy. From this chamber it is an easy transition to the New Palace of Westminster, where the great council of the nation is royally housed. The architecture is, I think, the finest civil gothic in the world, a little overladen with ornament, perhaps, and already crumbling beneath the gnawing tooth of the great Edax rerum, but grander than aught else I ever saw, Parliament had risen, so I could only see the empty seats of the great athletes who fight the battles of the Titans in the grandest deliberative as- sembly in the world. CHELSEA, FB03I THE BIVEB. Westminster Hall. 307 The adjacent great Westminster Hall, with its open oaken roof six hundred years old, was the scene of some of the most important events in the history of the nation. Here many of the early parliaments were held; here Charles I. was condemned to death ; and here Cromwell, throned in more than royal state, was saluted by the proud name of Protector. Among all the statues of the kings, princes and nobles in Westminster Abbey and Palace there is not found one of the peer of the mightiest of them all the man who found England well nigh the basest of kingdoms and raised her to the f ormost place in Europe. In the Abbey I saw the spot from which the embalmed body of Cromwell was rifled, and then the pinnacles of this same Hall on which his head was exposed to sun and shower for thirty years. At length in a storm it was blown to the ground, picked up by a sentry, concealed in his house, and is now strange irony of history pre- served, it is said, at Sevenoaks, in Kent. Diverging to the right from the river we may pass through St. James,Green and Hyde Parks to the wilderness of fashionable west- end squares and the historic royal OLD WIND-MILL, BATTERSEA. SOS A Canadian in Europe. residences of St. James, Buckingham and Kensington Palaces. But continuing to follow its pleasant wind- ings we at length escape from the din of the great city to the quiet of its rural surroundings. A string of pleasant villages are strung upon the stream, like pearls upon a necklace. The first of these is Chelsea, now a suburb of the city, with its hospital for invalid soldiers, shown in our cut on page 306. Chelsea has many potent memories ; here dwelt Pym, More, Locke, Addi- son, Steele, and Swift; and here still lives the vener- able sage, Carlyle. In the quaint old church is a me- morial slab of the luckless minister of Henry VIII. and near by the tomb of Sir Hans Sloane. Battersea with its hand- some park, slender bridge and quaint windmill, lies on the opposite side of the stream. The tomb of Bo- K-.-.U-^l n -i .1 SIR THOMAS MORE'S MONUMENT. lingbroke, near by, is the chief memoral of one of the most brilliant and profligate of English writers. Fulham has been for six hundred years the country residence of the Bishops of London. To the left of the Putney : Chiswick. 309 picture is seen the palace and church. Here Richardson wrote the tear-compelling story of Clarissa Harlowe. At Putney, famous in boating annals,Gibbon was born, and the younger Pitt died. "England shall moult no feather of her crest," declared the great com- moner, and he made good his proud boast. Chiswick House, a splen- did Palladian Villa, with fine park and gardens, wit- nessed the last hours of Charles Fox and George Canning. SIR HANS SLOANE'S MONUMENT. Drop on Fox's grave the tear, 'Twill trickle on his rival's bier. FULHAJI. 310 A Canadian in Europe. In the churchyard is the grave of Hogarth, the great moralist of art, bearing the inscription by Garrick If genius fire thee, reader, stay ; If nature move thee, drop a tear; If neither touch thee, turn away, For Hogarth's honoured dust lies here. Gliding past the terraced lawns, and splendid gar- dens of Kew, an account of which I reserve for another page, we reach HOGARTH'S TOMB. PUTNEY. Staines. 311 Richmond, which I also describe elsewhere. Near by is the quaint village of Twickenham, with its memories of Pope and Walpole. CHISWICK HOUSE. Passing by for the present the stately halls of Hamp- ton Court, and still following up the narrowing stream, we reach at length the picturesque old town of Staines, deriving its name from the " Stones " which once marked the limits of the jurisdiction of London in this direction. The sluggish stream, traversed by its slow moving barges, and its venerable parish church, are shown in the cut on page 312. We have now reached the limits of our upward journey, 312 A Canadian in Europe. and are almost in sight of the ancient towers of Windsor, which must receive more ample treatment in another chapter. STAINES CHURCH. CHAPTER XVI. WINDSOR RICHMOND KEW. of the most delightful excursions from London is that to Windsor and Eton. When weary of the rush and the roar, the fog and the smoke of the great city, a half-hour's ride will take one through some WINDSOR CASTLE FROM ETON. of the loveliest pastoral scenery of England to the quiet and ancient royal borough, where everything speaks only of the past. I spent the rainy days in the galleries and 314 A Canadian in Europe. museums, and took advantage of the rare sunny ones to run out to Windsor, Hampton Court, the Sydenham Palace, and other suburban excursions. When the sun does shine in England, it lights up a landscape of richest luxuriance and most vivid verdure. Nowhere have I seen such magnificent oaks and elms, such stately beeches and chestnuts, as in Windsor and Bushy Parks ; nor such soft, springy, velvet-looking lawns. " How ever can I get such a lovely lawn as you have ? " said an American lady to an Oxford Fellow. " Nothing is easier, madam," he replied ; "you have only to roll it and mow it for a couple of hundred years." Before one enters on the rural paradise that surrounds London, he must pass through a dreary region of hideous deformity. For some distance the railway passes on a viaduct over the suburban streets. Anything more ugty than the hundreds of acres of blackened chimney-pots and red-tiled roofs and narrow alleys and crowded dwellings of London's poor, in the manufacturing district on the south of the Thames, it would be hard to conceive. But soon we emerge from this Arabia Petraea of London's stony streets to the Arabia Felix of her engirdling parks and villas and hedgerows and gardens. Soon the mighty keep and lofty towers of Windsor Castle, one of the largest and most magnificent royal residences in the world, come in view as we skirt its noble park. The most striking fea- ture is the great round tower, dominating from its height on Castle-hill, like a monarch from his throne, the grand Windsor Castle. 315 group of lower buildings. Dating back to the days of William the Conqueror, what a story those venerable walls could tell of the tilts and tourneys, and banquets and festivals, marriages and burials of successive generations of English sovereigns ! And over it waved in heavy folds on the languid air that red cross banner which is the grand- est symbol of order and liberty in the wide world. Here NORMAN GATE AND BOUND TOWER, TTINDSOB. to this winding shore whence, say the antiquarians, the name Windleshore, shortened to Windsor came, eight hundred years ago, the Norman Conqueror, and during all the intervening centuries here the sovereigns of England have kept their lordliest state the mighty castle growing age by age, a symbol of that power which broadens down 316 A Canadian in Europe. from century to century, firm as this round tower on its base, when thrones were rocking and falling on every side. I obtained a ticket of admission to the Castle from the comely saleswoman in a bookstore. She made no charge for the ticket, but offered for sale a book of plates, which forms a very pleasant souvenir of my visit. One enters first through a frowning gateway in a massive ETON COLLEGE, FBOM NORTH TERRACE, WINDSOR. tower into an irregular quadrangle, flanked by the lovely gothic St. George's Chapel, and the Dean's Close a delight- ^ ully quiet and sequestered group of buildings with tim- bered walls in the old English style and a long range of " knights' apartments." The chapel dates from 1474. In the chancel are the stalls of the Knights of the Garter The Royal Mausoleum. 317 emblazoned with their arms, and overhead hang their dusty banners. Adjoining the chapel is the royal mausoleum, in which, surrounded by the splendours of their palace home, repose the remains of Henry VI., Edward I., Henry VIII., Charles I., George III., George IV., William IV., and other royal personages a perpetual reminder that sic transit gloria mundi. The deathless love of the sorrowing Queen has made this chapel an exquisite memorial of the virtues and piety of the late Prince Consort. ETON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL. The Upper Ward is a large and rather gloomy quadrangle, entered through a Norman gateway, surrounded by the state chambers and the Queen's private apartments. The former only may be seen. Visitors are conducted in groups by a rather pompous attendant, who feels to the full the 318 A Canadian in Europe. dignity of his office. The state-rooms contain some fine paintings, but the barriers of cord leave only a narrow passage, and the guide hurries one through in a rapid and perfunctory manner, so that the visit is rather unsatis- factory. It is quite a shock to one's susceptibilities also to hear such a faultlessly attired gentleman drop his h's in such a promiscuous manner. We are led in succession through the Queen's audience chamber, and presence cham- ber, and guard chamber, and many another, filled with elegant tapestries and the like. St. George's Hall, in which state banquets are held, is 200 feet long, and is gay with the gold and gules and azure of royal and knightly arms. The Vandyck room is rich in royal portraits, that almost speak, by that great painter. The noble terraces one is a third of a mile long command lovely views of the royal gardens and park rich in flowers,fountains, statuaiy, and stately trees. Herne's famous oak, celebrated in Shakspeare's " Merry Wives of Windsor," a few years ago blew down, but the Queen planted another in its place. One climbs by a narrow stair in the thickness of the solid wall to the battlements of the ancient keep, long used as a castle palace, then as a prison here James I. of Scot- land was confined. From the leads is obtained one of the finest views in England, extending, it is said, into twelve counties, At the base is the deep moat, once filled with water, now planted with gay beds of flowers. Like a map beneath us lie the many suites of buildings, the Royal Gardens, the Home Park, the Great Park, and the The Royal "Mews" 319 Long Walk and Queen Anne's Ride two magnificent avenues, nearly three miles long, of majestic elms. Under the bright September sunlight it was a grand symphony in green and gold. ELMS NEAR THE HERONRY, WINDSOR PARK. The English are wonderfully fond of horses and dogs. One of the things, therefore, which one must not fail to do at Windsor is to visit theroyal "mews," or stables socalled from the " mews " or coops in which the royal falcons were kept, three hundred years ago such is the persistence of names in this old land. Grooms in very glossy hats, and with eyes keenly expectant of fees, do the honours of the splendid establishment, built at the cost of 70,000, which is, of course,kept scrupulously neat. Many of Her Majesty's lieges would be only too happy to be as well cared for as Her Majesty's horses and hounds. 320 A Canadian in Europe. The Thames, here a meagre stream, is converted into a canal, by means of locks, many of which are favourite subjects for the artist's pencil. LOCK AT WIN A few minutes' walk from Windsor is Eton College, the most famous of English public schools. The young Eton College. 321 Etonians, who represent the very bluest blood in England, swarm about Windsor there are 900 in attendance in turn-over collars and stove-pipe hats, and are an odd com- bination of frolic and precocious dignity. " It is not fine clothes that make a gentleman," said a mother to her Eton boy. " No, mamma, I know it ; it's the hat" was his reply But see these boys at cricket when the " stove-pipes " are tossed aside, and a more manly set of lads you will not often find. " It was here," the Duke of Wellington used to say, " that Waterloo was won." And here for over 400 years the proudest peers of England have been trained. Near Windsor is the sequestered church-yard of Stoke- Pogis, rendered memorable for ever by Gray's pensive elegy. This beautiful " God's acre " now contains the poet's grave, as also that of his brother-poet Waller, and of the eloquent Burke. HORTON CHUBCH. U 322 A Canadian in Europe. In the same vicinity is Horton, the early home of a mightier genius, John Milton. In its ivy-mantled church is the tomb of his mother, ob. 1637. Here were written his sweetest poems Lycidas, L' Allegro and II Penseroso. And here is shown the pear tree beneath whose shade he used to woo the muse. Beaconsfield, a quaint village near by, with a fine old church, gave a home to Burke and a title to Disraeli. I took the train to Richmond, and then walked down the winding Thames to Kew. Nothing in England sur- prised me more than the size of the parks in and near the great city, where land is more precious than elsewhere in the world. Here is Richmond Park of 2,255 acres. Wind- sor Park is still larger. Bushy Park, near by, has 11,000 acres. Epping Forest, in the suburbs, contains 3,000 acres. Hyde Park and Regent's Park, in the heart of London, comprise nearly 1,000 acres. Richmond is a charming town, climbing the slopes which overlook the winding Thames. It has that com- fortable air of finish and maturity which shows that it has long ago reached its majority so unlike our restless, growing Canadian towns. The comfortable villas, lovely lawns and gardens have such a delightful air of repose, as if here the eager rush of life was never known. From the summit of the hill is one of the loveliest conceivable prospects of stately park, majestic trees, quaint old ivy- covered churches and placid reaches of the Thames, gay with white-winged pleasure-barks and joyous boating Claremont. 323 parties. This scene forms the subject of one of Turner's finest paintings in the National Gallery. Bluff King Hal and Good Queen Bess often held their court in the old palace, and here, in 1603, the latter died clinging pitifully to the last to a life which had been to her little else than a gilded misery. CLAREMONT. A little further on rise " Claremont's terraced heights," haunted with painful memories of Olive, the Government clerk who " founded an empire where the foot of Alexander had trembled," and then returned to gnaw his heart at the ingratitude of his country, and seek rash refuge in self- slaughter. Hither, too, Leopold of Belgium brought hia bride, the Princess Charlotte, the pet and pride of the 324 A Canadian in Europe. British nation to mourn, after one brief year of wed- ded bliss, her untimely fate. And hither, in later times, fled Louis Philippe, a refugee from the anger of his re- volted subjects. What a lesson the stately halls and broad fair acres of the grand old park read of the vanity of earthly fame and glory ! RICHMOND BRIDGE. After a pleasant lounge on the old stone bridge at Rich- mond, I walked down the Thames side as far as Kew, with its old palace and famous gardens. The gently sloping lawns and charming villas and old historic seats recalled Mrs. Hemans' lines : The stately homes of England, ITow beautiful they fltand Amid their tall ancestral trees O'er all the pleasant land. Kew Gardens. 325 One of the most notable of these, Zion House, is an imposing pile. In the fifteenth century it was a nunnery, but is now the property of the Duke of Northumberland. The famous lion which used to ramp upon the top of Northumberland House, in Trafalgar Square, London, was removed hither when the town house of the proud race of the Percys gave place to a modern hotel. ZION HOUSE. Near by is Isleworth, with its ivy-mantled old church tower ; and a little further on, the palace of Kew, an unpretending, large red-brick house, in old-fashioned grounds, the residence for many years of George III. The glory of Kew is its Botanic Gardens the finest in the world. They comprise over 300 acres, laid out with sylvan walks and drives, charming lakes and fountains, and magnificent gardens and conservatories. The palm- 326 A Canadian in Europe. house is 362 feet long and 100 feet high, and beneath its lofty roof rise the feathery fronds of majestic oriental palms. I viewed with special interest the splendid Victoria lilies, with blossoms a foot in diameter, and great raft-like floating leaves five or six feet across. The strange whim- sical-looking cacti, all prickles and knobs and brilliant blossoms, were very remarkable. Here are three museums, rich in the curious vegetable products of every clime a collection of nature's freaks, and an object lesson in botany unequalled elsewhere in the world. I was glad to see the woody wealth of Canada so well represented. Huge cross sections and thick planks of British Columbia pine, about eight feet in diameter, and polished specimens of the rich woods and other native growths, give a very favourable impression of the resources of England's greatest colony. I rode back to London on the top of an omnibus, in the deepening twilight, through miles of elegant suburban streets, and then through miles of brightly-lighted crowded city thoroughfares, weary but delighted with a day of rich instruction and pleasure. CHAPTER XVII. HAMPTON COURT OXFORD KENILWORTH. FTER Windsor Castle, no pal- ace in England possesses more histo- ric interest, or seems a more fitting abode for its sceptred line of sovereigns than Hampton Court. It is reached in three- quarters of an hour from the heart of London, and the sud- den transition from the din and turmoil of the great city to the cloistered seclu- sion of these quiet courts and galleries, and the sylvan soli- tude of these bosky glades, is a most delightful experience. I left the railway train at the little town of Teddington, GARDEN GATEWAY, HAMPTON COURT. 328 A Canadian in Europe. with its many gabled church that I might enjoy the ap- proach to the palace through the majestic avenues of Bushy Park, a royal demesne of 11,000 acres. It was a glorious day. An early shower had washed the air and brightened the verdure of the grand old park. Its chief glory is a magnificent avenue of limes and horse-chestnuts, six rows of them, extending in straight lines for over a mile. Such splendid masses of foliage I never saw elsewhere, except, perhaps, the grand old elms and chestnuts of the Hague. They were planted by William III., and for well-nigh two hundred springs and summers have flushed with the pink beauty of their blossoms, and gleamed with the russet hue of their prickly fruit. Our engraving gives some idea of the fine vista of the main avenue, seen reflected in the broad and placid pool in the foreground. BUSHY PARK, CENTRE AVENUE. Near the court end of the avenue is a curious basin with carp and gold fish, in the centre of which rises a Hampton Court. 329 singular structure, half monument, half fountain, wea- thered with age and overgrown with moss and lichen. The residence of the "ranger," a sombre red brick house screened off by railings, blends harmoniously with the quiet beauty of the scene. The lowing of kine, the faint tinkling of sheep-bells, and the swift whirr of the pheasant or rustle of the hares through the ferns, are all the sounds that meet the ear. Through the distant forest glades sweep the antlered deer, or pause in their browsing to stand at gaze as undismayed as their ancestors in the days of merrie Robin Hood and Littlejohn. Here the grim Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, when he could lay aside for a time the cares of state, used to doff his steel hauberk and buff jerkin, and don a coat of Kendal Green for a swift gallop through the park after the flying deer or hares. Reaching Hampton Court, we enter first the sequestered park known as the Wilderness, and every one on his first visit tries his skill in penetrating the famous labyrinth " a mighty maze, but not without a plan " that has be- wildered generations of young and old children since the time of its creator, William of Orange. It is a narrow pathway winding backwards and forwards, and round about between quick-set hedges, leading to an arbour in the centre. If you once make a wrong turn you are lost, and may wander for hours without reaching the goal. I had no difficulty, by following the simple clue suggested by my guide-book, in finding my way in and out. A sturdy A Canadian in Europe. urchin was perched on a high seat overlooking the maze, to give directions, for a consideration, to those who had lost their way. The palace not yet being open, I strolled through the spacious grounds in company with a gentleman from Nor- way. The gardens are laid out in the symmetrical Dutch BUSHY PARK. manner brought over by William III. from the Hague broad walks, pleasant alleys, trim rectangular parterres, decked with flowers and foliage plants and statuary, and studded with noble masses of chestnuts, holly, and yew, the latter sometimes cut into fantastic forms. The views up and down the winding Thames, with its villas, its gray ivy -mantled churches, its quaint old inns, and its gay pleas- ure parks, are worthy of a Ruysdael's pencil. Hampton Court. 331 The palace itself was originally built by the celebrated Cardinal Wolsey, the haughty minister of Henry VIII. The proud prelate was then in the zenith of his glory, and built and banquetted more like a sovereign prince than like a vassal of the Crown. The palace was successively occupied by Henry VIII., Mary, Elizabeth, James I., Charles I., Cromwell, Charles II., James II., William III., Anne, George I., and George II. Since the reign of the last ON THE THAMES, NEAR HAMPTON COURT. of these sovereigns it has ceased to be a royal residence, and is now occupied by certain noble but reduced pension- ers of the Crown. The building is of red brick, the older part in the Tudor gothic style, with battlemented parapets. The newer portions are in the renaissance style. Over the entrance to the central court are seen the arms of Wolsey, with his motto, " Dominus mihi adjutor "" God is my helper." 332 A Canadian in Europe. On the walls are terra-cotta medallions of the Roman Emperors, presented to Wolsey by Pope Leo X. Passing beneath the Tudor arch of Wolsey 's Tower, with its fan-traceried ceiling, we ascend a broad stone stairway to a splendid baronial hall, whose open timber roof, stained windows, rich with gules and gold, gaily blazoned banners HAMPTON OOUBT WEST FRONT. and gleaming armour, recall the stately mediaeval pagean- try of which it was the scene. Here are the ciphers and arms of the royal Bluebeard and his wife, Jane Seymour, and near them those of the fallen Cardinal. Here, in 1558, Philip and Mary held their Christmas banquet with Elizabeth as their guest, or prisoner the great hall blaz- ing with a thousand lights. Here, it is said, Shakespeare's Hampton Court. 333 self played before good Queen Bess a part in the splendid drama which commemorates the glory of Henry and the fall of the proud founder of these halls. But of all this gorgeous pageantry only a shadowy memory remains. Our cut shows the quaint costume of the last century. ENTRANCE TO WOLSEY'S HALL, HAMPTON COURT. The colonnade of coupled Ionic pillars running across the middle quadrangle, as shown in the engraving on page 334), is a later addition by Sir Christopher Wren, and is quite out of keeping with its gothic surroundings. The great attraction of the palace now is its splendid gallery of over a thousand paintings, many of them by 334 A Canadian in Europe. distinguished masters. Conspicuous among these are the famous historical portraits by Vandyck ; and the court beauties, by Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir Peter Lely. The portraits of these fair frail creatures, once the pride of courts and cynosure of every eye all dead and turned to dust two hundred years ago are suggestive of stern MIDDLE QUADRANGLE, HAMPTON. moralizings to an austere mind. We cast no stone. Re- quiescant in pace. We pass through guard chambers, presence chambers, royal closets and bedrooms, chapels and banquet halls all lined with paintings of much historic or artistic interest. Here were preserved, till recently, the famous cartoons of Raphael, now in the Kensington Museum, which are so familiar from engravings. Origi- nally prepared by the great painter, at the request of Leo Raphael's Cartoons. 335 X., as designs for tapestry, " they were slit into strips for the guidance of piece work for a Flemish loom, tossed, after the weavers had done with them, into a lumber room ; then, after a century's neglect, disinterred by the taste of Rubens and Charles I., brought to England, the poor frayed and faded fragments glued together, and made the chief de- coration of a royal palace." They are among the very finest work of Raphael. Before leaving the palace we pass HAMPTON COURT LOOKING UP THE THAMES. through the stately gateway shown in our initial cut. into the private garden, and see the famous vine, under glass, of course, planted in 1769. Its stem is thirty inches in girth, its branches extend a hundred feet, and yield from 2,000 to 3,000 pounds of grapes. These are sent, by the Queen's command, as presents to her private friends. Returning to London, we pass through the pretty town 33G A Canadian in Europe. of Hampton, possessing little of note except the memory and house of Garrick. Hither the great actor, sated and weary with the mimic life upon the stage, retired to spend his closing days in quiet, or in the society of a few favoured friends. The house and picturesque grounds are well shown in the accompanying engraving. GARRICK'S VILLA. One of the chief charms of rural England is the ancient church in almost every parish often hoary with extreme age, and mantled with a venerable growth of ivy green. In the quiet God's acre in which they stand heave the mouldering mounds beneath which Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, The peaceful fathers of the hamlet sleep. The old Walton Church, by the Thames side, shown in the cut, is a typical example of these monuments of the piety of our ancestors. Oxford. 337 WALTON CHURCH. My visit to Oxford was made under unpropitious cir- cumstances. It had been raining for days, I might almost say weeks, and the whole country was flooded. The un- cured hay was drifting about the fields, and the prospects for harvesting the grain were very gloomy. If you wait for fine weather in England, you may wait for a long time ; so I stayed not for storm or shine. Amid a pour- ing rain I visited the Colleges, the Bodleian Library, the Museum, new Keble Hall and Chapel, and the stately St. Mary's and Christ Church. This venerable seat of learning, dating from the time of Alfred, the ancient Oxenforde its cognizance is still a V 338 A Canadian in Europe. shield with an ox crossing a stream has a singularly at- tractive appearance as seen from a distance, its many towers and spires, and the huge dome of the RadclifFe Library rising above the billowy sea of verdure of its sylvan surroundings. A nearer approach only heightens the effect of this architectural magnificence. Probably no city of its size in the world presents so many examples of stately and venerable architecture as this city of colleges. Look in what direction you will, a beautiful tower, spire, or gothic facade will meet the eye. The general features of the Oxford Colleges, of which there are no less than twenty, are similar. They consist, for the most part, of one, two, or three contiguous quad- rangles, carpeted with a turfy lawn of exquisite verdure, and surrounded by long rows of collegiate buildings, con- taining lecture rooms, library, refectory, students' rooms, and kitchen. Frequently there are quaint carved clois- ters, as at Magdalen, or pleasant gardens, shady alleys, and daisy-tufted lawns. The outer quadrangle is enter- ed by an arched gateway from the street, where a porter peers out from his den, and touches a well-trained fore- lock to strangers. As I passed beneath the archway of Christ Church, through Wolsey's " f aire gate," well worthy of the name, I asked the porter which were the rooms that had been occupied by John and Charles Wesley. Somewhat to my surprise, the answer I received was : " I don't know. Never heard of them. That must have been a long time ago." I concluded that this ignorance must College Porters. 339 be an idiosyncracy of the porter mind, for at Pembroke College near by, of which Blackstone and Whitefield were students, is pointed out the room occupied by Samuel Johnson ; and the name of Addison is still linked with 340 A Canadian in Europe. one of the pleached alleys of Magdalen. I climbed the old tower from which " Great Torn," weighing 17,000 pounds twice as much as the great bell of St. Paul's every night tolls a curfew of 101 strokes, as a signal for closing the college gate. The large dining-hall of Christ Church College, next that of Westminster, is the grandest mediaeval hall in the kingdom. The open timber roof, of Irish oak, 350 years old, with gilt armorial bearings, is as sound as when erected. On the walls are paintings by Holbein, Lely, Vandyck, Kneller, and Reynolds, of distinguished patrons or students of the College, from Wolsey down to Glad- stone, whose portrait occupies an honoured place. Here, at remarkably solid tables, the students dine. Here Henry VIII., Elizabeth, James I. and Charles I. banquetted and witnessed dramatic representations ; and here, in 1634, the latter monarch held his last Parliament when driven from Westminster. Beneath the stone stairway is the passage leading to the great baronial kitchen, with its high, open roof. A white-aproned, rubicund old head cook did the honours of his important domain. He showed me a monster grid- iron on wheels ; the huge turnspit, on which they still roast, before an open grate, thirty joints at once ; and the treadmill where the unhappy turnspit dog keeps up his unprogressive march on the sliding platform of his mill. Observing my admiration of a huge elm slab, about six inches thick, used for a kitchen table, " Fifty years Christ Church College. 341 ago," he said, laying his hand upon it, " I helped to bring that table into this hall." For half a century he had been cooking dinners for successive generations of " under- grads," and seemed hale and hearty enough to last for half a century move. RADCLIKFE LIBRARY, OXFOUI). I went then into the venerable chapel, whose massive columns and arches date from 1180. It is also the cathe- 342 A Canadian in Europe. dral church of the diocese. The sweet-toned organ was pealing, and the collegiate clergy were chanting the choral service, which has been kept up ever since the Reforma- tion. Oxford is such a crowded congeries of collegiate build- ings, often connected by narrow and winding streets, that it is only by obtaining a bird's-eye glance that one can take in a comprehensive view of the city and its many colleges. Such a view may be had from the Radcliffe Library, shown on the preceding page. To the left may be seen the front of Brazenose College, said to be named from the brazen-hus, or brew-house, of Alfred's palace. Over the entrance as a play upon the word is a huge brazen nose, very suggestive of brew-house potations. Near by is the Bodleian Library. A sacred stillness seems to pervade the alcoves, laden with the garnered wisdom of the ages, of many lands and many tongues. One speaks involuntarily in tones subdued, and steps with softened tread. It was an agreeable surprise to find a book by the present writer in such good company. Among the objects of interest are a MS. copy of Wycliffe's Bible the true charter of England's liberties, and MSS., by Milton, Clarendon, Pope, and Addison ; the autographs of many English sovereigns ; historic portraits, including one of Flora Macdonald, not at all pretty ; Guy Fawkes' lantern, a very battered affair ; a chair made of Drake's ship, in which he, first of English sailors, circumnavigated St. Mary's Church. 343 the globe ; Queen Elizabeth's gloves, and a seal worn by Hampden, with the legend : " AGAINST MY KINO I DO NOT FIGHT ; BVT FOR MY KING AND KINGDOM'S BIGHT." The ceiling is studded with shields bearing the Uni- versity crest, an open Bible, with the pious motto, " DOMI- NVS ILLVMINATIO MEA." It struck me as rather an anachronism to -be shown as " New College" a building erected by William of Wyke- harn in 1386. Amid the religious silence and solemn beauty of its venerable cloisters " a dainty relic of mon- astic days" seems to slumber the undisturbed repose of five long centuries. The ivy mantled gateway of St. Mary's Church, is an object of strikingly picturesque beauty. The image of the Virgin, above it, gave great offence to the Puritans, and was one of the causes of the impeachment of Arch- bishop Laud. It seemed to me a desecration to see civic placards about gun licenses and dog taxes affixed to the doors and gateways of the churches. The air of complete seclusion from the din of life of many of these colleges, is one of their chief charms. Not more sequestered was the leafy grove of Academus, than the gardens of Magdalen, or " Maudlin," as it is locally called. Within a stone's throw of the busy High Street, deer are quietly browsing under huge old elms, with their colonies of cawing rooks, as though^ the haunts of __ men 344 A Canadian in Europe. were distant and forgotten. Here, in a beautiful alley which bears his name, Addison used to walk and muse on high poetic themes. In the cloisters are a group of GATEWAY OF ST. MA.RY'8 CHURCH, OXFORD. strange allegorical figures, the origin and meaning of which no one can explain. One of the Fellows with Old Customs at Oxford. 345 whom I fell into conversation, interpreted them as sym- bolizing the seven deadly vices and their opposite vir- tues an admonition as necessary to the scholars of five hundred years ago as to those of to-day. On May morn- ing a Latin hymn is sung on the tower, a relic, it has been suggested, of the May -day Baal worship of pagan times. The persistence of these old customs, amid the changeful- ness of modern life, is remarkable. Another singular one, of unknown origin, at Queen Philippa's College, is that on New Year's the Bursar gives each member a needle and thread, with the words, " Take this and be thrifty." The scholars here have, time out of mind, been summoned to dinner by the sound of a trumpet, instead of by bell, as elsewhere. Here, too, is the Boar's Head Carol sung at Christmas, to commemorate the deliverance of a student who, attacked by a wild boar, thrust into its throat the copy of Aristotle that he was reading, and so escaped. Of this College, Wycliffe, the Black Prince, and Henry V. were members. St. Mary's Church is invested with some of the most memorable associations of the Reformation. From its pulpit Wyclitfe denounced the Romish superstitions of his day, and maintained the right of the laity to read the Word of God, the true palladium of their civil and religious liberty. Two centuries later, when Romish influence was in the ascendant at the University, the martyr bishops, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were cited here for trial before Cardinal Pole, 1555 ; and hither 346 A Canadian in Europe. the following year the venerable Archbishop Cranmer was brought from prison for the pur- pose of publicly recant- ing his Protestant opin- ions. "Soon," says Foxe, " he that late was primate ST. MABY'S CHURCH, OXFORD. of all England, attired in a bare and ragged gown, with an old square cap, stood on a low stage near the pulpit.' Ttie Martyrs' Memorial. 347 After a pathetic prayer, stretching forth his right hand, instead of the expected recantation, he said : " Foras- much as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore, shall be first punished, for it shall be first burnt." Having thus " flung down the bur- den of his shame," he was dragged from the stage, with many insults, to the place where he glorified God in the flames, after having been compelled to witness the mar- tyrdom of Latimer and Ridley. On the scene of their death now rises the beautiful Martyrs' Memorial. The effigies of the martyrs are of remarkable expressiveness ; that of Latimer, bending beneath the weight of four score years, seems to be uttering his dying words, " Be of good com- fort, Master Ridley, and play the man ; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Additional pathetic interest is given to this St. Mary's Church, by the fact that in the choir, in a brick vault, lie the remains of the lovely and ill-fated Amy Robsart, the heroine of Sir Walter Scott's " Ken il worth." Her body was brought from Cuinnor Hall, only four miles distant, to Oxford, and lay in state in Gloucester College. After a hard day's work, I went to an old fashioned inn to refresh the hungry inner man. Instead of being sent into a great bleak dining-hall, in which one's individu- ality is completely lost, I was led up stairs to a small and cosy parlour. Here a . tasteful repast tasteful in two senses was served by a neat-handed Phyllis, and I en- 348 A Canadian in Europe. joyed the homely English comfort of " taking mine ease in mine inn." The same night I took train for Stratford-on-Avon, on pilgrimage to the spot " Where his first infant lays sweet Shakespeare sung, Where his last accents faltered on his tongue," and was whirled through the darkness at a speed sur- passing that of even Herne the Hunter. I found lodg- ings at the Red Horse Inn, and slept in a great bed of state, with a huge four post canopy that might have come down from Shakespeare's time. Next morning still in the rain I found the sexton of the venerable parish church, which is approached through a beautiful avenue of limes, and is surrounded by cypress and yew trees, and soon stood above the plain stone slab in the chancel floor, which covers all that was mortal of the greatest poet of all time. As I strolled along the banks of the gentle Avon, I thought : " Here the boy Shakespeare chased the butter- fly, and plucked the buttercups, and hunted thrushes' nests, and sported in the crystal stream ; and across those meadows the love-sick swain sped to the cottage of sweet Anne Hathaway ; beneath those trees they held their tryst, and on their beechen bark he carved her name." I next visited the old Grammar School, of Ed- ward the Sixth's time, where the immortal bard learned the mysteries of that English tongue which he has ren- dered classic for ever. I then proceeded to the house in Stratford-on-Avon. 349 which the future poet first saw the light. It is a quaint two-storied timbered house, which has successively been used as a butcher's shop and as an inn. The front door is cut in two, so that the lower part might be kept closed to shut out the dogs I was told. The stone floor has also been badly broken by the chopping on the butcher's blocks. Passing up a winding wooden stair, we enter the room in which the wondrous babe's first cry was heard. Across this rough floor he crawled on his first voyage of discovery, and through this lead lattice he caught his first glimpse of the great world-drama, whose thousand varied scenes he has so marvellously painted for all time. Here is his desk from the Grammar School, notched all over with his school-boy jack-knife. Here is his signet ring, and the chair in which he sat. What a potent spell of poetry to bring to this dull Warwickshire town, from all parts of Christendom, ten thousand pilgrims every year, to pay their homage at the shrine of genius ! Among the noted names etched on the lattice pane, I saw those of Walter Scott and Washington Irving. The comely hostess of the Red Horse, notwithstanding her almost rustic-seeming simplicity, well knew how to charge for the bed of state and the toothsome viands so daintily served in the cosy breakfast-room. It was the dearest place I mean in cost at which I stopped in England. I took the train still in a pouring rain to Warwick, said to be the oldest town in the realm built by the British 350 A Canadian in Europe. king Cymbeline, destroyed by the Picts, and rebuilt by Caractacus the Caerleon of ancient times. The first Earl of Warwick was a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. The famous hero, Guy of Warwick, was a giant nine feet high, who performed prodigies of valour before he became a hermit and retired to the caves of Guy's Cliff, where he died. His tremendous sword and armour, in confirmation of the story, are shown at the castle. Warwick, the King- maker, maintained 30,000 vassals on his estates, and was the last of the turbulent barons who set up and put down sovereigns as they pleased. The famous old castle is de- clared by Sir Walter Scott to be the finest monument of ancient and chivalrous splendour which remains uninjured by age. Its massive walls rise like a cliff in air, and dominate the whole town a monument of the stern feudal tyranny of " ye olden time." As the family were at home, I had to be content with an outside view. The parish church is said to be the finest in England. The sepulchral monuments of the Earl of Beauchamp, and the Earl of Leicester, the unhappy favourite of Queen Elizabeth, read their impressive lesson of the vanity of earthly glory. I engaged a carriage to take me around the quaint old town, and across the country to Kenilworth, one of the most charming dri ves in England. As the rain had ceased, I gave up the dignity of the coupe* to ride on the box with the driver, that I might better enjoy the scenery and his conversation. He was the son, I found, of a Wesleyan Kenilworth Castle. 351 local preacher ; but he himself had sought fame and fortune as a jockey, only to meet with broken bones and an empty purse. The quaint villages, with their timbered houses, and the well-kept parks and fine granges, were a perpetual picture of rural beauty. Kenilworth Castle is the finest ruin in England. Tra- dition refers its origin to the time of King Arthur; but the present structure dates from the time of Henry I., with extensive additions by Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Leicester. Here were celebrated the splendid pageants which accompanied the visit of the Virgin Queen to her high-born subject. But their chief interest is given to those crumbling ruins by the tear-compelling story of the fair Amy Robsart. I climbed the massive Caesar's Tower, matted with the densest growth of ivy I ever saw ; and lingered in the roofless banquet hall, that often rang with the sounds of wassail and revelry; and roamed through the pleasaunce and field of tourney where in the pride and pomp of chivalry, gallant knights in ringing armour, sought to win the prize of valour at the hands of beauty. But most I loved to muse amid the broken arches of Mervyn's Bower, which the Wizard of the North represents as the scene of the wretchedness of his hapless heroine. Strange that his enchanter's wand can cast such an undying spell over these mouldering ruins all that the cannon of Cromwell have left of the once stately castle. At the bookstore of the little town I bought a copy of Scott's " Kenilworth " as a souvenir of the place, and learned from the comely sales- 352 A Canadian in Europe. woman, who seemed to enter thoroughly into the romance of the story as what woman's heart will not ? some local traditions of the castle. A rapid ride over the London and North-Western Rail- way,* through Coventry, with its strange legend of the fair Lady Godiva and the " low churl, compact of thankless earth," Peeping Tom ; past Rugby, dear to the heart of many a schoolboy ; past Olney, with its memories of Cow- per, and Berkhamspstead, where he was born ; past Har- row, with its famous school, where Byron, Peel, and Palmerston were scholars ; and past Willesderi Junction, through which pass four hundred trains a day, brings me to the splendid Euston Square Station, in time to take the Underground Railway en route for Sydenham Palace, to see the grand display of fireworks and the illuminated fountains. So much may one crowd into a single day in this land of rapid transit. * This railway conveys 100,000 passengers and 73,000 tons of freight per day. It runs 29,000,000 " train miles " per year, has 10,000 miles of rails, 560 stations, 40,000 employees,, and the annual consumption of coal is 600,- 000 tons. CHAPTER XVIII. CAMBRIDGE YORK EDINBURGH MELROSE ABBOTSFORD STIRLING THE TROSSACHS GLASGOW STAFFA BELFAST- DUBLIN WALES CHESTER " HOME AGAIN." wa y ^ Scotland I stopped at Cam- bridge, Peterbo- rough, and York, to see the colleges and cathedrals of those old ecclesiastical towns. The ride through the Fen country is tame and uninteresting, save for its historic asso- ciations. Yet, even this flat and amphi- bious region has its poetic aspects, as described for us by Milton, Tennyson and Kingsley. It was on the first of September that I visited Cambridge, the one day of the year when the college quadrangles are closed to the pub- w SCOTT'S MONUMENT. 554 A Canadian in Europe. lie, so as to maintain, I was informed, the control of the grounds. But a judicious fee is an " open sesame," almost everywhere ; and I was allowed to reach the pene- tralia of most of the colleges. At Christ's College, Milton " scorned delights and lived laborious days." I was shown his mulberry from which I plucked a leaf. His own melodious lines in " II Penseroso " etch with an ar- tist's skill the scene and its associations. But let my due feet never fail To walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight, Casting a dim religious light ; There let the pealing organ blow, To the full-voiced choir below. In traversing the fat grazing lands of Huntingdonshire, memories of Cromwell and his Ironsides would assert themselves. At St. Ives, famous in nursery rhyme, a cattle fair was in progress, and bucolic graziers, with ruddy faces, top boots, and " horsey " dress, abounded. In England you can almost always tell a man's rank by his garb. In Canada you cannot, except that the master is generally a little worse dressed than the man. The old Cathedral of Peterborough, on the site of an abbey founded by the Mercian Kings in 660, is of severe and majestic simplicity. The storms of seven hundred years have stained and weathered those Norman arches to a grim York 355 and hoary aspect, with which they frown down upon the ephemerides of to-day. Here that " most poor woman," Queen Katharine of Arragon was buried, and for a time also, the unhappy Queen of Scots. But of all the cathedrals of England which I saw, the most impressive is the mighty minster of York. How it symbolizes the profound instinct of worship of the hu- man soul, its yearnings after the unseen and eternal ! The sweet and solemn chanting of the choir seemed to me the litany of the ages, the echo of the prayers of the dead and buried generations crying out for the living God. The great east window Pugin thinks " the finest in the world." The Monkish rhyme at the portal, we feel is no vain boasting : VT ROSA FLOS FLORVM, sic EST DOMVS ISTA DOMORVM. The ruined Abbey of St Mary's, founded 800 years ago by William Rufus, reminds us of the cowled brotherhood whose worship or wassail once filled those, shattered vaults, now open to rain and wind. The old walls, the quaint " Bars," or gates and the stern old castle, celebrat- ed in Scott's " Ivanhoe," are grim relics of the stormy feudal times. But these seem but as of yesterday com- pared with the older Roman ruins, dating back to the first century. Here the Emperors, Severus and Constantius died ; here Caracalla and Constantino were crowned, if indeed the latter was not a native of the place. Through the bolder scenery of the North Riding ; past Durham with its grand cathedral crowning a lofty Z5G A Canadian in Europe. slope, where, as a legend reads," HAG SVNT IN FOSSA BED.E VENERABILIS OSSA;" through Newcastle with its famous High Bridge, its grimy colliers and its eight hundred year old castle, which gives it its name ; between the far- rolling Cheviot Hills, and wild sea coast for ever lashed by the melancholy main; passing in full view of Holy Isle, the storm-swept Lindisfarne, and the grim prison of the Covenanters, Bass Rock, and near the scene of the hard-fought battles of FJodden-Field, Dunbar and Pres- ton Pans, we glide by the grim couchant lion of Arthur's Seat into the Athens of the North, the me- mory-haunted city of Edinburgh. No city in Europe occupies a grander site, and few cities in the world are invest- ed with more heroic or romantic associa- tions. My first visit was to the noble Scott monument, shown in the initial cut of this chapter, where I had a bird's-eye view of the scene, over which WM NORTH BBIDGB, h ha8 Cast Sudl an Edinburgh. 357 undying spell. Beneath the arch is a marble statue of the great enchanter, and filling the many niches are the figures that he called from the realm of fancy, and enbreathed with life forever. The deep ravine of the North Loch, now a charming public garden, crossed by lofty traffic-crowded bridges, separates the picturesque and historic old town and the handsome new city. The lofty narrow crow-step- ped buildings of the former rising tier above tier, espe- cially when lit up at night, have a strangely picturesque appearance. It was like a dream, or like a chapter from the "Heart of Midlothian" to walk up the Cannongate, the High Street, the Lawn Mar- ket, between the lofty and grim-featured houses. My garrulous guide pointed out theTron Church clock, which he said " was &JG keepit twa minutes fast, that the wark- inen might na be late ;" and the old St. Giles Church, where Jenny Geddes flung her stool at the prelatic hireling " wha would say a mass in her lug." OLD EDINBURGH BY NIGHT. 358 A Canadian in Europe. Here are buried the Regent Murray and the great Earl of Montrose, and without, beneath the stone pave- ment of the highway, once part of the churchyard, lies the frodv- of John Knox, A metal plate with the letters, Knox's House. 359 "I. K., 1572," conjecturally marks his grave the exact position is not known and all day long the carts and carriages rattle over the bones of the great Scottish Re- former. Near by, the site of the old Tol booth is shown by a large heart marked in the stones of the causeway. In the High Street is Knox's house, a picturesque old place with a steep outer stair. It was with feelings of peculiar reverence that I stood in the room in which Knox died, and in the little study very small and narrow only about four feet by seven, in which he wrote the History of the Scottish Reformation. I sat in his chair at his desk, and I stood at the window from which he used to preach to the multitude in the High Street now a squalid and disreputable spot. The motto on the house front reads, " LVFE. GOD. ABVFE. AL. AND. YI. NYCHTBOVK. AS. YI. SELF." There are many such pious mottoes, as : " MY. HOIP. IS. CHRIST;" "WHAT. EVER.ME.BEFALL.I.THANK. THE.LORD.OF.ALL ;" " LAVS. VBIQVE. DEO;" " NISI. DO- JOHN KNOX'S S3UPV. 360 A Canadian in Europe. MINVS. FRVSTRA ; " PAX. ENTEANTTBVS. SAL VS. EXEVNTI- BVS." A garrulous Scotch wife, with a charming accent, showed a number of relics of the great Reformer, includ- ing his portrait and that of the fair false Queen, whose guilty conscience he probed to the quick, and the beauti- ful Four Maries of her court. In the Museum I saw Knox's old pulpit where, says Melville, "he was sae active that he was lyk to ding it in blads and flee out of it." The grim old castle rises on an isolated crag, four hun- dred feet above the Forth half palace and half prison a memorial of the stormy days of feudal power. In a little chamber about eight feet square, James VI., only son of Mary Stuart, and future King of England, was bom, and it is said he was let down in a basket from the window to the Grass Market, three hundred feet below. On the ceiling is a quaint black letter inscription : (Shrift flint rrmnwt U*HJS willi thornr, the fount pha htit iss fcotn*. At the other end of the long and narrow street the most picturesque in Europe is the Royal Palace of Holy- rood, with its memories of guilt and gloom. Here is the chamber in which Knox wrung the Queen's proud heart by his upbraidings ; the supper room very small in which Mary was dining with Rizzio and her Maids of Honour, when Darnley andhis fellow-assassins climbed the winding stair, and murdered the unhappy wretch cling- ing to his royal mistress's skirts, and then dragged his body 362 A Canadian in Europe. into the Queen's bedchamber, where the blood stains are still shown upon the floor. The Queen's bed with its faded tapestries, her private altar, the stone on which she knelt, her meagre mirror, her tiny dressing room, and the embroidered picture of Jacob's Dream, wrought with her own fair fingers, make veiy vivid and real the sad story of the unhappy sovereign, who realized to the full the words, " Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown." The Abbey Church, now an exquisite ruin, dates from 1128, and still af- fords a sanctuary to in- solvent debtors. The wynds and closes of the ancient town, once the abodes of the Scot- tish nobility, are now the squalid lairs of mi- scry and vice. Once high bom dames and knightly men, banquet- ted in carved chambers now the degraded pur- lieus of poverty and crime. Some of these have still interestinghis- BIDDLE'S CLOSE, WHERE HUME COMMENCED HIS "BISTORT or ENGLAND." {,oric associations, as the Old Gray Friars Churchyard. 363 houses of the Duke of Gordon, of Earl Moray, Hume, Bos- well, Walter Scott, and others of distinguished name and fame. I penetrated some of the grim closes, which sur- passed aught I ever saw of squalidness, and was glad to find myself safely out again. The church yard of old Gray Friars is an epitome of Scottish his- tory. On the broad flat stone shown in the cut on page 366, the Solemn League and Covenant was signed, 1638, and on Mar- tyrs' Monument-one reads, "From May 27th, 1661, that the most noble Mar- quis of Argyll was be- headed, until Feb. 18th, 1668, there was executed in Edinburgh about one hundred noblemen, gen- tlemen, ministers and others, the most of whom lie here." Nourished by such costly libations, the tree of liberty took root and flourished strong and fair. The tomb of " Bluidy Mackenzie," of sinister memory, still exerts its malign spell upon the belated urchin as he slinks past. While visiting the antiquarian museum, I had the great and unexpected pleasure of meeting a fellow-towns- 364- A Canadian in Europe. man, Mr. John Macdonald, of Toronto, with his two charm- ing daughters the only per- sons that I had ever seen before that I met in a four months' tour. I gladly accepted the cordial invitation to join his party, and we drove again to Holyrood, the Canongate, the Cemetery in which lie the bodies of Drs. Duff, Cand- lish, Chalmers, Guthrie, Hugh Miller, and many other of COLLEGE WYND, WHERE SCOTT WAS Scotland's greatest sons ; and BURN. Calton Hill, with its magni- ficent panorama of cliff and crag, and strath and frith, and WHITE HORSE INN, CANONGATE. Melrose Abbey. 365 ANCHOR CLOSE. its noble group of monuments. A grizly blue-bonneted cice- rone pointed out, with broad Doric comments, St. Leon- ard's Crags, the home of Davie Deans, the moss hags of Jennie's midnight tryst, St. Anthony's Chapel, and Ar- thur's Seat, like a grim cou- chant lion, one of the most majestic objects I ever saw. It is a delightful excursion to Melrose and Abbotsford, through lovely scenery, over which is thrown the nameless spell, The light that never was on sea or shore, The consecration and the poet's dream. The heather and the broom mingled with the gorse and gowans on the green slopes of the Tweed side, and the names of Eskdale, and Gala Water, Cockpen and Eildon Hills, recall many an ancient ballad or legend. The old Abbey, dating from 1136, is one of the finest relics of gothic architecture extant. The image-breaking zeal of the Reformers, and the cannon of Cromwell have left only a picturesque ruin. It was quite pathetic to see the roofless aisles, the broken windows, the crumbling columns, and the grass-grown chancel where once the cowled brotherhood chanted their matins and even-song. SG6 A Canadian in Europe. The battered saints looked down reproachfully from their ivied niches, and the effigies of the knights seemed to keep watch over the tombs, where, through the long acres their bodies " await the resurrection." I noticed STONE ON WHICH THE COVENANT WAS SIGNED. the touching inscription, "CVM VENIT JESVS CESSABIT VM- BKA" " When Jesus comes the darkness shall fly away." Here is the tomb of the arch wizard Michael Scott, whose awful apparition is recorded in the Lay of the Last Min- strel, and here was buried at last the fiery heart of Bruce. I sat in Sir Walter's favourite seat and gazed where " the darkened roof rose high aloof," and on the lovely eastern oriel with its slender shafts of foliaged tracery, of which he sings, ' ' Thou would'st have thought some fairy's hand 'Twixt poplars straight, the osier wand In many a freakish knot had twined ; Then framed a spell when the work was done, And changed the willow wreaths to stone." Abbotsford. 307 Was ever ruin so sad and fair ? I lingered for hours in the legend-haunted spot, and then walked along the green Tweed side to Abbotsford where still wields hi* spell a mightier wizard than even Michael Scott. It is a large and rambling house with fantastic, yet picturesque groups of chimneys, gables and turrets. Over the door is the pious legend, y night, by xtay $emcmue? aye, ye goodness of ye oul, |Uul thank Ute name ute'e gloviou.$ ete $\mi\A throughout ye The house is full of old armour targes and claymores, helmets and hauberks ; antique furniture and relics the keys of the Tolbooth, Queen Mary's cross and purse, his- toric portraits and the like. Of especial interest was the stately library, and the small writing room, with the desk and books just as the master left them, and the effigy of faithful Maida. Then I stood with hushed spirit in the room in which he died, and through the open window heard the murmur of the distant Tweed, which in life he loved so well. I was ferried over the brawling stream by a stout-armed damsel with a pleasant face and strung Scottish accent, and was soon whirled by rail back to Auld Reekie again. Next morning I left early for Glasgow by way of Stir- ling and the Trossachs. The royal borough of Stirling with its famous castle, perched upon a lofty crag, is de- lightfully quaint and picturesque. The view from the 368 A Canadian in Europe. ramparts of the lovely valley of the Forth, and the purple- vested Ben Voirlich, Ben Lomond, Ben Ledi and the rest of the Titan brotherhood was unsurpassed even by that from Calton Hill. Queen Mary's View is a small opening in the wall where the "fair mischief" watched the tilts and tourneys in the jousting yard below. Here is a quaint old hall, adorned with strange mythological figures, where the ancient parliament of Scotland used to meet. In a gloomy chamber of the palace, James Y. slew with his own hand his, guest the Earl of Douglas; below is the monument of bold Wallace wight, and hard by the world-famous field of Bannockburn. But the chief spell of the scene is that cast by the filial piety of fair Ellen of the Lake. As I marched down Castle Hill I was preceded by a company of kilted and plaided pipers, skirling the wild music of their mountain pibroch on the air. From Stirling the route skirts the Ochil Hills, passing Dumblane, where dwelt the " sweet Jessie " of the song, and "Bonny Doune," with its banks and braes to Callander, where first we hear the Gaelic speech. Here we take open coaches for the ride through the Trossach pass. The whole region is rife with associations of the winsome Lady of the Lake, and the scarlet-coated guard points out with effusion the scenes where took place the varied incidents of the poem. The scenery I must confess, after the loveliness of Como, and the grandeur of Lucerne, seemed bleak and tame; but the genius of the poet has invested it with an undying charm. We would hardly be surprised to hear the wind- Glasgow). ing of a hunting horn and to see Fitz James and Roderich Dhu start up from the hazel thickets of the deep and tangled glen. Reaching Loch Katrine was ever seen " so lone a lake, so sweet a strand " ? we traverse its mountain-girdled O expanse past fair Ellen's Isle, floating double on the wave and the Silver Strand where she met King James ; and again take coaches, and in a pouring rain reach Inversnaid, grandly situated on the steep slopes of Loch Lomond. Here Wolfe was once quartered to repress the depredations of the wild Highland clans under Rob Roy, whose cairn and birthplace and grave are shown. The sail down this inany- isled lake gives glimpses of stern Ben Lomond frowning through his misty shroud. Passing in view of the majestic Dumbarton Rock flung by the fiends after St. Patrick, when he fled from their persecution to Ireland, says the legend we reach the crowded port and busy mart of Glas- gow. The chief glory of Glasgow is St. Mungo's church, dating from 1123. Its stained glass is the finest I saw in Europe. Its vast and majestic crypts are celebrated in " Rob Roy." The Reformers were content with destroy- ing the images, so that it is, as Bailie Nichol Jar vie expressed it, " as crouse as a cat wi' the flaes kaimed aft'." The large church-yard is literally paved with grave- stones. Among the notable names in the adjacent Ne- cropolis, I noticed those of Motherwell, Sheridan Knowles, Alexander Smith, Dr. Eadie, Dr. Wardlaw, and the ceno- 570 A Canadian in taphs of Knox, and of Hamilton and Wishart, burned at St. Andrews, 1528 and 1546. The chief relics of the old city are the Trongate and " Saut Market," where dwelt the honest Bailie. The region is now the purlieus Fingal's Cave, Isle of Staffa. 371 of poverty and vice. Nowhere have I seen greater squalor and wretchedness. Hundreds of idle men with grimy faces and greasy clothes glowered at me as I passed. A day or two later in a bread riot they rifled a baker's shop. Yet in this poorest region the gin-shops most abounded, and wretched creatures, frowsy men and bareheaded, bare- footed women swarmed in and out " like bees about their straw-built citadel." It is a short sail from Glasgow through the grand scenery of the Western Isles to Scotland's greatest natural curiosity Fingal's cave in the Isle of Staffa. Staffa is only a mile in circumference, but its entire fagade, and the arches and flooring of the caves strangely resemble architectural de- signs. The special wonder however is Fingal's Cave ; the sides and front of which are formed of perpendicular basaltic columns. The arch is 70 feet high and supports a roof 30 feet thick. The chasm extends in length 230 feet. Mere dimensions however can give no idea of the weird effect produced by the twilight gloom, half revealing the varying sheen of the reflected light ; the echo of the measured surge as it rises and falls, and the profound and fairy solitude of the whole scene. Our engravings give remote and near views of this remarkable cave. The columnar structure of the rocks and the tesselated pave- ment of the floor will be observed. I crossed by night from Glasgow to Belfast. It rained all the time I was in Ireland, so I have rather depressing recol- lections of the country. Belfast seemed thriving and active 372 A Canadian in Europe. much more so than Dublin. In spite of the rain the people whom I met seemed determined, like Mark Tapley, to be as jolly as possible under adverse circumstances. " I'm the man kin tell ye all about it," said a tram-car conductor of Dublin. 373 whom I asked some question. " It's ten years in the police force I was," and he gave the history of every noteworthy house that we passed. He seemed to know everyone. He would tip a wink to a pretty nursemaid in a window, and a nod to a friend in the street, and a merry jest to the pas- sengers as they entered the car. My route to Dublin traversed an amphibious region, where " the foinest pisantry in the woruld, sorr," were striving, in the month of September, to harvest their crop of hay which was drifting about the fields. Their little crofts and glebes and thatched cottages looked very poverty-stricken. The country is well called the Emerald Isle. Vegetation of such vivid green I never saw. But this was by no means characteristic of the people, who were anything but verdant bright, witty and cheerful in spite of their poverty. The men wore superannuated beaver hats and long ulster coats, some of which, as speci- mens of patching, were works of art. One could hardly tell the original fabric, arid, like Joseph's coat, they were of many colours. Anything more dreary than the water- soaked, black turf bogs it would be hard to conceive. At Drogheda, an ancient town which has had more than its share of Ireland's woes, I crossed the Boyne in full view of the battlefield on which the star of the Stuarts sot for ever. The finest thing I saw in Dublin was Trinity College. Indeed not even Oxford has as large and wealthy a foun- dation. In " College Green," so called, I suppose, more 374 A Canadian in Europe. Hibernico, because it has not a blade of grass, stands the most preposterous equestrian statue in the world that of William III. One would think the man who made it never saw a horse in his life. As I strolled through the old Parlia- ment House, now a bank, I asked a servant if he would like Home Rule again. " Some might, belike," he said, " not I ; shure, what's the differ ?" which cheerful philos- ophy I did not seek to disturb. St. Patrick's Cathedral is said to have been founded by its patron saint, A.D. 448. If that be so, it has done little for its environment in those 1400 years, for it has around it the most squalid purlieus of the town, which is saying a good deal. The Liffy, the Four Courts, Nelson's Monument, and the "Phaynix Park" provoke the pride of every patriot, and not without due cause. The Castle, a stern feudal tower, is characterized by strength rather than beauty. The carving in the Chapel Royal is superb. The custode looked just like Dickens, and was such an eloquent gentle- man that I had to double my intended fee. A ride in wind and rain over stony streets, in a jaunting car it should be spelled j-o-l-t-i-n-g car does not make one long for a repetition of the experiment. I had to hang on, metaphorically, " with tooth and nail." I suppose it is a little better than riding on a rail, but I am not sure. Next day I crossed to Holyhead in one of the swift mail steamers which are subject to a penalty of 34s. per minute if the mails are delayed. The bold Welsh coast presents a rugged front, but few lovelier views than that of Menai Straits and Bridge can meet the eye. The scenery of North Wales is bold but bare. The country is almost treeless, and is divided into small fields by stone fences. The villages are clumps of low- walled, small stone houses, and the mountains roll away in purple billows to the cloudy distance. The towers and castles built to over- awe the Welsh, are grim memorials of a bygone age. Especially fine are Conway and Denbigh Castles. Some of the mines have been worked from the times of the Romans. I saw acres of slates stacked up, enough, it seemed, to roof all the houses in the world. The old city of Chester deserves a longer visit than I could give it. Its walls " grey with the memories of two thousand years," mark the camp of the Roman legions, and much of their work still remains. I walked all around the lofty ramparts. From one of the towers Charles I. watched the defeat of his army on Bolton Moor. Cromwell's cannon have left his bold sign manual upon the walls. The new bridge across the Dee has a span of 200 feet, the widest stone arch in the world. The most curious feature of the city is its Rows, or doul .It- terraces of shops, the upper one fronting on a broad arcade. The old timbered houses have quaintly-carved fronts, galleries and gables, like those in Frankfort, often with some Biblical or allegorical design. Of special interest is one which bears the legend, '# providence is mine phwtancc. mrtclii. A Canadian in Ettropt. said to be the only house which escaped the plague in that year. To reach the town house of an old Earl of Derby a handsome place during the civil wars I had to pass through an alley only two feet wide. It is now a sort of junk shop so fallen is its high estate. A young girl showed me the hiding place in the roof where the Earl lay concealed for days til] he was discovered, taken to Bolton and executed for his fidelity to his king. It is a ride of only sixteen miles to Liverpool, and next day I found my old quarters on the S.S. Dominion, en route for Canada. One of the pleasures of going abroad, to speak Hibernically, is that of coming home again ; and one of its most important lessons is that no land under the sun furnishes for the average mortal happier con- ditions of existence than our own beloved Canada. Many of those old historic lands of Europe are charming places to visit, but they are also excellent places to leave. The struggle for a bare livelihood is more keen, the chances of success are less assured, and educational and social advan- tages are less easily attainable than in our own favoured land. Untrammelled by the fetters of the past, with almost boundless extent and inexhaustible resources, it offers to its sons a fairer heritage than is, I think, to be found else- where on earth. Land of my birth, " WHERE'ER I ROAM, WHATEVER REALMS TO SEE, MY HEAET UNTRAVELLED FONDLY TURNS TO THEE. " THE END,