I YAIE UNIVERSITY I IBRARY Jill 3 9002 06794 6492 SKETCHES FROM ATOUR through HOLLAND and GERMANY t oL dj cu . 8 S 8 A ©ft ¦/JW THE GROOTE KERK, DORDRECHT. [Front. NVLLA DIES SINE LINEA. Sketches FROM A TOUR THROUGH LONDON Macmillan&co 1889 iv- HIS HIGHNESS prince Eowarb of Saye^TKHeimar IN ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS MANY KINDNESSES. PREFACE. The first thing the authors desire to state is that this book is really a joint-stock undertaking, in which neither has performed his part without constant suggestion and correction from the other, so that they may both bear the burden of any faults or mistakes which it contains. This is the grave and modest way of coming before the public which they desire to adopt at the outset, for without some such admission the fury of the critics cannot be appeased, and a confession of infirmities often acts as a kind of sacrificial cloud of incense, which hides the real weaknesses from view. On the other hand each of the authors may fairly hope, if their several parts are not indicated, that his particular friends will attribute all the faults to the other, and so each will be able to enjoy the unqualified flattery which every writer expects vi Preface. from his immediate admirers. But if any im pertinent person should insist upon asking why they should write and draw about countries which have been so fully described in current guide books, like Baedeker's, they have to reply that without venturing to rival the profound philosophy and poetic fervour of the great German, there was room for a modest book touching upon many vulgar things which he would not condescend to mention. They have indeed ventured to steal a lofty epigram from his description of the Felsen- keller at Giessen, and this adorns their title-page ; but they have feared to dilate more fully upon this admirable aspect of German life, though it has given peace and comfort to many minds. In the words of a neglected poet — Im Felsenkeller sitzt der Mann, Er lasst sich nicht verdriessen ; Denn Bier und schone Aussicht kann Geniessen er in Giessen. Quite apart from this aesthetic difference, there is such a wealth of suggestion in the larger official guide-books, that many people are quite perplexed when they open them. It is therefore not with- Preface. vii out use to propound a moderate and definite scope which can be compassed within moderate limits of time and money, and will yet give the British or American citizen the satisfaction of boasting to his friends that he is going to travel, and the still greater satisfaction of talking about his travels when he has returned. More especially if he has failed to see anything, or to remember what he has seen, during his travels, this little book may serve to remind him of what he ought to have seen, and will furnish him, if not with directions before he starts, at least with sugges tions after his return, for which he may possibly feel grateful. Travelling is no longer restricted to English lords or American millionaires. It can be enjoyed by people of very moderate means, provided they will go about it in the right way. Thus the poet already quoted gives us the following affecting confession, which the poorer classes may take to heart : Ich bin gewiss ein armer Mann, Muss immer sparen, was ich kann, Und weil ich nicht hab' Geld gemig, Muss reisen mit dem Bummelzug. viii Prejace. He might have added that he must be content with cheap German beer and cheap cigars. But with modest people quantity makes up for quality ; and there was at least one member of the present party to whom these enjoyments seemed not less important than churches and treasures. Another of the keenest and cheapest enjoy ments of travel is the reflection upon those points in manners and customs which contrast with the observer's own traditions, and are therefore set down by him as objects of ridicule. The authors have felt themselves justified in introducing a good many features of this kind into the present volume, both from vulgar satisfaction, and be cause they felt that the sweetness of all the eulogy lavished on art and architecture required the acid of some criticism upon life and manners to make it more palatable. But they here con fess that they are aware how these foibles are what strikes the stranger at first sight, whereas the deeper and larger qualities of a nation only come out by the friction of a longer intercourse. They are however also aware that the observer who qualifies every statement with a view to beino- Preface. ix just, generally succeeds in being tedious. Yet even at this risk they cannot conclude this preface without saying a word of apology to Luther's swan, whom they may have maligned by suspect ing him of being a mere superlative of St. Martin's goose. Being doubtful of this conjecture, they set into play mighty forces to attain a better solution. They besought a German prince to interfere, who directed a German Professor to inquire what was the history of this allegory. The Professor with the greatest zeal and kindness ransacked his University library as well as his brains, and tells us that the swan in question must be connected with the coat of arms of the Luther family. Neither the old escutcheon of the family nor the device, which the Reformer (very coolly) invented for himself, contains a swan, but a later member of the clan adopted a swan as the helmet ornament in addition to his arms. The popularity of this emblem was probably caused by the dying words so widely attributed to John Huss at the moment of his martyrdom. Huss means goose in Bohemian. He said, " You are now going to roast a goose, but from its ashes will rise a swan x Preface. that you will not be able to roast." It seems that from this ghastly joke comes the general identification of Luther with the swan. May this interpretation sink into the reader's heart, and contribute to his moral good ! November \$th, 1 888. CONTENTS. TAGE PREAMBLE . . i CHAPTER I. DOWN THE THAMES . . ... .7 CHAPTER II. DORDRECHT .... .20 CHAPTER III. LEIDEN AND HAARLEM . . 46 CHAPTER IV. AUOUT THE ZUIDER ZEE 64 ENKHUIZEN . .... Si CHAPTER V. MISCELLANEOUS GLEANINGS . . . . 9 1 xii Contents. CHAPTER VI. PAGE CENTRAL GERMANY. BRUNSWICK— ROMANESQUE CHURCHES. 106 CHAPTER VII. HELMSTEDT . . 131 H1LDESHE1M . -137 CHAPTER VIII. MARBURG . 145 FULDA ... . . 161 CHAPTER IX. IN THE COUNTRY .... ... . . . . 168 CHAPTER X. GERMANY — SOME BALTIC TOWNS . . 179 WISMAR ... 201 CHAPTER XI. LUBECK . 212 LUNEBERG . 221 HAMBURG . . 22? CHAPTER XII. ON THE WAY HOME 2,7 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. THE GROOTE KERK, DORDRECHT. . . Front. THAMES BARGES . OX THE RIVER, DORDRECHT THE OLD GATE, DORT SCULPTURE OVER THE OLD GATE, DORT . DORDRECHT, FROM PAPPENDRECHT . DUTCH BARGES THE SAFEST HOUSE IN DORT .... STREET CANAL IN DORDRECHT GATEWAY TO THE OLD VROUWENHUIS, DORT . THE WATERGATE, GORKUM THE OLD SYNOD HOUSE PART OF A HOUSE IN THE WIJN STRAAT HET WITTE PAARD (THE WHITE HORSE) . EVENING AT ZWIJNDRECHT . LION OVER THE GATEWAY OF THE BURG, LEIDEN . DES CARTES' HOUSE AT ENDEGEEST — NEAR LEIDEN . THE CATHEDRAL OF BOIS LE DUC THE AMSTERDAM GATE AT HAARLEM . RUDDER OF A KEEN .... MEDALLION OF ADMIRAL DE RUYTER. THE EAST GATE OF HOORN . WATER TOWER AT HOORN . 13 21232/ 3° 33 35 37 39 42 44 45 4951 55 56 61 63 66 6S69 xiv List of Illustrations. GROTIUS FARM HOUSE NEAR HOORN . HOUSE DECORATION, ALKMAAR . THE WEIGH-HOUSE, ALKMAAR VIEW OF THE PORT AT ENKHUIZEN KIPPER OF THE ZUIDER ZEE STERN OF A TJALK A TJALK FROM THE ZUIDER ZEE CHURCH AT EGMOND HOEF . WATER GATE AT AMERSFOORT (1670) WATER GATE AT AMERSFOORT (1888) DES CARTES' HOUSE AT EGMOND BINNEN THE CAS'JXE OF LOEWENSTEIN, THE PRISON OF AT BOIS-LE-DUC WATER GATE, WOUDRICHEM . EGMOND AAN ZEE . WINDMILL AT LEHRTE . OLD HOUSE IN AMERSFOORT ORNAMENT FROM A BRUNSWICK OLD HOUSE IN BRUNSWICK . OLD COURTYARD (BRUNSWICK) A STREET IN BRUNSWICK . OLD PUMP IN SAME COURTYARD MAGNI K1RCHE, BRUNSWICK CHALICE IN THE BRUDERNKIRCHE, BRUNSWICK ANCIENT IRISH COFFER, IN THE MUSEUM AT BRUNSWICK 7TH CENTURY THE JUL^UM AT HELMSTEDT STAIRS TO TOWER OVER GATE AT HELMSTEDT ANDREASPLATZ, HILDESHEIM THE KAISERHAUS, HILDESHEIM ... THE SCHLOSS, MARBURG ... . . THE HEXENTHURM AT THE SCHLOSS GATE, MARBURG HOUSE 74 7779 83 8587 90 9697 9899 100 102103 105108 1091 10 111 112 i'3 116118I23 127 133 135Ui H5 151 •54 List of Illustrations. \v l-AGE HOUSE AT MARBURG . . 1 59 THE WAKTBURG FROM THE WEST . . . 171 LUTHER'S STUDY 1 75 TOWER OF MARIEN KIRCHE, GREIFSWALD . . .182 ON THE MARKET PLACE, GREIFSWALD ... 184 STRALSUND, FROM RUGEN .185 THE SEMLOWER GATE, STRALSUND . . . 187 INSIDE THE RATHHAUS, STRALSUND ... . 189 PART OF EXTERIOR OF RATHHAUS, STRALSUND . . 190 MARIEN KIRCHE, STRALSUND 191 A GABLE AT ROSTOCK . . . . . . 195 UPPER PART OF TOWER MARIEN KIRCHE, ROSTOCK . . 1 96 ROSTOCK FROM THE OPPOSITE SIDE OF THE ESTUARY . 1 97 THE WEST GATE AT ROSTOCK ... . 200 TOWER OF ST. GEORGE'S CHURCH, WISMAR . 204 NICOLAI KIRCHE, WISMAR . 209 CATHEDRAL OF LUBECK ... 213 INTERIOR OF SCHIFFERHAUS, LUBECK . 215 THE BURGTHOR, LUBECK .217 LUBECK — GENERAL VIEW . . . 219 THE RATHHAUS, LUNEBURG ... . 224 A BIT OF OLD HAMBURG LEFT STANDING . . 226 A BIT OF OLD HAMBURG RECENTLY PULLED DOWN . . 229 OLD HOUSES IN HAMBURG .... .237 TOWN HALL OF M1DDELBURG ... . 262 QUEENBOROUGH IN HOGARTH'S TIME . . 264 QUEENBOROUGH AS AT PRESENT . . .265 A TOUR IN HOLLAND AND GERMANY. PREAMBLE. modern travellers may be regarded as followers of a great but unin telligible man, the philo sopher Hegel. Did we say great but unin telligible ? We should have said great though unintelligible. Or rather great because he was unintelligible. For it seems the glory of the nineteenth century to have discovered that E A Tour in Holland and Germany. even the enjoyment of beauty must not be obvious ; there must be obscurities and com plications in anything that is truly beautiful " in and for itself." If you want real poetry, you must go to Robert Browning, and take care to avoid what he has written easily and fluently ; if you want real music, you must go to Wag ner, and select those works where he carefully avoids staying in one key for more than one bar. And so it is if you desire to delight the eye with real beauty. You must not pursue the vulgar and obvious track of the Rhine and Switzerland, you must not be fascinated by crude peaks of snow and boundless wastes of ice ; you must go and sec what to the vulgar herd appears dull and sleepy, or dirty and confused, and there you must detect , hidden delicacies of an aesthetic beauty far beyond the ordinary loveliness recognised by any common person. This last illustration brings us back to what we said about Hegel. That lofty thinker declared that contradictions were not a real thing, but only phases of something higher in which the opposite sides coalesce. Black and Preamble. ¦ 3 white were only a vulgar one-sided way of seeing things ; the real thinker combined the two in a nondescript gray. Right and wrong were only lower phases of an ignorant and bigoted mind ; both would be reconciled in some higher view, and merged in a nobler indifference. This, by the way, may console the passable young lady, who is neither lovely nor hideous. She has combined both the partial and therefore imperfect kinds of looks into that indiscrimin- able higher unity which leads towards the purer categories of thought. And as Hegel applied his philosophy to all human life, we need no apology for applying it to modern travelling. Every body wants to see what others have seen, and at the same time to see what others have not seen. You are bound to know what other travellers talk about, and to go upon their track, but you are not really happy till you find they have missed something that you saw ; still more that you have taken a route unknown to civilised men, and seen what nobody else has seen. We are all trying to work these contra- b 2 A Tour in Holland and Germany. dictions together ; and it is hard to say whether people lose more by avoiding or by following the beaten tracks. Some will tell you, and with great truth, that travelling begins where railways end. Others have, it that by follow ing the iron line you must tap all the centres of human civilisation, as well as all the hidden beauties of nature which men have gradually discovered and recognised. So then the best way seems to be to follow the great doctrine of philosophical compromise, and say that the black of London and the white of the Alps must be merged in some intermediate fog which reduces both to the same colour. Happily the centres of culture are bordered by outlying country seldom disturbed or de bauched by the tourist ; the palaces of the rich in our cities are backed by the cellars and tenements of the poor ; and alas ! the midnight howl in the squalid alley too often reaches to the luxurious chamber of the refined maiden. In this case, therefore, it is easy to get hold of the contra dictions ; not so easy to weld them together into the higher unity, or if that be done, to Preamble. 5 make this loftier indifference as palatable to the public as the plain vulgar black and white. Perhaps the best hope is that the strong colours will be perceived as they turn up, and that those who are not deep thinkers will not trouble themselves about any reconciliation. For the public (and we here almost confess that we agree with that abstraction) is not usually concerned with things " in and for them selves," but only " as they appear." This is the language of the schools ; we shall endeavour to represent the latter sort of knowledge in the ensuing chapters. It is worth adding for the reader's orien tation, that the field we travelled over may be divided into three tolerably distinct groups — Holland, Central Germany, and the Baltic coast. What else is in the book is mere transition to or from these. The impressions derived from conversation with the people are set down as we heard them talk, and questioned them ; but these judgments do not claim to be more than passing impressions, and are of course liable to the risks of all such informa- A Tour in Holland and Germany. tion. Still it may be interesting to know what aspects German life showed to those who saw it just at the crisis of the second Imperial accession, and who heard the consequent fore casts of a new policy. CHAPTER I. Down the Thames. VERYBODY is in such a hurry now, that even those who despise the dolours of the sea have got the habit of going by rail as far as they can, and taking the shortest sea passage abroad, generally by night, and yet by so doing they miss the most picturesque of all busy scenes, the crowded river, the dense shipping, the intense variety of our rivers and estuaries. Of these none is to be compared with the Thames for splendour, and yet how few people travel cS A Tour in Holland and Germany. it, and travel it by day ; how many go down to Oueenborough or Harwich in the evening in order to escape this remarkable journey ! The great picture of Mr. Vicat Cole in the Royal Academy of 1S88 has awakened a good many minds to the splendour of the Thames in the way of real picturesqueness, and so it may be hoped that many more will avail them selves of the old Baron Osy, which starts at midday, and goes direct to Antwerp. It is a boat good enough in the way of comfort for any person who deserves to travel ; our captain was enough to put anybody in a good humour, being a perfect specimen of that vigorous, prompt, friendly seaman who makes Englishmen so vain of themselves, and so fully convinced that after all the real flower of humanity is to be found in Great Britain. It is an odd thing that modesty and benevolence in one man should induce vices nearly the opposite in those that admire him, and so far I suppose the captain is to be blamed. But how can he help it ? He has to manage a motley cargo — ranging, as we found it, from a pair of kangaroos, a pair of Down the Thames. 9 race horses, and cases of fireworks, to a set of passengers of various nations, most of them with no more brains than the kangaroos, without the breeding of the race horses — we cannot answer for their explosiveness, for the captain took as much care to keep them cool as he did with the fireworks. So far then as the negative conditions of enjoyment went, nothing could be more satis factory. But what about the positive side ? Well, if Mr. Vicat Cole had been painting every half mile of the river, he might have produced a whole gallery of pictures not inferior in interest to his ' Thames Pool ' below London Bridge. It is indeed not very easy to find the point from which he took his view, bringing St. Paul's into his canvas at no great distance, and still keeping the bridge and the hideous line of the Cannon Street station out of view. But in any case it must have been at the Southwark side, and somewhere opposite the Tower, if it be strictly a reality, and not a poem, bringing together many of the myriad beauties which crowd that wonderful highway of men, io A Tour in Holland and Germany. and passing by the stray blots of ugliness as irrelevant. Aristotle said long ago that dramatic poetry was more philosophical than history, because it selected what was splendid and typical, and neglected vulgar and idle minutiae ; and so I suppose it is with art. Even if a photograph of the view could be coloured per fectly, how far would it fall below Mr. Cole's canvas ? What is it that makes this crowd of things — many of them not in themselves beautiful — so strange and interesting ? In the first place a great crowd of shipping is always fascinating from the real grace and the variety of its forms ; still more such a crowd in various motion, and vet all that motion up, down, across, to and fro, rvthmical and graceful. The motion of water itself, and of things on water, is always beautiful, and there is a great deal of rapid and powerful motion on the Thames, which reconciles us with its dull and muddy colour. Mr. Cole has perhaps exaggerated the heavy sea which he has painted in his picture, but the race of the tide is strong, and the eddies round the anchored craft add greatlv to the life Dozvn the Thames. i i of the scene. The muddy colour too harmonises with all the various browns and grays, and with the smoky atmosphere which makes them all blend together, and which softens all the harshnesses of outline or of colour that mieht offend the eye. For amid all the browns and grays of wharfs and walls, and dingy boats, there are wonderful patches of colour, reminding us of the bright ness of Adriatic or Levantine shipping. The inner surface of the boats is frequently painted blue, or scarlet, unless the sails are dyed olive green, in which case there seemed to be some tacit agreement that the boat should, show yellow. The olive, green sail, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all, is not very frequent., nor is the coal-black, but both occur along with the dingy yellow of ochre, and two shades of chocolate brown, one deep, and one ruddy like the coat of a red cow. Now and then several of these colours' are boldly patched upon the sail, and give the variety of piebald which Nature has de clared to be one of her liveries — in dogs, cats, and even in wild horses. We add this lest the unwary i 2 A Tour in Holland and Germany. reader should silently contradict us, and hold that piebald is always the result of artificial crossing. The hulls of these barges show a design which has probably lasted unchanged for centuries, less changed, perhaps, than the Dutch barges, which are old-fashioned enough. But in the Thames, the bow and stern only show high above the water, which washes with every passing steamer over the middle of the boat, unopposed by any bulwark, but merely by the convex surface of the battened down deck. Their visible cargoes were as various as their forms, great loads of timber affording large almost straw colour patches which were perhaps the most prominent in all the scene. There is too a curious combination of business and leisure about them. You feel that the owners are working hard to earn their bread, and yet you feel that their time is not very precious, for they can afford to spend long days and nights wandering up and down the great river. The steamers hurrying through them exhibit by contrast the slowness of all this work. Then there are all kinds of permanent settlements on the water ; the old Castalia we saw turned into a floating hospital ; Down the Thames. \ 3 and there are powder-boats and old hulks of men-of-war, when you reach the naval stations, : i THAMES BARGES (cj. also p. which make you feel as if you had come into one of the great lumber-rooms of the world, in spite of all its thrift and industry. 14 A Tour in Holland and Germany. But to dilate on the particulars of these sixty miles would fill a volume and not a chapter. When we had left all this varied life, and looked with compassion upon Margate, the blessed holy-day ground of the hard-wrought London Cockney, we had at last leisure on the open sea to devise some plan or general notion of what we should visit, and what special feature in the old towns we should illustrate. As the contact of Late Gothic and Early Renaissance art is the principal moment in German and Dutch building, and is also one of the most interesting and various, we thought it should be one of our principal objects. Wherever Irish remains were to be found in outlying places were also to be noted. The combination of the two former styles is so common that we felt sure it would give us ample materials, and we came upon it at the very outset in Antwerp, where the magnificent spire of the Cathedral, which looks at you miles away as you ascend the Scheldt, is a striking instance of it. The architect seems to have lost his sense of Gothic design when he got near the top, and the highest pinnacle is as unmeaning as the Up the Scheldt. pinnacles of Sir John Vanbrugh, while the lower portions are not to be surpassed for elegance and refinement. The very same combination may be seen in the town of Dordrecht on our frontispiece. There is plenty of time too to wonder at this astonishing structure at Antwerp, for the Scheldt is very dead in interest compared to the Thames as we. have just seen it. The traveller must fall back on his sporting instincts, when he may look with enthusiasm on the sedgy banks and flats as the happy hunting-ground for duck and snipe. It is a deep and absorbing in terest in its way, but only to be mentioned here by way of strong contrast. As far as actual trial goes many brave Englishmen would vastly prefer the busy idleness of a duck-punt on the Scheldt to the idle business of a hay-barge upon the Thames. There are people to whom each seems the finis bonorum. while the other is the in supportable opposite. We are not going to talk about Antwerp, be cause it is only on the way to our real destination ; and besides everybody knows Antwerp so well — or thinks he does. To a novice in travelling 1 6 A Tour in Holland and Germany. there are sundry trifles however which will show him he has left that inestimable England behind, and has arrived in the home of the ' unprincipled foreigner.' We need not talk ol the cooking — fresh ham roast like a leg of mutton, eels stewed with cockles, and the like. But when he sees railway porters smoking cigars, and little boys with well - coloured cigarette holders puffing away in the street under the eye of their parents ; when he sees a sportsman returning with his gun rolled up in a newspaper, and tied round with a string ; when he sees not only an officer in uniform with an umbrella,' but shepherds in the fields attending their flocks under umbrellas — he may begin to feel for the first time an alarming doubt as regards his first principle — that all the world is, or ought to be, trying to imitate England. It will be well for him, after seeing these horrible things out of the train, to go straight to the Musde Plant in, which will show him, 1 The nearest thing to this in England is to be seen in the Tower, where the beefeaters protect their fancy dress with umbrellas. But then the present dress is said to have been the concoction of the late Prince Consort's brain. Anizvcrp. 1 7 better perhaps than any other spot in Europe, how the foreign patrician of the sixteenth century lived and did his work. We use patrician in the mediaeval, not the classical sense. But here are not only the workshops, the press, the tools, the loose sheets, the types of the great arch-printer who flourished under the favour of Philip II., but all the dwelling rooms, the Rubens pictures, the beautiful furniture, the dignity and comfort of a great merchant in a great mercantile society. You may there see what so many Englishmen ought to have beaten into them — that you may be a rich tradesman without being showy, and sell goods across a counter without being vulgar. But have we not promised to say nothing about Antwerp ? Otherwise, we should write a panegyric on that other patrician fashion of old Antwerp, of setting up in the chapels of St. Jacques portraits of yourself and your wife, each with a missal, praying, and between you the inscription of your names and your bene faction. Or, if not this, then they dedicated some precious masterpiece of a great painter as 1 8 A Tour in Holland ana Germany. a memorial. Are there not memorials far more worthy and more artistic too than brasses and stained glass windows ? But if these things be profitable for English men, the way into Holland is eminently so for an Irishman of patriotic inclinations, who parades the poverty of his countrymen. For in North Belgium) if anywhere, he will see how land can be utilised, how every inch is tilled, how people work in the fields on wet nights (without umbrellas) up to eight o'clock, so that the produce of each acre exceeds the profit of each correspondingly good acre in Ireland by 50 or 60 per cent. These farmers are centuries ahead of the western Celt in care, in diligence, and in education. Nature is there taught to obey, and not run riot ; but men also have • been taught that this can only be done by labour — improbus labor, if you like — not by talking of poverty and politics, not by heating themselves with discussion and with drink. So perfectly have they subdued their mother earth, that they tyrannise over her laws, and warp her intentions after the most capricious designs. This Dutch domineering over Dutch Gardening. \ g Nature we saw first in garden walls covered with foliage. The design for example in one case was a series of large panels, of which the frames were in the rich pink and brown of well-clipped copper beech, while the centres were of luxuriant ivy. A more perfect piece of artificial gardening could hardly be im agined, but artificial it is, in the strict sense of being opposed to what is natural, and there fore wanting in regularity and precision. C 2 CHAPTER II. Dordrecht. are now in Dor drecht, the home and centre of much that is most distinc tive in Dutch life. The place is more over a little out of the beaten track, and, though still boasting- of considerable trade, does not attract either the tourist or the fashionable, so that much remains in the way of old-school dress and manners. In architecture, on the other hand, the Dord- rechters seem not to have attained to the new ON THE RIVER, DORDRECHT, P. 21 THE OLD GATE, DORT. 2d A Tour in Holland and Germany. religion of preserving what is old, but are still in the slough of the early Queen Victoria, or the ante-Revolution period of modern Europe, so that they are yearly replacing inestimable relics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the worst early nineteenth century style. It seems not only better to illustrate fully one such town, but a religious duty, seeing that a few more years may sweep away much that is now untouched, which gives this city its meaning and connection with the history of its country and its art. Here too one of us had lived for a little time, and had ranged artistically round the place, to study with care its best aspects. Any one can read in the guide-books a sketch of the history, nor is it worth while to repeat superficial things about it here. But luckily the old gate still remains, with a bust and inscription dated 1618, the year of the Synod. There is no reason to think the date and ornaments later than the actual building, which commemorates the pax et concordia of the United Provinces at the very time that they came to wrangle hopelessly about their dogmas. Dordrecht. -D But the busts in toga and in armour, over both outside and inside arches, are interesting as having given rise to a local tradition, that the SCUlPICKt OVER THE OLD GATE, DORT. outer is the terrible Alva in good humour. when he first came to Holland, the inner (which represents a totally different person) Alva in 26 A Tour 111 Holland and Germany. anger after the insurrection. We sought in vain to persuade a worthy Dutch artist, who told us the story, that such a dedication to a great national enemy was impossible in 1618, and that, had Alva been put up there during his life, by this time his bust would infallibly have disappeared. Our friend retorted that they had all been taught it at school, and therefore it must be true. By and by we found another man to tell us that the outer bust was Egmond. The obvious person for such a place at such a date is surely Count Maurice of Orange, then Stadtholder. Dordrecht is, like most Dutch towns, permeated by water. It lies moreover upon a fine river (the Maas), which is not often the case. There are water streets, and water fences along roads and round rich villas — an admirable substitute for the hideous and selfish walls so common in England. There are boats and barges, rafts of timber and ships everywhere ; and we quarrelled over the relative beauty of Thames and Maas barges. Interesting also was a Dutch yacht, built on the lines of a barge, and rather like a small Spanish galleon, but Dordrecht. o g of very well polished oak, with rich appointments, and ample cabin room — altogether a home of comfort if not a model for speed. The com bination of warehouses with private mansions illustrates the close connection of Dutch society with commerce and the consequent respect in which the latter is held. It was blowing half a gale when we saw all this various assemblage of craft rocking and swaying in the Maas, and very characteristic of the country it was. The Dutch sea-pieces with flying clouds and rough waves came up vividly before the mind's eye, and, by the way, it ought to be remarked, that on the very wide but shal low surfaces of these estuaries there is a short, choppy sea, which, when accurately painted by the local masters, looks quite conventional to us who live beside a deep ocean, whereas it is strictly true to nature. The Dutch barge (under which term are included the various species known to the nautical expert as tjalk, schuyt, keen, pink, and other names which we cannot recall) is like its sister of the Thames flat-bottomed, and carries lee 30 A Tour in Holland and Germany. boards, which act as a keel in preventing the vessel from drifting to leeward. The difference between DUTCH BARGES. the two kinds of craft consists in the shape and colour of the hulls, the position of the cabin, Dordrecht (which in the Thames barge is below deck, in the Dutch on deck), and in the mode of setting the sails. The cabin or deck house, the abode of the skipper and his family, is painted as a rule a bright green, picked out with black, white and red, and being in charge of the skipper's wife is of course kept scrupulously clean. The after part of the vessel where the cabin is placed is treated with great honour, the brass- work kept bright, ropes nicely. coiled, and brilliant flowers in pots or boxes give an air of do mesticity to the barge which would be impos sible in the Thames craft, owing to the heavy seas it has often to encounter off the Kentish and Essex coasts. The top of the rudder is painted green, and the tiller often elaborately carved and gilt. The hulls are never painted, but varnished with Stockholm tar, which gives great richness and variety of colour and brings out all the natural beauties of the timber. The shape of the hull does not appear to have changed since Van de Velde's time, but the mainsail is now hoisted 32 A Tour iu Holland and Germany. with a gaff instead of a sprit — the old arrangement which is still retained on the Thames. Next to the water, as a great natural feature, are the splendid avenues of trees, mostly elms, which line almost every street. They are grown with perfect regularity, with tall straight stems, and a great crown of leaves shading the roofs of the houses. Probably the moisture of the fencing canals feeds the roots, for they all look in splendid health, nor did we notice a gap or failure anywhere. All roads in the countrv round about are planted in the same way, but not very long ago, for the trees though fine and tall were in no case old forest trees. The fashion does not seem older in this district than the present century. In strong contrast to the straightness of the trees is the slant of many of the buildings, both church towers and house walls often leaning alarmingly out of the perpendicular. The state looks carefully after these cases, and demands yearly reports as to their safety. Here is one, the residence of our artist friend, M. Carlebur, which is declared to be the 'safest house in Dort.' Dordrecht. oo Most of the picturesque gabled house-fronts are dated, varying from 1500 — 1650, and give an excellent idea of the domestic archi tecture of the time. The rich colouring of these fronts is generally produced by courses of various bricks, brown and yellow being the usual contrast. Ornamental iron clamps or anchors1 are visible on almost every one of them. It is not easy, without bright colouring, to give the effect of a Dutch street-canal, and yet at every turn there is some thing so picturesque that we longed to record it. The an- j, nexed cut (p. 35) is an average specimen, combining as usual, 1 Cf. the specimen given below in cut at the end of the chapter. THE SAFEST HOUSE IN DORT. 34 A Tour in Holland and Germany. a warehouse, a private residence, and a barge which may perhaps be said to combine both. Fine brass pots (cf. p. 20), for carrying milk , are in pairs at many doors, being carried by a yoke over the neck. They are polished and very bright in colour. We were glad to hear that the practice of mak ing dogs draw heavy loads is now condemned by public opinion, and will soon be prohibited by law. Even now it is illegal for the owner to sit in a cart drawn by a dog, though this is constantly done in the country, and we sometimes used to stop a cart of this kind, and compel the lazy men or boys to get out, which thev did without complaint. The dogs work with wonderful zeal and goodwill, and we did not see a single case of cruel use of the whip, or of urging an unwilling animal. On the contrary the creatures looked well fed and happy, and singularly eager to do their work, always pullincr even excessive loads with all their might. Still nothing can reconcile us with having our principal four-footed friend degraded to the level of a working slave. The people are however far kinder to their cattle than in Southern Europe ; STREET CANAL IN DORDRECHT. the horses, which are of the well-known Flemish type, so common in our older equestrian statues o 6 A Tour in Holland and Germany. and portraits, are well fed and not overloaded. Tortoise-shell cats seem the usual thing, and are often about the streets. The Groote Kerk in Dort is a very good speci men of the religious architecture of the country.1 In almost every city you find a late Gothic struc ture, of great height and dignity in conception, and furnished with a lofty tower for the steeple. The height is generally far more remarkable than the length, and while the material (dark brick) gives a fine tone to the exterior, it forbids the use of elaborate carving or tracery on the surfaces, so that they are plain and somewhat bald. From a distance therefore these churches, standing out high over the towns, and visible with their great towers far away, are very fine and imposing. The contrast of these churches to the secular architecture is the more marked, as so much of it is purely Renaissance. Here, for example (p. t>7), is a gateway (to the old Vrou- wenhuis) which we encountered by the way. But if the effect of the churches is somewhat 1 Cf. Frontispiece. GATEWAY TO THE OLD VROUWENHUIS, DORT. marred by the plainness of detail on the exterior surface, when you enter you get a severe shock. The whole interior is whitewashed, and all the D ;8 A Tour in Holland and Germany. ornaments of a church are gone. The Puritanical spirit of the people has made of them what it has made of the interior of St. Mungo's in Glasgow — a vast room without any meaning. The great whitewashed arches and vaults look unutterably cold and bare, and here in Dort you have the chancel totally deserted, and a crowd of old- fashioned eighteenth century pews round a vulgar Rococo pulpit in the nave, with a seat of dignity for the Burgomaster or Kerkmeister over against the pulpit. The Holy Communion is administered (I dare not say celebrated) in the middle of the church, some pews being cleared away to make place for the Table. Nothing sadder, colder, or more dismal can be imagined. There remain in this church, neglected and decaying, two magnificent rows of stalls, carved in the best early Renaissance style in oak, and dated 1460 and 1537. This splendid work has at least been left untouched, but is crackino- and threatening to fall to pieces in a few years. One of us remembered, at the tercentenary of Leiden University, going in full dress one very cold winter's day, to hear the Rector deliver his THE WATER GATE, GORKUM. P. 3«;. Dordi-echt. 4 1 state address from the pulpit of such a church. The effect of cold from the colour and appoint ments exceeded that of the temperature, so that we all emerged more dead than alive. We now learned that this freezing religion has lost its hold upon the people, and that a pious Dutchman is not easy to be found. We asked here to see the gold plate of the Groote Kerk, celebrated as the gift of a rich citizen, and dated 1735. It consists of great solid gold plates and very ugly solid gold chalices, with a large flagon in the shape of an ordinary jug with a lid. Most of the designs were repousses, and not good ; the shield and arms of the donor were very handsome, but appliques with the year of his birth and death (1680-1744). There was a complete series of silver vessels exactly copied from the gold, which were kept in the same safe, but used in another church in Dort. As they are only brought out four times a year they are quite new to look at, and without a dinge, but the silver is of a peculiar dull white colour, and not polished. Huge elm trees form a sort of close round D 2 42 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the great church, which stands out over them close to the river, and almost in the midst of the THE OLD SYNOD HOUSE. lovely shipping which crowds the arms of the Maas. Dordrecht. The Synod of Dort has always been a sort of household word in the history of Protestant dissent. The Hall of the Synod, like so many splen did old buildings in Holland, was taken down thirty years ago, and replaced by a building which records to posterity how ugly a thing may at some time be considered handsome. We are happy to give the famous old building from a litho graph showed us in the town. There is nothing more fascinating than the quiet diligence of this town, with its simple and worthy people. They brought us one evening to a club, where a military band was to give a concert, and we went expecting the usual thing. To our surprise, we found that the band (the Dutch Grenadier Guards' band) was a real or chestra, but for the strings, though they had two double basses to support their brass. But they had a quartet of horns, a quartet of oboes and bas soons, and most of them were solo players of high merit. No wonder that this band got second prize at the great competition of the Paris Exhibition. But this is by the way. For this is not what we came to see. 44 ^ Tour in Holland and Germany. \\ e have given a cut from Gorkum, in the neighbourhood of Dort. A word may here TART OF A HOUSE IN 1VIJX STRAAT. be added about the charming suburb and o-arden of Dordrecht, the village of Zwijndrecht. Ivino- Dordrecht. 45 over against it on the river, and affording the best views of the town. Here we found not only splendid fruit — this country is beginning to supply the London market — but also very pretty children, quite exceptionally so for the country. All the people were busy packing and forwarding straws- berries, as well as still brighter bundles of carrots, in barges. In front of the inn we found the following sign : HET W1TTE PAA.RD. (The White Horse.) CHAPTER III. Leiden and Haarlem. Hague likes us not, though any one who has introductions may stop there for pleasant society, and in any case see the pictures in their charming gallery, with its incomparable Anatomy Lesson of Rembrandt, its astonishing Old Man in Armour by Boll, its lovely Both, Wouverman, and Leiden and Haarlem. 47 Van der Velde landscapes, not to speak of Van Dyck and his portraits, But all this can be seen without stopping in the Hague for more than a kw hours, during which you will admire the smart streets, the well-dressed people, and the fine equipages, even though a coachman in handsome and complete livery, with his footman beside him, smoking a cigar and showing earrings in his ears, seemed to us something odd in the way of style. So did the fact that at Rotterdam a man went up and down the train with champagne and hard-boiled eggs by way of morning refreshment for travellers. This sort of thing turns up at every moment if you care to observe it. But let us hurry on to the really distinctive town of Leiden, which is hardly less Dutch, and hardly less picturesque than Dort. There are the same canals with shady alleys forming streets, the same frequency of shipping in the streets, the same confusion of land and water traffic, the same recurrence in every street of old gables, with sixteenth and seventeenth century dates. We had seen this town long ago in great state, when the famous University held its tercentenary in 48 A Tour in Holland and Germany. 1875. It was then the depth of winter, with deep snow and hard frost, but the hospitality of the Leideners allowed no indications of the ther mometer to throw any suspicion upon the -warmth of their reception. We had all the great people of Europe in the way of learning present, and there were Leideners as good as any of them, notably the famous Cobet, who stood alone in the classical world as the man since Porson whose critical acumen was acknowledged supreme. The chill of age, alas ! has come upon him at last ; it has dimmed the piercing insight, and silenced the trenchant utterance of that master mind that once dominated all around it. But our old friend the famous Kuehnen, whose name is a household word among the critical theologians, is still hale and hearty, and with him we went over the roll of names which stood foremost thirteen years ago, to lament many gaps, and recall many delightful meetings. The whole body of students had of course changed, and we felt as strange as the Poet Laureate, when he went to re-visit his Cambridge haunts. But the very scantiness of remaining friends EVENING AT ZWITNDRECHT. P. 49. Leiden and Haarlem. 5' gave us leisure to examine the outward beauties of this famous seat of learning, which, if it has no old colleges — no university anywhere has them out of our isles — has certainly old houses enough n/i)1iiii[|Hjrn.(|i';]j[i'1i|i.',V|tii%,}nj,l^r LION OVER THE GATEWAY OF THE BURG, LEIDEN. to rival any town in England. You see in the window of a narrow ornamented Gothic front, dated perhaps 1550, the academic advertisement camera or cubicula locanda, and here, if you pene- 52 A Tour in Holland and Germany. trate, you will see all preparations for a refined and luxurious college life. The students' club which is a veritable club with all the necessaries of life on the spot, is far finer than anything we have in England ; and though it is new, it stands in a High Street with ancient houses about it. On page 51 is an ornament from over the entrance to the Burg, with the arms of the town. In the same street, the dear old panelled house at which we stayed, the cosy and comfortable Sun Hotel, has a mantelpiece in the proprietor's private room which is a specimen of the Dutch style worthy of mention, especially as it is not yet known to travellers, and we were informed that there were several other such things in Leiden. But let not the curiosity-hunter imagine he will acquire these things by merely asking for them. The sum of 4,000 guilders (^350) was refused for the piece in question a week before we saw it. We have seen far better ones sold for ^25 in Dublin, and could procure one any day for £^0 far superior. We sent out the young man of the party to forage for information about the students. He Leiden and Haarlem. found that most of them had gone down, and the rest were in the throes of examinations, as he had beeb himself but a fortnight ago in Oxford. But he brought us back not a word about the examinations, and only some trivial matters which seemed to him momentous, such for example as the fact that they pulled in sixes instead of eights, and that their cricket seemed of an elementary kind. This he sought to prove by documentary evidence, for he had got hold of a copy of the Holland Sport, with the account of a match, which seemed the oddest thing in the world. The bowling was still supreme, one performer obtaining eight wickets for four runs, and the individual notches of each batsman were set down in a row (we were going to say a long row) after his name. There were long comments and reflec tions upon the play, which in Dutch seemed very comical, but which showed a laudable desire to explain everything and promote an interest in the game. As far as raw beefsteaks go, the whole nation seems to be under training. They eat them not red, but blue inside, and they wonder that we 54 A Tour in Holland and Germany. don't do it. In fact they imagine they have acquired this taste in imitation of England. We took the steam tram from Leiden to Ende- geest because it had once been the residence of Des Cartes, and only found his house, which we now present to the philosophical public. All the most remarkable dwelling houses in Leiden date from the thirty to forty years im mediately following the siege (1574), and there are excellent specimens of early Renaissance among them. The Stadthuis of Leiden, and the slaughter-house at Haarlem (beside the great church) are the finest we saw in the country. If either town had the large and flowing water there is at Dordrecht, they would be in no way inferior. Indeed their churches are distinctly superior. There is a magnificent specimen at Leiden, with its inner walls whitewashed, and many of its great windows walled up, and the tracery gone, but with a splendid dark wooden ceiling, which the Protestant Vandals found too troublesome to deface. There is a lofty and beautiful chapter-house at the west end, formino- a sort of wing, in which the windows are pre- Leiden and Haarlem. 55 served,, and at last the people are waking up to the disgrace of whitewashing these churches, DES CARTES HOUSE AT ENDEGEEST — NEAR LEIDEN. and they' were beginning to scrape the walls. They had already disclosed upon the pillars sur rounding the choir figure subjects painted on 56 A Tour in Holland and Germany. red and on gold ground, so that the smooth round surfaces which look so poor in their ?*» " THE CATHEDRAL OF BOIS LE DUC present state were intended for rich colouring.1 1 The cut here is from Bois le Due, where the church, though very beautiful, is far more French in character than most Dutch churches. But it is being so rapidly spoilt by restoration, Leiden and Haarlem. 57 This is further proved by the choir pillars of Haarlem, where there are still imitations of great carpets dedicated by the guilds, painted as if hanging on the face of the pillars facing the altar. In its roof too Haarlem at last shows again the splendid cedar which the piety of the fifteenth century had devoted to it, and there are few more beautiful specimens of rich groining to be found. Indeed while, as we said before, all these Dutch churches present such strong similarities that they would seem all built by a single architect, there can be little doubt that Haarlem is the finest and the least defaced. There are even a pair of old windows — rich shields emblazoned upon yellow ground, and a very delicate open work screen of gilt bronze, together with oak stalls hardly in ferior to those of Dordrecht — all this at Haarlem is far better than the organ, which all the world goes to hear, while the rest is neglected. There is fine old oak carving in the Stadthuis here also, where you go to see the Schutterei that we thought it well to record its appearance in the year 1888. By this means an insignificant book may attain some day a his torical value. 58 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Maltijden, or shooters' feasts, painted by Franz Hals and his fellows. The first thing which strikes the tourist is that some local scoundrel has painted numbers in white on the front of each of these splendid portraits, for the sake of the list of names beneath. In one case a drop of white paint has fallen down the rich black velvet of the dress ! Will any one advocate the abolition of capital punishment when he hears of such crimes as this ? Furthermore they have not hesitated to hang up the portrait of a benefactress and her husband of fifty years ago, in the fashionable costume of that odious period, and with the abject stupidity of countenance it produced ; and the artist has chosen magenta velvet for the dress, which screams at you from the wall among the mellow tones of the old masters ! The state coachman, with the cigar and the earrings, sinks into insignificance beside that ! The sexton that & showed us through the great church at Haarlem wore his hat, and when we remonstrated, said he was afraid of a chill, and that he thought more of his health than of such sentiment. And yet he knew the antiquities of his church very fairly, Dutch Politics. 59 and when we hoped that the Catholics would some day recover the building, he said quietly that he supposed it would do no harm. Specu lations upon the character of a people whom you see for a few weeks are confessedly imper tinent, and we offer no comment upon these facts as we repeat them. The general truths which we will stand by are these. The highest classes in any European country are uniform enough, at least in all important particulars. It is when you descend to the middle and lower classes that the differences emerge. But even so, the politics of every nation have peculiar features which disturb any apparently obvious analogies, at a closer view. Thus the great American parties of Republican and Democrat are not paralleled by Whig or Tory, or Right and Left in France, or Ultramontane and Progressist. Still worse Liberal and Conservative in Holland mean something very different from the same terms in English politics. We asked a worthy gentleman in Holland, who offered to do something for us on a Sunday morning, whether we were not interfering with his devotions at 60 A Tour in Holland and Germany. church. Oh, no, he replied, don't you know that I belong to the Liberal party ? When this reply was analysed, it appeared that the Conservative or Reactionist party are so thoroughly identified with religious orthodoxy (of the Protestant Evan gelical kind) that Liberalism adopts freethinking in religion as part of its programme. Hence a Liberal attending church is a Liberal attending a meeting of his opponents. It seems that the orthodox party also adopt Protection against the Free Trade declarations of their opponents, and our Liberal friend was shocked and alarmed to hear us throwing doubts on the Verbal Inspiration of Adam Smith, Mill and Cobden, and venturing to predict that the question of Free Trade might require to be argued afresh against new and powerful objections. It must not be imagined that all the young and vigorous men adopt the anti-religious side. Of the distinguished students we had met at Leiden in 1875, several had taken the orthodox side in the Dutch Parliament, in spite of the very advanced teaching received from the Dons at the University. Dutch politics are therefore not less THE AMSTERDAM GATE AT HAARLEM. P. 61. Leiden and Haarlem. 63 complex, and not less misleading to strangers than those of other nations. But we had not come like the typical English tourist in Ireland, to settle national problems with a week's ex perience, nor did we leave the country boasting, in our enlarged ignorance, that we had mastered the whole question, and that it presented no difficulty. RUDDER OF A KEEN. CHAPTER IV. About the Zuider Zee. you once cross the latitude of Haarlem C' and Amsterdam northward, you come to a country far more characteristic, and far less debauched by the infection of tourists than the rest of Holland. Amsterdam is of course a splendid city in its way ; it even boasts of two of the finest modern buildings to be seen anywhere — the new Railway Station and the new Museum. These buildings are due to the genius of a living architect, M. Cuypers, who seemed to us to surpass all his rivals by no uncertain difference. Wherever About the Zuider Zee. 65 his master hand had touched a building else- where, as for example at Zwolle, the effect was unmistakable. We could not but hope that this remarkable man may be appreciated beyond Hol land, and teach the Germans especially what noble buildings are possible even in our own day. In the Museum there are art treasures as great and various as those of South Kensington. The pictures alone are now a collected gallery of galleries, to which a week might well be devoted. But this noisy capital was so foreign to our ambition that we only stayed long enough to stare at the three great masters — Rembrandt, Franz Hals, and Van der Heist, and we came away with the impression that Rembrandt's pencil was like Aaron's rod, which ate up the rods of the other magicians. Among the portraits, the most worth looking at as a man, together with William the Silent, is undoubtedly Peter the Great, whose picture is quite fascinating. Among the older houses, by far the most interesting, though one of the simplest, is the house ot Admiral de Ruyter, of whom more anon. But the Schutterei feasts are there in such crowds 66 A Tour in Holland and Germany. as to be positively tedious, in spite of the excellence of many of them. Let us escape from the Dutch splendour of the seventeenth century— a splendour shown in house building, costume, portrait-painting, landscape- MEDALLION OF ADMIRAL DE RUYTER. painting, fighting by sea — in fact in every way a nation can show greatness, except in literature, and go down to the sleepy and sober town of Hoorn, where we found the middies of a training-ship curs ing their fate at this exile, and quite blind to the Abottt the Zuider Zee. 67 delightful eccentricities which make it one of the best of Dutch towns. The churches are indeed in significant, and many modern square houses have replaced the older, but still there are many houses, dated conspicuously from 1560 to 1670, which give the amateur of that kind of building food for any amount of enthusiasm. It is as usual the passage from Gothic to early Re naissance which is here so striking. The houses look intoxicated, being deliberately, as our excel lent host the Burgomaster informed us, built to lean forward on the flat; sides, so as to throw off rain easily. A careful examination of the building will prove this to any one who takes the trouble to see it. The East gate of the town is a very fine structure, much more orna mented outside than inside. Among other ornaments there is over the door the following : Nil prosunt vigilum excubise, nihil arma minseque Murorum ingentes raucseque tonitrua cannas, Ni, Deus, hancce velis regere ac tutarier urbem. The date is upon the gate, as usual, in this case 1578. 68 A Tour in Holland and Germany. In this town there are various traces of a turn for Latin inscriptions upon the houses, and when THE EAST GATE OF HOORN. these latter have been taken down, the memorial slabs on the fronts are brought to the Museum. There is one more curious than the rest, the work WATER TOWER AT HOORN. P. 69. About the Zuider Zee. 7 i of an Englishman or Scotchman who settled at Hoorn, and built himself a mansion. Over the door were two reliefs — one a pair of figures repre senting Darnley and Queen Mary of Scotland, thus described : on the left of the carving : " The most illustrious Prince Henry Lord Darnley, King of Scotland, and father to our Soveraigne Lord King Joannes. He died at the age of 21." Then the relief, and under it 1567 and 1618. On the right side : " The most excellent Princess Maria Queen of Scotland and mother to our Soveraigne Lord King Joannes. She died 1586, and was intombed at Westminster." The second decoration, which probably stood over a second door, gives two figures described as James et Anna Rex et Regina Scotia? Angliae Francis Hibernise, and they are supported on the left by these lines — Felix ingenio Phoenix virtutis amore, Candide flos regum, totius orbis amor, Sis sonus o felixque tuis fidem tueare, Quod facis ut Babylon nunc ruat kirTakofyos — dated 1618. The inscription to Anna on the right side, though perfectly legible, is 72 A Tour in Holland and Germany. wholly unintelligible. We failed to make either metre or sense out of it, so we did not think it worth transcribing. There is fine old work in oak in this same Museum, but the peasants now know its value. A very handsome press in the Burgomaster's house had been purchased from a farm-house for ^50 — a moderate price, but still no song. We spent a Sunday afternoon in visiting a country farm, in order to see what was the life of the peasants in their homes. We drove out of course along a perfectly straight alley, with tall trees on both sides, till we came to a straggling village consisting of a long series of pyramids of thatch of various dimensions, with a single chim ney of brick showing quite a modern date. Most of them were built within the last fifteen years, on ac count of the great profits made in the English market by cattle-farming. Still we found that a great number of these so-called tenant proprietors had mortgaged their farms through debt, and were now contented tenant farmers on the homestead which they had once owned. Such was the case with the farm we visited ; our host had purchased About the Zuider Zee. it from the peasant proprietor, who now tilled it for him as his tenant. Our host said that his purchase-money was practically invested at 4 per cent. The house in which these people lived is sketched on page 74, and though there was no great room except up in the roof, which was devoted to storing hay (generally salted to save it from heat ing), there was a state-room never used, and a hall-door never opened. Grass was growing un trodden in front of it. There was a sky-blue skirting round the foot of the wall, which was ex tended to the stems of the trees some five feet high ; whereas the woodwork was all painted green, while the roof was of glazed black tiles, with an overcoat of thick thatch laid on the upper parts of the pyramid, and its border cut in square lines and steps, so as to leave some tiles showing. These pyramidal houses were very lofty, and contained dwelling-rooms, stables, and lofts under the square inclosed. Over in Frisia they are far loftier, and the walls of the house lower in proportion, and all of red tiles, so that the farm-houses show like 74 A Tour in Holland and Germany. huge red pyramids standing out of groves of trees. There was nothing whatever pretty or artistic about these houses. Plan, furniture, pottery, glass, everything was new, vulgar, and tawdry, ~^> FARM HOUSE NEAR HOORN. and yet the people were the nicest of people. They live by milking cows and making cheese. The whole arrangements for making cheese were shown to us, and were perfect as to neatness, cleanness, and intelligence. The export of Dutch About the Zuider Zee. 75 cheese is enormous, and we were lucky enough to see at Hoorn late one night a djalk being loaded from a store on the quay by candle-light. The view into the covered cabin, where several men were storing . great rows of cannon-balls of cheese, which showed dark ruby by the yellow light thrown on them, reminded us at once of the candle effects so well known in Dutch picture galleries. The farmer and his wife gave us milk and cigars — an odd but not unpleasant combination, and having showed us their rooms — the beds were set in deep presses in the walls of the sitting- room — took us out into fields of grass, fenced with water ditches almost of the level of the grass. There were beautifully bred black and white cattle, all of the same type, one indifferent horse, some sheep, and a watchdog — all of them friends of the family, and coming up even to us strangers with the most perfect confidence. The Dutch are really kind to their beasts — a high mark of civilisation, and indeed all savages are cruel, so that advance in the treatment of other animals may generally be regarded as an advance in 76 A Tour in Holland and Germany. culture. Even though they employ dogs to draw, which is contrary to our habits, and will probably be soon forbidden by law even there, still the dogs seem happy and are most lively and anxious to do their work. The woman of the house wore one of the handsome Dutch caps which show a gold plate under their lace, and which vary in detail every few miles through Holland. But like most of her Dutch sex, she surmounts this curious and in some respects beautiful head-dress with a gaudy bonnet of the commonest style purchased in Hoorn. So she possessed a necklace of pink coral beads to fasten close round the neck, but it was laid aside as now an obsolete fashion. The finest member of the family was a boy of fifteen, who already worked with a zeal and a fondness appreciated by all the animals under his care, and he left us to take off his Sunday suit and don his working clothes because the milking time was come. At this hour, five o'clock, groups of black and white cows are seen gathered all over the country close to the men, who do almost all the milking. About the Zuider Zee. yy In this great village or populated district, holding 3,000 people, there was one policeman, and he had nothing to do. There were Protes tants and Catholics, who do not intermarry and who are inclined to mistrust each other. We. HOUSE DECORATION, ALKMAAR. found the old feeling about the relative honesty of the two here also — but there are no quarrels and no breaches of the peace. A more important excursion to most people at Hoorn is that to Alkmaar, from which we give a couple of sketches. F 78 A Tour in Holland and Germany. This town is the centre of the great cheese commerce we have described. Throughout this watery Arcadia, the men are coarse to look at, and the women comely but not often handsome ; the boys decidedly ugly. All the good looks are concentrated upon the little girls, whom in many places we found ex tremely pretty. The same fact came strongly before us when we visited a primary school of some hundred children in Hoorn. The boys, who were of the poorest class and educated free, were coarse and low of type, while the girls were neat, pretty, and often refined. Neither we nor the natives whom we cross-examined were able to give us any account of this fact, which they all admitted. But the boys in question were of the lowest class, and that suggests that when we visited the establishments, criminal or charitable) for the surveillance of the mendicant or criminal poor, we found the inmates of so low a type as to kill all interest we had felt in the place. They were like the criminal classes of a graver sort in England, or we suppose over the world, maimed for virtue from the outset, and such as a more g ^f^ THE WEIGH-HOUSE, ALKMAAR. P. 79. About the Zuider Zee. 8 i enlightened society would at once destroy as they would dangerous vermin conveying con tagion through mankind. But in Holland the beggar is a downright criminal. In a country of such thrift, such diligence, such earnestness, the man who is not swayed by this atmosphere of respectability, and refuses to work, must in deed be a real social outsider, not fit to be left among men. The reader will see from our sketches of Hoorn the sort of place he will find. But no thing can convey to him the delightful calm, the sleepiness amid real activity, which distinguishes these cities of the Zuider Zee. Let us pass on to Enkhuizen, once an important port, and now the point for transit to Frisia by a smart little steamer. Enkhuizen. Enkhuizen and Hoorn are still full of remin iscences of the great fight against Admiral Bossu which secured to the Dutch the control of the Zuider Zee. The battle was fought between both places, so that at Hoorn they have his F 2 82 A Tour in Holland and Germany. drinking-cup, a fine silver-gilt vessel with a lid, and of course dating from before the battle in 1576; at Enkhuizen they have his great two- handed sword. There is a modern Stadthuis, at least a square building of the eighteenth century, in which the curiosities are not so striking as the splendid old stamped leather in patterns of red, gold and green, and which are found again in still greater perfection in the Weesenhuis (orphanage) of the town. Of course you are regularly told in each town how much Roths child (apparently a special name generalised to include the race) had recently offered for these curiosities. To walk through this town is a veri table pleasure from its extraordinary cleanness. Not even the vulgar Brock, which advertises its cleanness professionally, can exceed it. The footways belong to each house, and are frequently railed off, so that, to walk along them being im possible, every one walks in the street. But you can do so in any weather, for mud is simply non-existent, and rain runs off owing to the convex paving. But the day we were at Enkhuizen was very fine, with a gale blowing, and there was not About the Zuider Zee. 83 even dust (that brother of mud) to be dis covered by the searching wind. Here is a sketch of the Dromedary tower close to the port. The appearance of the orphanage within corresponds VIEW OF THE PORT AT EXKHCIZEN. to the elegance of the exterior, which has a fine Renaissance front. We found charming young women among the orphans — they stay there till they are twenty — and they have a fine old dormitory which is the very model of comfort. We have seen no public school in England with so good an appointment. 84 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Luckily the boys were absent, so we were not obliged to verify our former observation as to the contrast in looks between the sexes. The insti tution had been lately enriched by a large bequest from a Madame de Vries, whose portrait, tomb, and other belongings rather encumbered the place. The general aspect of this other "dead city" was very like Hoorn, which it also so closely resembles in its history. Within three minutes after the train arrives at the quay, a smart little steamer starts three times a day from Enkhuizen to cross the sea to Stavoren ; and to this craft we entrusted ourselves one evening in spite of the gale, to see what the navigation of the great shallow gulf would be. There was no swell, only a short and angry sea, so that really sickness was confined to •' the misses," as the steward ex plained. The sailors were mostly travelled men, and were used to English sailing, but amono- the craft that we passed we give the sketch of a local skipper in the costume of the islands. His tall hat, with a broad crape, he wore as a sign of mourning for. his wife, About the Zuider Zee. 35 and he was working a boat called The Young Cornelius. The historical fact of this sea being the result A SKIPPER OF THE ZUIDER ZEE. of a sudden and terrible inundation is still so fresh in the people's minds, that they have no idea how long it is now accomplished, and many 86 A Tour in Ho liana and Germany. legends have gathered about it, of which we will repeat one narrated to us on board by a local merchant. After telling us of the fact, he went on to say that a gentleman who owned here a considerable estate' was one day walking on his farm, when he found a herring. (This is not physically impossible in a land where each field is fenced by a narrow canal.) He took up the fish, and thought over it deeply. Next day he offered for sale his estate, which fetched him many thousand guilders. Within a month, it and the whole country were covered by the sea ! When we told him that this gentleman must ' have lived more than six hundred years ago, he seemed wonderfully staggered, as if the antiquity of a story were not the best evidence of its truth ! When we added that all stories of universal interest were at least 2,000 years old, he seemed quite consoled, and offered us long cigars in proof of his gratitude. Into the plans for recovering this great area from the sea we will not enter. It is far too dry a subject for this idle book. There are two About the Zuider Zee. 89 or three islands in it inhabited by fisherpeople once of naive manners, and still of quaint cos tume. The constant advent of Sunday excursion steamers from Amsterdam has destroyed any primitive innocence which had lasted into our times. We will not turn aside to discuss the hackneyed subject of the dykes either, of which we were reminded by seeing the town of Stavoren looking only with its roofs over the great fence which we approached in our steamer. The Dyke Asso ciations are no doubt most of all interesting as being associations made freely among the people, and not led by the Government. They have been so for centuries ; once only a great ruler, Charles V., interfered at a very serious moment, and by the imperial resources revived and strengthened the then decaying energy of the people. Now, as we were told, it is a great honour to be co-opted into these colleges, for which the qualification is the possession of 16 hectares of land. The members meet not only for business, but for pleasure, and drink claret out of ancient and peculiar glasses. We grieve QO A Tour in Holland and Germany. to add that they smoke with their claret, a vile offence, but not cigars, which would be far too modern. They use nothing but clay pipes. A DJALK FROM THE ZUIDER ZEE. CHAPTER V. Miscellaneous Gleanings. ryp E visited another decayed town on the Frisian coast, Kampen, which leads up to Zwolle, long the resi dence of Thomas a Kem- pis, who came from Kampen on the Rhine. Beyond this, Zwolle is only remarkable for the gateway annexed, and for a carved pulpit and canopy in a church (St. Michael's) which is one of the finest pieces of carving to be seen anywhere. It is perhaps not quite so fine as the pulpit of the Newe Kerk in Amsterdam, and there may be some others in Holland or Belgium as good, for you must examine each to find this out ; no book that we know of 92 A Tour in Holland and Germany will tell you. These magnificent pulpits, which date from early in the seventeenth century — the. stairs on the Zwolle pulpit are individually dated 1618, 1619, 1620, &c, on their perpendicular face — are therefore the outcome of the same revo lution that swept away the altars, emptied the stalls, and whitewashed the walls of these great churches. They only left the sumptuous gilded screens, which date from Catholic days. Every other ornament was abolished, and yet these splendid pulpits were then carved. The organ cases are, as a rule, much later. There is no more interesting example of the taste for decor ation finding scope in spite of a great change of sentiment. All the care and affection which the Catholic lavished upon altar, reredos, and chancel — the special House of God — the Pro testant lavished upon the pulpit, the special tabernacle from which the Holy Spirit spake through the mouth of the evangelical preacher. Even the cold religion of the Reformed did not kill the instinct of decoration, and it may be fairly doubted whether any fine art was more perfect in its way than the oak carving of these Pulpits. 93 splendid pulpits. Stairs, pulpit front, canopy, both above and beneath, and the tall spire of wood over the canopy — all are elaborated with a wealth of imagination and a delicacy of exe cution only to be understood when they are individually studied. To reproduce them here would be simply impossible. The well-known draught of fishes at Antwerp, with the meshes of the net carved in wood, is a false and meretricious example of this kind of pulpit, which must be seen in the Protestant churches. As we said before, almost all other ornament is expelled. The chancel is a bare empty space, unless it be occupied by some historical monument, as for example the Newe Kerk at Amsterdam with the tomb of de Ruyter. There is some tendency to decorate the wood work of the principal pews round the pulpit, where the elders sat, but with nothing elaborate. There is no splendour of detail, in the vast temples with their noble proportions, but the pulpit and occasional mural monuments. These are indeed often rich in carving, and adorned with bright colours, as well as with conceits in 94 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Latin verse. Nor are these ornaments confined to the actual resting-place of the deceased. Lieut, van Speyk, who blew up his ship, which had stranded in the Scheldt, to save it from the Belgians, in the war of 1831, is commemorated in pictures and inscriptions all about the country. None of the verses seemed to us so dignified as the prose upon de Ruyter's tomb — Viri qui nullo sibi prcelucente majorum imagine soli Deo et virtuti omnia debuit. It then describes his great four days' battle against the allied fleets, in which he won the victory — copiis minor, virtute par, consilio et successibus mafor, and concludes by calling him immensi tremor Oceani ! We have noticed already that the seventeenth century was a brilliant time in Holland for every thing but letters, and yet there was residing in Holland during twenty years of that century one of the most brilliant writers of his time, not only a great authority in science and philosophy, but a master in prose style. We allude to the celebrated Des Cartes, who retired from the land of the 'Most Christian King' of France, where Des Cartes in Holland. 95 he was bred a nobleman, to live like a burgher in the land of commerce and of liberty. Des Cartes' imperishable Discours de la Mcthode, and his other great works were printed at Amsterdam or Leiden, and published in Holland. It seemed therefore curious to us to hunt for mementos of this great genius through the country he adopted. But our search was almost in vain. We know from his letters that he at one time thought the life and bustle of Amsterdam the most perfect atmosphere for a quiet worker, who could go about as a stranger, unnoticed and unmolested, and enjoy the company, without incurring the fatigues, of seeing and hearing many people. His studied retirement in this great city affords a good reason that all local record of his residence or habits is wanting. But when, in consequence, we suspect, of the birth of an illegitimate daughter, and the troubles it in volved, he suddenly abandoned Amsterdam, and determined to live in small and quiet towns or villages, it is surely odd that there too all records of him should be lost. We searched at Amers- foort and at Endegeest, at Egmond Binnen and 96 A Tcur in Holland and Germany. Egmond Hoef, where he remained for years, and could find nothing but the houses or gates which must have often seen him pass. One of the present authors has cited from the old bio graphies the ex tant details of how he lived in this seclu sion, and what he saw of his neighbours.1 Here is the water gate at Amersfoort, both in an old sketch CHURCH AT EGMOND HOEF. 1 Mahaffy's Life of Des Cartes (Blackwood, 1880). In the same book will be found a copy of the portrait by Franz Hals. Des Cartes in Holland. 97 of the year 1670 and as it now remains. Many a time Des Cartes passed under this arch. At Egmond Binnen his only possible residence is quite manifest. There is only one old house where a gentleman of quality could have lived, WATER GATE AT AMERSFOORT (1670). and there were some vague traditions of the fact. But it is quite plain that he always remained a pilgrim and sojourner in Holland, and, though sought out by all Europe, was hardly noticed by his obscure neighbours. It G 9s A Tour in Holland and Germany. seems to have been a very different thing with such a man, for example, as Hugo Grotius. For in the first place Grotius was not a foreigner in the sense that Des Cartes was. And secondly, ^r-yq*^ ¦ .. i ¦-¦':!¦¦¦ ¦> ¦J ' '¦% i I WATER GATE AT AMERSFOORT (ij the science of politics, which he treated, had probably far more interest for his townsmen than the abstract science of Des Cartes. The great work however of Grotius, De Jure Pacis ct Belli, which is called the foundation of modern inter- Hugo Grotius. 99 national law, is one of those books which every body names and nobody reads. It would probably not be asserted that the ancients had no inter national law, it it was known that three-quarters DES CARTES HOUSE AT EGMOND BINNEN. of the cases cited in support of his principles by Grotius are drawn from Greek and Roman history. At all events he was a national figure. It G 2 ioo A Tour in Holland and Germany. was at Loevenstein that he was a long time imprisoned, and here, as at Delft, there are THE CASTLE OF LOEVENSTEIN, THE PRISON OF GROTIUS. ample recollections of him. So of Erasmus, and others who were natives of Holland : so of Boerhaave at Leiden. But Des Cartes desired to Des Cartes Obscurity. ioi be an outsider even in Holland, and he succeeded in his purpose. We even searched Bois-le-Duc (St. Hertogenbosch), where he went occasionally, but though we found some pretty things for a sketch, we found no records of Des Cartes. There were not even in the libraries we visited any specimens of his handwriting exhibited. Spinoza, though equally, nay, more a foreigner at Amster dam, though equally secluded from the public view, has at last found his proper position there, his public statue and his fame. Even the famous portrait of Des Cartes by Franz Hals is preserved, not in Amsterdam or the Hague, but at the Louvre in Paris. The contemplation of the quiet comfortable opulent life of the Dutch, continuing so long after the supremacy of the seas, and the primacy in commerce has passed from them, naturally leads the reflecting traveller to hope that, even should a similar fate overtake the arms and the commerce of England, there may be in store for her some such respectable position. There must have been a vast accumulation of capital as well as of art treasures, which have not been dissipated, and at 102 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the present day the Dutch are a wealthy people, who can afford themselves all the luxuries of life. "WWp|f^|§! AT BOIS-LE-DUC. Amono- these we were led to wonder that the daily bath so indispensable to Englishmen finds no place. This' is- clear enough from the hotel WATER GATE, WOUDRICHE.M. charges for such a thing. A cold bath costs about lod. and a warm one, is. 3d. ! It is quite plain that if the nation determined to use baths, 104 A Tour in Holland and Germany. such prices would not be tolerated for ah instant. Take the case of cigars. The Dutch people choose to smoke them, and consequently you can get them quite passable for one half-penny a piece. A national want must be supplied on reasonable terms. The inference is therefore that clean liness, so remarkable in Dutch streets and houses, is not a special attribute of the Dutch as regards their persons. We will add another qualification of Dutch virtue in the matter of languages. It is quite true that the higher classes learn and speak many languages. The students at Leiden show a mastery over modern languages which would put to shame any English College, even King's College, Cambridge. But on the other hand the lower classes are singularly dull and stupid in understanding any attempted Dutch on the part of a foreigner. You may learn a sentence quite carefully, and pronounce it to them, but, as soon as they preceive you are a stranger, they seem to make up their minds that you are un intelligible. When they can be got to pronounce the same sentence themselves the difference is Des Cartes Bathing Place. 105 inappreciable, and by and by they will confess it. But to guess at broken Dutch is a faculty which they do not seem to possess. EGMOND AAN ZEE. CHAPTER VI. Central Germanv. Brunswick — ¦ Romanesque Churches. making a study of the general aspect of the old life still remaining in Holland, it is worth while to pass into the very kindred, and yet very different, civilisation which meets us in the old German towns, which be came rich and famous about the same period — that is to say, at the close of Gothic, and the opening of the Renaissance period. Of course Germany is a very big word Hanover. 107 so is even Holland. If you pretended without years of experience to judge either generally, especially to deny the occurrence of any particular feature, because it has not occurred to you in a limited experience, you would probably have your folly promptly exposed. Moreover to revisit Ger many after some years is in many respects to revisit a changed country. All we can pretend to give are impressions, and the reader must take them for what they are worth. What we en deavoured to do was to take a few noted centres, or perhaps not-noted centres, and describe or draw the remarkable things which any one may see there, but which the English public do not know. Nor are they to be blamed, seeing that even Baedeker's Guidebook seems ignorant of many splendid things in the smaller towns of Germany. Any traveller who goes through Hanover, and wanders about for an hour through the streets, will be struck with the wealth and variety of the deep-pitched red-tiled roofs, with dormers, and attic windows of great picturesqueness. Our initial letter will suggest the kind of thing 10S A Tour in Holland and Germany. he will see. But this should be only a fore taste to him, and he need not delay there, but hurry on through Lehrte to Brunswick, which is WINDMILL AT LEHRTE. really one of the finest specimens of an old German town we were able to discover, finer even than Hildesheim, which has lately become very well-known and prized in this way. Old Dutch and German Houses. 109 The contrasts of old Dutch and old German buildings are very obvious, and require no special knowledge to appreciate. Almost all the better OLD HOUSE IN AMERSFOORT. Dutch building ( we exclude old wooden shanties and windmills ) is of brick, not showing any timber beams, and adding ornaments in stone work on the elaborate fronts. Their houses 1 10 A Tour in Holland and Germany. are generally not great in size, and show only the gable to the street, so that a Dutch street consists of many various and irregular gables facing outwards. The old German street is very different. In the first place the roofs are often enormous, and frequently run parallel with the street, while the gable is often quite flat and coated with tiles also. These great fields of red are ORNAMENT FROM A BRUNSWICK HOUSE. broken by little dormers, and by subsidiary attic gables facing outwards, as in the cut annexed. The walls are of wood and brick, showing great beams with bricks between them filling up the. timber frame- work. It is on this timber work, espe cially on the horizontal beams over the door and windows, that elaborate ornament and inscriptions have been applied. The Dutch inscription is gen- Old Dutch and German Houses. 1 1 1 erally a stone slab introduced. These, often con siderable scripture texts, proverbs, and records of the builder and his date, are always on the oak OLD HOUSE IN BRUNSWICK. beams in the wall. The carved ornaments are, if simple, the fan pattern, or a row of figures such as the cardinal virtues, but in other cases they adopt various fancies, and are not easy to see clearly, ir? A Tour in Holland and Germany. far less to describe, though they give a great ap pearance of richness to the front. One of these OLD COURTYARD (BRUNSWICK). houses at the convent outside Helmstedt was dated 1478, but this was the oldest we found, and was known as the oldest in that town. Missing Page Missing Page Gothic and Renaissance. 115 Brunswick has streets upon streets of these houses varied here and there by one more splen did than the rest, and again by a regular Renaiss ance front in stone, larger and more dignified than the Dutch examples we have already given. The Dutch fronts are generally painted in strong con trasts, while the German fronts always show a gray and colourless tone, until the recent outbreak of painting them which we shall presently describe. The plan of the rich Renaissance fronts, which are common in Holland, and not uncommon in the old German towns, are imitated with great richness of detail and brightness of colouring in the elaborate mural sepulchral monuments all through the churches, where the most intricate design is carried out in either wood or stone. The impression produced by these two styles is that the Renaissance is in house-building more splendid, the Gothic more picturesque. The two appear to be also more distinct in Germany than in Holland. But here we are again becoming serious, and speaking about what is not our business. Let us turn to the churches. While the huge and 11 1 1 6 A Tour in Holland and Germany. lofty Dutch churches all bear one stamp, that of the fourteenth century (more strictly 1350 — 1450), the most remarkable ecclesiastical build ings about the duchy of Brunswick, Hildesheim, &c, are distinctly early Romanesque, or what we call Norman in form, though with differences from *K\ OLD PUMP IN SAME COURTYARD. English and French Norman so remarkable that they strike the eye at once. In any of the churches we visited the arches of the windows both within and without are perfectly plain. The doors are seidom large, or much ornamented. The west door of St. Blasius' Cathedral at Romanesque Churches. 1 1 7 Brunswick, which is a wonder there, is not to be compared to any rich Norman doorway in England. At Hildesheim the three Romanesque churches seem all to have had a western apse with small windows, precluding any western door — a most extraordinary feature to any one accustomed to English or French churches. In two of them it is certain ; in the Cathedral, the great bronze doors of St. Bernward are at the west end, but beyond them is a further apse which can hardly be outside the original plan. A further study of these churches showed us that the western apse was at one time their usual place, which seems to have been copied from the famous old Benedictine settlement at S. Gallen, of which a complete plan is still preserved. The main church of that convent, built about the year 800, combined in it two older churches, dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul respectively, who were both accommodated with altars and chapels in the new church in this way. Under each apse there was generally a crypt, in which the founder was buried. Thus St. Gallus was under the east apse of this church, St. Boniface under the western 11 2 1 1 8 A Tour in Holland and Germany. apse of the Cathedral at Fulda. As a consequence of this fashion the entrances to these churches consisted either of two little doors beside the MAGNI KIRCHE, BRUNSWICK. western apse, or more frequently of doors in the north and south walls of the nave — and they never attained the splendour of the great western doors Round Towers. 119 of the Norman churches of England and France. This is the reason that the great bronze doors of St. Bernward seemed to us curiously out of place in the western apse. What the architectural mis creants of 1720 may have done is hard to tell. Perhaps they took them from a northern or southern entrance to put them where they have no meaning. This occurrence of western apses with an altar and special consecration seems to be peculiar, and therefore worth describing to those who study early churches in England, where examples must be very rare, if they occur at all. It should perhaps be added that many of these early buildings had round towers, standing free like those in Ireland, and intended like them for towers of outlook and of refuge, not as bell towers, for two very good reasons : either they possessed only hand bells, or when (as at Aix la Chapelle) a real bell-tower was required, it was a separate con struction, between the round towers, and joined to the west end of the church. These round towers seem to have had little chapels in their lowest story. The interiors of these churches are very noble, but very simple. The carving of the capitals 120 A Tour in Holland and Germany. is sometimes rich, but more frequently slight, and in many cases the capital is without any pattern save what painting could give it. In the naves of the Hildesheim churches columns in pairs alternate with plain square piers, very bald and disagreeable in such a place. The ceilings are not vaulted, but flat, and elaborately painted. That of St. Michael's, which dates from the twelfth century, is, in spite of its restoration, one of the most beautiful works of art to be found anywhere. So is the great circular candelabrum of St. Bernward in the Cathedral of Hildesheim, which is now reproduced in many churches round the district, and of which there is a copy at Kensington. The whole impression these Romanesque churches make is one of dignity and of richness in colour, but of a want of imagination and of delicacy in the details. Of the recent restorations we will not speak. The restoration undertaken in the church of St. Bernward was unfortunately in 1720, and it was so horribly complete, that that once splendid building is practically destroyed. There is no more hideous example cf the artistic atrocity of Church of St. Blasius. 1 2 t the eighteenth century in all the world. But long before this, when the church was still unviolated, it gave the model to the sister churches of St. Michael and St. Godehard, which have suffered far less, so that the style can be fairly appreciated. Let us return from this digression to the other delights of Brunswick. We were lodged in a hotel called the Blue Angel, which seemed to us an odd combination,1 where we could admire the internal irregularities of old German building with much comfort and economy. After wondering at the queer and beautiful streets, with their endless variety and their rich red colour, we adjourned to the famous church of St. Blasius, of which we have already spoken. The new painting of the church has unfortunately departed considerably from the tone of the north transept, which was sufficiently preserved to have guided the painters. Still the whole effect is fine. Of curiosities there are many reminiscences of Henry the Lion, and fine coloured wooden statues of him and of the third 1 Again, the proprietor, Herr Luft, lived in the Angel, not vice- versa, as is generally assumed. 122 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Bishop of Hildesheim. These date from before 1200. But far older is a weird and gaunt wooden figure of Christ on the cross, the feet not over laid, larger than life, and certainly dating as early as the tenth century, possibly much earlier. It had once hung from the roof ;. it is now preserved behind the altar. The crypt contains nothing but the decked out coffins of the Brunswick family, with faded ribbons and dried flowers lying in the dust. Among the ghastly assembly of the dead, the coffins of the Duke of Brunswick, killed at Quatre Bras, and of our unfortunate Queen Caroline are conspicuous. Now, by a strange coincidence, just as the crypt is full, the Dukes of Brunswick are superseded by a Prussian regent — the generous dilettante and art patron Prince Albrecht of Prussia. But we must not begin to emulate Murray. So we shall only mention the Museum 1 for two special reasons. It is a great, new, spacious 1 This Museum, according to the notice on the door, "is closed on all Church holydays, even when such days fall upon a Sunday." We recommend this to the attention of English Sabbatarians. CHALICE IN THE BRUDERNKIRCHE, BRUNSWICK. P. 123 Overgrown Museums. 125 building, in which all the treasures are carefully arranged and catalogued, nay, the catalogue is in many respects an art treatise, and a most valu able book to peruse. But the collection is so large and various that the vast crowd and the incon gruity of the materials utterly weary and perplex the visitor, and unless he can stay long enough to examine carefully the catalogue, and then have himself led blindfolded to the particular spot where he wishes to study, he had better not visit the place at all. Probably most readers have often felt this at the British Museum and at Kensington ; we felt it even at the magnificent Amsterdam Museum, where the new building of M. Cuypers, the great Dutch architect, is of transcendent beauty and comfort, cool and restful in colour, and eminently soothing to the senses.1 We vote therefore for several small museums in a large town, where different classes of treasures 1tov 1 Everywhere we kept wishing that the modern buildings we saw had fallen into his hands, and had turned out like the Museum and the new Railway Station at Amsterdam. Had he for example been let loose upon Berlin, with the unlimited wealth which is now misspent upon architecture there, he would rapidly have made it the finest modern city in Europe, instead of the meanest. r26 A Tour in Holland and Germany. shall be separately kept, and thus many inestim able lessons in art will be learned which are now- lost through the crowding of our collections into vast buildings. Thus we missed at first in the Brunswick Museum the oldest and perhaps, artistically, most precious curiosity, to us inte resting above all because it is recognised Irish work, and apparently of the seventh century. This beautiful box is made of panels of walrus ivory, set in bronze framing, and is about five inches high and five inches long, with about halt the depth. The ornamentation reminds any one versed in Irish antiquities of the patterns of the best period, such as those in the Book of Kells. On the bronze framing on the bottom of the box there is a perfectly clearly engraved inscription in runes, of which the text is repeated twice, each copy occupying a long and a short side. Unfor tunately the reading of these runes is still very doubtful, and for the reason that most of the text seems to be proper names. Among the interpreta tions offered the most reasonable seems to be that of Professor Stephens (of Copenhagen), published in the Kilkenny Archaeological Journal of 1863. ANCIENT IRISH COFFER IN THE MUSEUM AT BRUNSWICK — 7'1'H CENTURY. P 127. The Runenkdstchen. 129 He understands it to mean that a workman called Nethii made this for a Bishop Eligius in Mont- pellier in Gaul. The bishop died in 658 a.d. But the whole thing is more than doubtful.1 It seems very hard luck that when all the letters have remained distinct and easily read, the sense should still remain a secret. The box originally contained a piece of the dress and a piece of the chemise of the Virgin Mary, and belonged to the convent of Gandersheim, from which it came to the Museum. Its earlier history is unknown. But for artistic perfection it may rank among the best specimens of the elaborate ornamentation for which the early Irish monks were so famous. Thus also, for the opposite reason that it is preserved by itself in the hands of the Cantor, we were able to study at our leisure the wonder ful chalice of the Briidernkirche, which had actually been absorbed by the Museum, but was 1 Indeed another, and apparently far more improbable reading is added in a new appendix published to this part of the Cata logue. And here references are given to Westwood's Fictile Ivories, p. 335. 130 A Tour in Holland and Germany. brought back to its church by the interposition of a vigorous and sensible Burgomaster. Splendid fonts, surrounded by no less splendid railings, and gabled apses to the churches are other signal features in the churches here. In fact they could not build anything without pointed gables, which stand all round the west ends of the churches as well as along the sides, and with their rich fourteenth century arches and orna ments have a splendid effect. On the whole, then, we repeat that Brunswick is in every respect more worth a visit than the score of German towns which are crowded yearly with strangers. And it is surrounded with smaller towns of similar character. We select two. CHAPTER VII. Helmstedt. is strange how soon a thing which has really been abolished falls out of memory. Most readers will ask what is Helm stedt, and why do we select it, and yet there was a time when it possessed a notable name in learning, and spread its fame over the world. The old University of Helmstedt (the Julosum), founded in 1575 by Duke Julius of Bruns wick, possessing a splendid Library and buildings, and adorned by such names in the "Mil/ llln, 'ijlV'TmSJTTT? 132 A Tour in Holland and Germany. classical world as Meibom, was abolished by Napoleon in 1809, when he ordered it to be merged in Gottingen. The Library has been weeded of its treasures to enrich Wolfenbiittel, the State library of Brunswick, though many valuable books remain in a great, gaunt, deserted room ; the professors and students are gone, the very name of the place is forgotten, and yet in the picturesque and quiet town there stands up untouched and unspoiled the finest Renaissance building of the peculiar type of northern Europe, which we saw in all our travels. We have done what we could to rehabilitate this magnificent house. No living university in Germany can show anything approaching to it in dignity and beauty. Over the splendid doors, two of which stand close together, we copied the following inscriptions : — Over the door, in the centre. AN. CHR. CIOIOXCVII ILLUSTR1S JVLEI HVJVS FRONTISP1CIA AERIS VENTORVMQVE INJVRIA L/ESA SVMPTV PVBLICO REPARATA SVNT PROR. HENRICO MEIBOMIO MED. D. P. P. SEN. Left. Right. IO. GOTHARD VON BORELLEN J. V. D. PROF. P. ORD. FIDERICO SCHRADERO H. T. ACAD. AED1LI. H. T. ACAD. AEDILI. THE JULCEUM AT HELMSTEDT. In the Library among other curiosities we found painted on a panel an original portrait of Luther, 134 A Tour in Holland and Germany. signed and dated 1536, by Lucas Cranach, with Latin lines beneath.1 Here then is a town of the first magnitude in the way of Renaissance art which nobody, not even the ubiquitous guide-book maker, seems to have visited. There are other features of interest to occupy the student. The town wall is still clearly marked and the towers standing, and one gate remains from which we give the staircase leading to the tower. Not only is there some Romanesque building left in the Church of S. Stefani, but just outside is a very fine Romanesque convent and complete cloister,2 exceedingly plain and bare, having been cleaned up and slightly coloured quite recently. What has been said above of the German Roman- 1 Cernis ut invicto dederat Natura Luthero Flammentes oculos, oraque plena Deo, Majus erat lumen quo Christi munera vidit Et quae sunt Fidei justificantis opes. Quem Martine sonas et voce et pectore Christum Hunc mea vox etiam, vita Fidesque sonet. Small portraits of Luther of this very type and design, and attributed to Cranach, are so frequent in German Museums that one feels suspicious of their genuineness. But there is no variation in the face, which is always unmistakable. 'l This also possesses beautifully carved and painted wooden mural monuments of early seventeenth century work. STAIRS TO TOWER OVER GATE AT HELMSTEDT P. 135. Hildesheim. 137 esque churches applies here also. But the very simplicity and silence of the cloister as we found it, were very striking. Hildesheim. l\S regards Hildesheim the case is very dif ferent.1 It is well known and reputed (with Goslar) the finest of old German towns — indeed it may pos sibly be over-rated in rela tion to Brunswick and other equally good specimens of ancient taste and wealth. Perhaps its greatest title 1 The above cut represents the pillar of an early Gothic crypt, which has been {horresco referejts) turned into a beer and billiard-room. The cues are standing round the pillar. I ;8 A Tour in Holland and Germany. to fame is the so-called Hildesheim treasure, which is of Roman days and, though found close by, is now preserved in Berlin. There, I suppose, it will be lost in the crowd, whereas if it had been left near where it was found, on the real "treasure of Hildesheim," in the Cathedral, a far worthier fate had awaited it. Its designs are accidentally known through the many copies which have been bought by private people. But indeed, however beautiful they are, they would have found a worthy company in the vessels, instruments, books and crosses preserved in the Cathedral of St. Bernward, and many of them due to the efforts and the patronage of that most artistic bishop. His art appears at once in the great circular candelabrum, and also in the quaint and splendid bronze doors, already mentioned. These are almost eclipsed by the illumination of his gospels, which are only second to the Book of Kells, and still more by his gold cross, which is covered with minute filigree work, and studded with precious stones. Itis luckily preserved in the church of St. Mary Magdalene by itself, where we could examine it at leisure as we had clone the Eleventh Century Art. 139 chalice in Brunswick. When we consider that all these works date from about the year 1,000 a.d., from the immediate school, if not from the guiding hand, of the bishop, we shall find another example of the strange fact, that art may become perfect in a very imperfect, and may deteriorate in a very advanced, civilisation. The work of Bernward's school is not equalled even by the gorgeous Renaissance work, which was so essentially a school of intricate and elegant orna ment. This latter kind of carving, both in wood and stone, is plentiful in the churches, but no one with a heart could compare it to the eleventh century masterpieces. Nor is this because they are older. The wooden Christ above mentioned (p. 122) is older still; but it is painfully gaunt and ugly. Concerning the churches which are of the Ger man Romanesque order we have already spoken in general terms. That of St. Michaelis may be noted in addition for its peculiarity of floor, which is raised about ten feet in the centre above the western nave, and again ten feet in the chancel, which is accordingly high above the rest of the 1 2 140 A Tour in Holland and Germany church. Moreover the north transept is shut off by a beautiful stone screen, quite Byzantine in character. We have already told of the architectu ral massacre of the cathedral (p. 1 19), but will here add that the eighteenth century Vandals were not so careful to destroy the cloisters, which are very simple and beautiful, and boast the possession of a rose tree 1,000 years old. This boast however now applies only to the root, which is invisible ; the present branches, which are all labelled with dates, are but of yesterday. The houses of Hildesheim which are worth looking at are far fewer in number than those in Brunswick, but then there are houses in the former more splendid than any we had seen in any other old town. The two best known are in the famous Altplatz of the town, which we saw on a market day full of people with no peculiar costumes, but selling wares of rich colours, such as meat, cherries, coloured pottery, and flowers. But to any one who knew the Hildesheim of former days there is this new feature, that the great carved fronts have been painted so as to bring out all the patterns, by which the effect is greatly enhanced. After ^ ANDREASPLATZ, HILDESHEIM. P. UI Remarkable Houses. 143 careful deliberation we came to the conclusion that this colouring, even when mistakes had been made, was a great and. real improvement. The best of the houses, called after its owner the Wittekind house, has fortunately been treated with perfect taste, and it is this, not the Butchers'' House with its enormous single gable, which we thought the finest house in the town. Its extended and yet minute ornament makes it unsuitable for an illustration to fit these pages, but here is a sketch of another, the so-called Kaiserhaus, because the row of statues along the front represents the Roman Emperors. But this house is altogether Renaissance, whereas the general character of the buildings is rather German house-Gothic. The pattern and in scriptions, which are all carved along the oak beams in the fronts of the houses, often repeat themselves — rows of fan pattern, the four cardinal virtues (with their names), Fortitude working a broken pillar, Temperance pouring out water, &c, the Five Senses, and such other subjects. The dates are almost all sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries. 144 -A Tour in Holland and Germany. Unfortunately for our purpose Hildesheim is a thriving place, and a large new quarter is rapidly springing up, where great new Gothic and Rococo houses excite the admiration of the inhabitants, most of whom are only now learning that an tiquity is a source of distinction, and may even be a source of wealth. The new suburbs are re markable for their pretty gardens, in which we saw fine standard roses, white lilies, carnations and many other shrubs and creepers flowering in splendid profusion. But this we can see at home. CHAPTER VIII. Marburg. had determined to look at some old University towns upon our way, and had thought of stopping at Got tingen. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the station, we found a large number of the students (of the red Hanoverian Verbindung) see ing off their friends. Our Oxford companion almost turned ill on the spot. Al ' more beery, swollen, criminal-1, looking set of people it would be hard to find, and, to add to their 148 A Tour in Holland and Germany. natural repulsiveness, almost all of them were cut and slashed about the face in the most disgusting manner. The wounds were fresh, at least if a wound healing by suppuration can be called fresh, and they seemed rather proud than ashamed of exhibiting this nauseous and bar barous decoration to the public at the station. It was well known to us in former years that a badly-healed scar in the face was used in Ger many instead of our hood, to mark a graduate or B.A. You knew at once when you met him that he was a University man. But that this mediaeval absurdity should last to the present time, along with the so-called high civilisation of the Germans, is passing strange. There was a whole library of pamphlets about it to be had some years ago. Now it seems accepted even without discussion. We do not suppose the Ger mans would like to cite on their side the ludi crous duels of Nicotera and Lovito in Italy three years ago, or of Floquet and Boulanger which happened while we were writing these pages. This practice, along with gymnastics, is sup posed to promote courage and vigour in a soldier Marburg. 149 nation. But any one who looks at the young Ger mans walking about will come to the conclusion that our field sports afford a very different and a far superior kind of physical and mental train ing. The Germans have no doubt enhanced the natural defects of their figure by an unfortunate costume or cut of clothes. They affect both in uniforms and in civil dress long frock coats, with very tight trousers. The result is that the skirts of the close-buttoned frock coat stand out in front of their very stout figures, with a pair of thin, and therefore apparently too long legs far back in the shade. It is like the circle and two long lines wherewith a child tries to indicate the human body. To return to the students. This melancholy exhibition at the railway station was enough to deter one of the party from stopping there at all : the rest of us protested that some of them — the Braunschweiger Verbindung — had received us years ago with great cordiality and kindness, and that we had found them excellent people. It was decided however to go on to Cassel, en route for Marburg, which we knew to be from artistic 150 A Tour in Holland and Germany. and antiquarian considerations far more interest ing. Moreover, it is almost unknown to English travellers, and this was another inducement. Concerning Cassel, a fine and cheerful town, situated in a very pleasant wooded country, and possessing a noble picture gallery and library, we need only say a word. Out of Holland there are no such Rembrandt pictures to be seen, and the long series of tall residences looking out over a stately park recall the recent days when the place was strictly the capital of a sovran ruling over a broad country. Now a Prussian general with his soldiers holds the position of the Elector with his court and foreign embassies, and already the people, who were justly discontented with the Elector's capri cious and not enlightened rule, are beginning bit terly to regret the revolution which has turned Cassel into a provincial town. The pompous monuments in honour of the Hessians who fell in promoting Prussian ambition, and are belauded as German patriots, have not compensated for the serious losses the better classes have suffered. The Library was unfortunately closed, so that we could not verify the statement that there are Missing Page Missing Page Marburg. 153 here some Irish MSS. brought from Fulda. Despite the abolition of the court, Cassel is a thriving town, increasing in population, with plenty of those evening recreations so pleasant for the passing stranger to enjoy. Marburg suffers artistically from its rising prosperity, as there is not only a large new quarter in the valley, but elegant modern villas are beginning to occupy the still available places on the beautifully-wooded hill, which is crowned by the mighty Schloss. It is one of the few in this country which has not been dismantled and ruined. Since the deposition of the Elector of Hessen Cassel, whose residence it was (in addition to those at Cassel), the Prussians have had it carefully repaired, and it is now used as the state Archiv, where all the documents of the province are collected and ordered. Thus many of the famous MSS. of Fulda have been transferred here, and we had the pleasure of handling some of the books brought by our missionaries from Ireland in the eighth and ninth centuries. An Irish MS. (in Latin) from Carlsruhe was also 154 -A Tour in Holland and Germany. there temporarily, which the presiding official, Herr Archivrath Konnecke, had the kindness to show us. We found in it uncial headings of quite the character of the Book of Kells, and the THE HESENTHURM, AT THE SCHLOSS GATE, MARBURG. smaller script was like that of the Book of Armagh. But alas ! there were only two small ornaments on one page, quite distinctive of the Irish style, peculiar in this that they were white Marburg. 1 5 5 on a black ground, or rather on the colour of the ink, which had faded to dark brown. This is the kind of thing, not to speak of documents signed by Charlemagne and his immediate successors, which are there in unusual abundance. But the castle itself requires no adjuncts, with its delightful terraces, its fine hall, its chapel, its lovely prospects, and the many fine points both of thirteenth and sixteenth century building which it exhibits.1 These German castles are like the English cathedrals, begun in one style and finished in another, and we could not find that the Renaissance ornaments generally laid on to the surface of the older structure were inharmo- 1 On the handsome Renaissance addition built at the south side of this castle is the following inscription, partly on the left, partly on the right side of the shield of the Landgraves : — DER DVRCHLEVCHTIG FVRST HOCHGEBOR. VON GOT ZUM REGIMENT ERKORN LVDWIG LANDGRAF VND TER ZU HESSE LIES DIES GEMACH VO NEW ABMESSE VND AVFFVHREN IN DER GESTALT ALS MAN TAVSEND FVNFHVNDERT ZALT VNDT SIEBENZIG ZWEI IAR DARZV GOT GEB DEM LANDT VNDT FVRSTE RHV. 156 A Tour in Holland and Germany. nious. Thus in the fine Rittersaal or main hall, which is of pure and early Gothic, there is an inlaid Renaissance door with lofty decorated framing, also inlaid in many plain woods, which is not to be surpassed by anything we could find. Marburg was the favourite residence of the old Landgraves, whose tombs are all to be seen in the great Church of S. Elizabeth (of Hungary) who was buried here in 1231. Her sarcophagus is here, preserved in a side chapel, and it may rank among the most splendid monuments of that splendid epoch. Though many of the jewels have been torn out, the beautiful figures and delicate tracing of this wonderful metal-work are still intact, and to see this monument alone it is worth paying a visit to Marburg. In other respects the church is fine and simple Gothic. The west door is among the finest in Germany, though much injured in effect by two huge buttresses, which rise beside it to support the lofty but poor steeples. In another side chapel we found lying figures of most of the Landgraves. One especially will strike the visitor, which lies like the rest in armour, while Marburg. 157 underneath it is the naked and decomposed corpse (in stone), with serpents, worms, and toads in and about the ghastly body. The realism is horrible, and legend tells that he was killed out hunting, and found in this state long after, which the priests commemorated in sculpture because he was a god less man, and never attended his devotions. Itis not likely that his successor would tolerate such a lesson in stone. Whatever the explanation, the monument is most curious. There are also trip- tychs, once the reredoses of side altars, of which the centre is elaborately carved and coloured wood, representing not only figures but land scapes, while the sides are old and excellent paintings of the Niirnberg school. There was much more to admire, but we are (as the Greeks say) escaping our own observation, falling into local cicerones. The students were less gashed, and looked nicer people than the Gottingen heroes. Still we were told that they had duelling matches every Saturdav. The worthy and learned Archiv- rat who talked with us much on the subject, would not allow that the practice was absurd or 158 A Tour in Holland and Germany. wrong. He said he should certainly not en courage it, but he should object to abolishing it by law. In this we coincided. It must be tabooed by fashion, as it exists by fashion. As soon as it is seen to be ridiculous and disgusting, it will disappear without any state interference. But our excellent informant laid great stress on the deep contrasts between the English system and the German, and warned us against drawing inferences here from our experience there, in this too he was quite right. All this however does not prove that the custom is not barbarous, for it seems that civilisation ought to be a homo geneous thing, praising and blaming the same sort of actions in various countries. There is however no use in arguing a question of taste. We left Marburg with great regret. It is the most Italian-looking of German towns ; with its steep streets, and lofty houses rising from the edge of the rock, and beautiful views into the far country. The style of its wooden houses is that well-known as the Upper Hessian, on which Bickell has just brought out an excellent set of photographs with text at Marburg. Though ijil ¦til «1 Bii ii i^..;:: III Bi •-'' HOUSE AT MARBURG the work had appeared but a few days, when we asked for it, the edition was already gone so K 160 A Tour in Holland and Germany. that we owed our knowledge of it to the kindness of M. Konnecke. A specimen of our own is here annexed, that the reader may compare it with the analogous work in Holland, North Germany, and the East sea-coast. In Marburg this style suffers in colour from all the roofs, or almost all, being of slate, though laid very carefully in small circular scales. The frames of wood are not carved so carefully as in Brunswick, and the filling up of bricks, sometimes of wattles and clay, is generally coloured white, especially if the bricks are not burnt bricks, but of mud colour. In the country towards Fulda, many houses are far more brightly toned. The roofs are again tiled, the walls sometimes painted, even scarlet ; and at a village, near Fulda, we found the woodwork of several houses painted bright blue, which in the white wall made a brilliant pattern, somewhat harsh in effect. The beautiful hilly and wooded country reach ing all the way from Marburg to the Rhon moun tains is well worth a visit, both from its natural and its artistic treasures. We noted several villao-es between Marburg and Giessen, such as Lollar, Marburg. 1 6 1 which possessed an old chateau, with fine medi aeval towers, so that a fortnight spent in excursions from both places would well repay the trouble. At one of these isolated castles Baedeker an nounces that beer and fine view are to be had. Indeed all through his practical volume the Bier-lokal is evidently regarded as of the first importance to his readers. Fulda. . The best centre near the Rhdn is Fulda, the seat of an old Prince Bishop, and still so strongly Catholic that it took a leading part in the political conflict called in Germany the Kultur- kampf since 1866. Hence it has been treated with disfavour. There is no garrison here, though the great empty Palace would now make an admirable barrack. Even no Bishop was tolerated till recently, so that for some years this ancient see was without its proper head. The town itself was unfortunately all renovated and ruined by late seventeenth and eighteenth century wealth and taste. The Bishop's Palace k 2 1 62 A Tour in Holland and Germany. and the Cathedral are in the worst Louis XIV. style. The houses are all square solid mansions of no architectural interest. It is only the Library and the Michaelis-Kirche which betray the ancient splendour of Fulda. Even the Library has suffered enormously. The archives above mentioned have been removed by the Prussians to Marburg ; many of the manuscripts were taken to Cassel, when the Elector succeeded the old Prince Bishops in the dominion over this province. The French did other mischief, and indeed we noted the most extraordinary keenness in all the people to tell of all the mischief done by the Napoleonic wars in Ger many. It seemed that even the common people were anxious to justify their victory over the French, and the harsh terms of that victory, by exaggerating all the old causes of anger which were supposed to rankle in German hearts. ' Frankreich, Krieg, and Hungersnoth, das sind die drei schlimmsten Sachen,' said a peasant to us, quoting a proverb which puts the French in the place of pestilence among the scourges of mankind. Marbtirg. 1 6 o But notwithstanding all scandalous robberies, and still more scandalous restorations, Fulda possesses among its books unique treasures, and among its churches one equally unique in Ger many. For St. Michael's Church is partly earlier than Romanesque, it is Byzantine in style, and dates from somewhere about the year 800. The crypt, supported by one central pillar, is surrounded by a series of vaulted cells, where St. Boniface and his companions sought to root out their sins by solitary confinement. Over this crypt rises a sort of cupola inside the later church, supported on Byzantine columns, with most of the capitals richly carved in patterns which remind one strongly of the Ravenna work.1 The Romanesque nave (eleventh century) is longer than is the case with the Byzantine churches in Greece, nor is the church so high in proportion as they are, if we except the central cupola. There is a curious circular staircase beside the west door, almost hidden in the wall, and of very original design. The whole church had been recently restored and coloured by Professor 1 So far it dates from about 750. 164 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Lange, who utilised carefully both the illuminated MSS. of the monastery and the traces of colour still recoverable on the walls. The effect is new and rather unsatisfactory, like the effect of the jesus Chapel off the chancel of Norwich Cathe dral, which has been restored in the same way. The black and gold walls, which are so striking in Greece — as for example at Daphne, near Athens — would have afforded a better model, or else the mosaics of Ravenna. None of the various attempts now being made to recolour the old Romanesque churches in Germany seem to have hit the right thing. The Fulda MSS. include the actual gospels written for his own use by St. Boniface, in what may be called Irish cursive, with pictures of the four evangelists, but no other illuminations. The last page contains a note in gold uncials of the unmistakable Irish type, stating that the succeeding abbot, Huoggi, obtained the book after the most earnest prayers from King Arnulfus as a memento of the great martyr — tanquam nobile documentum ipsis manibus (martyri) con- scriptum a rege Arnulfo obnixis precibus impetravit Marburg. 165 — and it ends with the date 874, so that here we have the minor limit of age — truly a valuable and precious document. The numerous auto graph letters of Luther, Melanchthon, and Zwingli (who had their bitter discussion in the Schloss at Marburg), which were shown us after this book of gospels, were sorely damaged in interest by their splendid companion. The other and larger gospel which Boniface used is well known from the treatise upon it with Pertz' edition of the text (Codex Fuldensis, Leipsig, 1 858). It consists of single tall columns of uncial writing, earlier than the other book in date, but to us not so interesting. We will only add that by the use of chemicals to decipher the marginal notes of St. Boniface the book is in some places sadly defaced. This vandalism is attributed, whether justly or not, to Professor Pertz, of Berlin. Most of the later MSS., one of which (Aa. 65, Cod. Weingart.) is illumi nated by an artist scarcely inferior to Fra Angelico, come from the monastery of Wein garten, so that Fulda has not only lost but gained by robbery. 1 66 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Of printed books we need only mention the Gutenberg Bible on vellum, of which we know the auction value to be at least 4,000/. The vellum of the Weingarten MSS. is the most delicate and excellent we had ever seen, as thin as fine paper, and of the most perfect colour and texture. The Library room, though built early in the eighteenth century, is perhaps the most com modious and striking in Germany, and would be well worth imitating in some of our new mansions — if indeed a library be included in the notions of the new magnates. W"e noted it specially as showing how even in the most debased period people can build handsomely and well if they will keep before them practical objects, and make, their designs honestly sub servient to the purpose in hand. The sleepy town of Fulda offers these treasures at all events — the Church plate we did not see — to the traveller who will pause there for a day, perhaps on his way to catch trout, or admire mild mountain scenery in the Rhongebirge. We were left by accident at the small station of Neuhaus, Neuhaus. 1 6 7 where we had ample time to admire the four corner towers of the Prince Bishop's country or sporting Schloss, which had once been surrounded by a fosse. The whole building is still very complete. But we were reminded unduly of home by finding in the village the manure heap close in front of each house, and many of the children, otherwise pretty, looking pale and sickly. The farming seemed very good and careful, and in a garden we found the finest purple double poppies we had ever seen. So that even in a village taken at random there was plenty to interest any reasonable inquirer. CHAPTER IX. In the Country. ''al y~\F 1 LjIi seeing a series of cities and streets and old houses, and comparing churches, and hunting for Cantors and Pedells to show us ecclesiastical treasures — for the Lutherans and the Reformed keep their churches locked, and seldom open them except for money — a week in woods and hills, in converse with nature, or what is com paratively nature, is not to be despised. So this time we chose the Thuringer Wald, both because of the Wartburg — a splendid speci men of early German Romanesque — and because we had peculiar privileges accorded to us in that The Thuringer Wald. 169 district. For we were under the guidance and care of princely hospitality. So we were admitted to the private rooms of the Wartburg, which is now one of the residences of the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, to whom that famous castle owes its admirable restoration. Radiating from the Fiirst enhaus at Liebenstein as a centre, our august hosts took us beautiful drives and walks through the surrounding forests and glens, which are like a great English park, with unlimited plantations. This Thuringer Wald, the property of the reigning Saxon Dukes of Weimar, and Meiningen, and Coburg, with the ancient and highly civilised towns surrounding it, may be called in many respects the true heart of Germany ; and the German tourist, a creature in whom vulgarity and enthusiasm strive for the mastery, will tell you that the Wartburg, with its legends of the Sanger krieg, of Luther, of the great duke Bernhard, who led the Protestant cause after the death oi Gustavus Adolphus, is the real citadel of German sentiment. Perhaps more poetic than all the rest are the recollections of S. Elizabeth of Hungary, whom we found again here upon walls and in 170 A Tour in Holland and Germany. inscriptions ; she died a nun at Marburg ; she lived her short life as queen in the Wartburg. Luther, of course, appears here as everywhere. There is hardly an old town in central Germany where they have not manuscripts and pictures and recollections of Luther. In the Wartburg, the famous ink-spot on the wall has been taken away with the mortar by the constant pilfering of the herds of German tourists which infest the place. More than 80,000 visited the castle last season. We owed it to our august host that we saw it privily and in peace. The general view of this castle is not so im posing as that of Marburg, but in its detail no German building can equal it in interest. The style is in many respects more Byzantine than the Romanesque churches, and shows that in the end of the eleventh century people knew how to build with grace and ornament. It has been so care fully restored, even in colour, that it is not easy to detect how much is new and how much is old, but some of the central pillars which support the dwelling rooms are manifestly beautiful old specimens of almost Byzantine style. The views fel Game Preserves. i y\ in all directions are very delightful. The country undulates in forested hills or mountains (up to 3,000 feet high) all round the castle, so that from every window there are valleys and upland ranges, forest and fell to be seen. The whole of the forest is intersected with good roads, and is care fully preserved for its game by the three Dukes. From early days it has been the home of red deer and roebuck, formerly of wild boar, but is wanting in hares, rabbits, and any game birds, but a few blackcock and capercailzie. Of course stags are the royal game, and afford these princes their autumn recreation. Stalking is impossible, on account of the dense woods ; so the deer are driven to the gun. Foxes are also shot here, and are considered as good sport as any game. But the rise of democratic ideas has seriously inter fered with this pastime of crowned heads. It is now necessary to pay Schadenersatz for what this large game destroys, and so wild boars, the most mischievous of all, are no longer tolerated, and the forests are fenced to keep in the deer from straying.1 All through the woods one comes 1 The tenant farmers are said to be as astute as Irish tenants 174 A Tour in Holland and Germany. upon lodges built by the Dukes, who seem to have all had a taste for building, and moreover a taste for living in a number of houses every year. Thirteen residences of the Grand Duke of Saxe- Weimar were enumerated to us. The strange thing is that at many of them there is an hotel or inn close beside the Ducal house. Even in the Wartburg there is an inn. All through the forest, in addition to celebrated spots, such as the place where Luther was seized to be carried to his friendly confinement, there are picturesque and interesting villages, inhabited for the most part by hardworking, but poor people. An exception is Ruhla, which straggles up a glen for nearly two miles in a single street, and is famed for the manufacture of meerschaum pipes, through which considerable fortunes are, or used to be, made. The most picturesque in the way of wooden building was Herges, where there were large houses not unlike the Hessian, but with a in planting the most tempting crops close by the most favourite haunts of the game, in order that they may make large claims for its destruction. And it may be suspected that they emulate— sed longo intervallo— the complaints of the Irish tenants in their land courts. Luther's study. (From the English Illustrated Magazine.) P. 175. German Home Life. \yy good many variations, especially a narrow eave of tiles running round over the ground floor so as to afford a protection to the hall-door and lower windows. There were also carved edges and some designs on the wooden beams. The whole country is admirable for walking tours, affording inns at short distances, and the greatest variety of easy excursions, not to speak of good historical towns, whenever the civilised man, weary of nature, desires to return for a day to the comforts or the distractions of the nineteenth century. But we are hardly fair judges of this district, as everything was mellowed and enriched by the generous and thoughtful hospitality which it was our privilege to enjoy. The present chapter would be far more interest ing, and the main attraction of the book, if it were lawful to sketch the dailv life of a German house, not of the lower and middle, but of the very highest class. This kind of indiscretion has however been monopolised by certain society papers, and certain travellers whose brilliant style carries them beyond the bounds of proper regard and respect for the feelings of their hosts, and we 178 A Tour in Holland and Germany. have no desire to requite kindness by calling in the public to witness it. The conclusion forced upon the student of this life, as a peculiar feature in the history of Germany, now fast disappearing under the centralisation of the new empire, is that no amount of Berlin splendour, with its enormous area of streets, its gigantic museum and picture gallery, its legion of starched officials, its affecta tion to rank among the great historical capitals of the world, will replace the older various and accessible culture afforded by the art, the learn ing, and the traditions of the smaller capitals. Weimar, Gotha, Brunswick, Cassel, may be some day swallowed up by the ambition of Berlin. Their life and art will never be replaced by that in any other great city. CHAPTER X. Germany. — Some Baltic Towns. seemed worth while, after our observations on Dutch and central German towns, to take a look at the north coast in side Denmark, where were situated so many important Hansa towns, and where German trade once promised to take the lead in Europe. So we left our hospitable hosts with great reluctance, and undertook the long journey from Eisenach to Greifswald, stopping 180 A Tour in Holland and Germany. at the great new capital of Berlin only long enough to survey the public buildings, which are one and all wholly uninteresting, and the museums, which in pictures and statuary are marvellously rich. The modern gallery will not please those accustomed to either the Royal Academy or the Salon, for with the exception of half-a-dozen fine portraits, especially Bismarck and Moltke by Lembach, the walls are covered with patriotic battle-pieces and with landscapes only respectable enough for tea-trays. Among the modern sculptures there is a Pifferaro coloured up to life, who puts to shame all the cold white marbles about him, and some of the mediaeval altar-pieces are for the same reason very striking. But it is needless to speak of these things, which require a long and careful survey, and belong to a different kind of tour from that which we undertook. Berlin is no typical city, except it be of Prussian enterprise, ability, and want of taste. It may be a very comfortable place to dwell in, and even very agreeable when you know the people and the ways of the city ; but except for its art collection, which is as usual so Greifswald. 1 8 1 vast that many fine things are practically lost. there is nothing to detain a stranger. o o So we will begin with Greifswald, an old university town far out of the way of ordinary traffic, and which we visited hoping to find specimens of Northern Gothic and Renaissance not familiar to ordinary people. At first sight these lesser Baltic towns seem disappointing. The wooden building, if such existed, has made way long ago to brick, and though there are very fine brick churches in all of them, the house architecture is not to be compared with that which is to be seen everywhere in Central Germany. The students present at the moment were few, and did not show the same amount of bloody wounds and hacks as at Gottingen. The general features of the old houses in the market place, and of the church of St. Nicolai, is that of all these towns — large churches built of red and black bricks in alternate courses, in style late twelfth century, and having their huge square towers ornamented by arched panelling or arcading of good and simple design. Internally, all these buildings have been white- TOWER OF MARIEN KIRCHE, GREIFSWALD. Greifswald. 183 washed, and are gaunt enough, were it not for occasional side chapels, where there remain some fine wood carvings of the fifteenth century, generally richly coloured. Of the same kind and of the highest merit are some reredoses, such as those at Stralsund and Rostock, which are master-pieces fit for any church in the world. The pulpits, on the contrary, were not worth looking at, though much ornamented, after we had seen the splendid Dutch work in the Protestant churches. For to the Lutherans, though preaching is very important, the pulpit is not the only place of interest in the church, but shares its supremacy with the altar, which has its crucifix and its ornaments, often very splendid, and in any case not ruthlessly destroyed, when they happened to be there. Greifswald has a fine spacious market, from which we give a sketch, but suffers from not being situated on the sea, though the bay outside is called by its name (Greifswalder Bodden), so that there is not the advantage of shipping to add to its beauties. We give a sketch of part of the Marien Kirche, which is remark able for the height of the nave. Unfortunately 184 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the arcading of the tower has been shockingly disfigured by the apparent setting of a roof against it, which cuts the design across the middle. But there is no use in complaining of this kind of thing. It is almost impossible to ON THE MARKET PLACE, GREIFSWALD. find in these countries a good plan untampered with. Far more interesting is Stralsund, both on account of its beautiful position between a large lake and the sea, with the island of Ritgen over against it, and on account of the many fine sawi r«a + *~$t* STRALSUND, FROM RUGEN P. 185 Stralsund. buildings which still remain. It is a sleepy town. with grass growing in many of the streets ; and THE SEMLOWER GATE, STRALSUND. at the table d'hote which we attended, dinner began with four courses of fish, then a course of 1 88 A Tour in Holland and Germany. schnaps, and then only came soup and the rest of an ordinary Continental dinner.1 An attempt to send home a couple of bulbs in a box failed from the complete incompetence of the officials to accommodate such a novelty to their iron- bound regulations. The houses and churches of this place were quite homogeneous with those of Greifswald, but more various. We give a few specimens of what was best, especially a gate which was equally picturesque within and without. The Rathhaus, of which we give a sketch, con tains a good provincial museum of the proper size, wherein one can see and study the contents without fatigue. The best things are the mass of flint weapons and implements of pre-historic time, and the MSS. of Swedish kings and generals, among whom Charles XI I., so intimately connected with the siege of Stralsund, and Queen Christina, are the best known. The altar-piece of the Nicolai Kirche struck us as the finest piece 1 The habit of serving fish (especially salt) before dinner, which corresponds to the serving of oysters at an English dinner, is said to be a remnant of the Swedish occupation of these Baltic towns. INSIDE THE RATHHAUS, STRALSUND. of wood carving we had yet seen. The main field, representing the crucifixion, has positively a whole multitude carved out, looking at the PART OF EXTERIOR OF RATHHAUS, STRALSUND. scene. The work has been somewhat restored, but only in the surmounting pinnacles, which ^BBtniRlSBS!! IBB MARIEN KIRCHE, STRALSUND. P. 191. The Rostocker Heide. 193 show in the artist a taste not better than that displayed on Cologne Cathedral. The way to Rostock from Stralsund is still to be done, partly at least, by a post-diligence, so we preferred to hire at Ribnitz a one-horsed trap of a very humble appearance, which took us at a slow jog along the wonderfully straight road, which, with only two slight bends, leads for fifteen miles along the Rostocker Heide, as it is called. We soon came to a great forest of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburgh-Schwerin, fenced in like the preserves of the Thuringian princes, but con taining (we are told) wild boars, as well as the usual large game, and many woodcocks, even in winter. The wood was full of ferns, and here and there fields of yellow lupine spread their enchanting scent through the country. We had not gone more than half way when the great towers and spires of the old Hansa town showed themselves over the flat moorland, promising us a rich harvest of sight-seeing. But nearer the town there were also large farms, with fine isolated homesteads, so unusual in Germany. These we learned were built by 194 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the Corporation of Rostock for the tenants to whom they leased the city property. The outlay of the Corporation was so heavy that we were told the rents only brought them a return of 2 per cent., so that we were not surprised to learn that the technical name^for these tenants is pensioners. Their leases are generally for thirty years. The farming showed evidence of great intelligence, but all the farm machinery still comes from the best houses in Scotland. So we amused ourselves with that closer observation which is the privilege of slow travelling, till we were brought up the steep and roughly-paved ascent into the ancient town. The first thing which will strike any observer is the distinctive and beautiful colour of the tiled roofs. Dull red and pale buff tiles are set on indiscriminately, with an occasional dark brown exception, so that the whole roof looks like a bright red roof which has faded out with the weather. It is impossible to imagine a finer effect than this covering over brick walls. Otherwise the house architecture was not remarkable There were some instances of the upright arcaded fronts Rostock. 195 which we have already given from Stralsund, and in the chief place were a number of very tall and ugly gables facing the street, as they do in Holland. But the five churches are splendid, A GABLE AT ROSTOCK. and so is the general aspect of the town from the opposite side of the estuary — a view which rivals those of Dordrecht. The Marien Kirche is the finest of the churches, 196 A Tour in Holland and Germany. as well as the most peculiar, being in shape a Greek cross, and adorned with a tower of very peculiar design. Here is the summit of it. Within, the capitals pillars in the nave tino; in a sandstone the edge to form a the head of the clus- wise the whitewash effect, and there is value in the way cept a very dated 1290, of the groups oi are formed by set- slab horizontally, for patterned band at tered shafts. Other- has killed the proper nothing of much of furniture ex- good font on which UPPER PART OF TOWER, MARIEN KIRCHE, ROSTOCK. the figures in bronze seemed to us a curiously distinct imitation of woodwork. The plan of the very tall windows in delicate brickwork of alternate brown and red is very beautiful. The Petri Kirche, with its immense spire, is in ROSTOCK FROM THE OPPOSITE SITE OF THE ESTUARY. P. 197- Churches at Rostock. 199 the quaint old market-place, with grass growing through the stones all round the church. Here for the first time we found an attempt to re- colour the interior, unfortunately not by scraping off the whitewash but by painting the pillars and groining in imitation of bricks, with white lines for the mortar. The effect, though far better than the miserable white, is far from adequate. But the usual loftiness of the nave and choir, which makes the church look quite short, is a redeeming feature, as is also the purity and simplicity of this fine thirteenth- century building. The Kloster Kirche has a quaint old cloister, with the surrounding rooms, an almshouse, and shady gardens about it. But the church is dere lict, and in miserable condition, though it boasts of two great altar-pieces, wood-carving coloured on a gold ground, both of them representing the Passion of our Lord. The canopies over the figures point to the fourteenth century, though the custodians insist that they are as old as the foundation of the monastery in the early thirteenth century. THE WEST GATE AT ROSTOCK. There are several fine gates to the town, very tall, and showing with the church spires from a Wismar 20 1 distance. We here give perhaps the finest of them — the west gate. There seemed to be good and constant com munication by steam to the bathing-place at the mouth of the river, and even to the fashionable Riigen, as well as south to Berlin and Hanover ; but along the coast each town seemed perfectly isolated. Wismar. Wismar shows its splendid churches to the visitor from a long distance, as all these towns do. Even the small and insignificant Doberan has one of these gigantic brick churches, which are nothing if the nave be not over 100 feet high. When we came into the town, we inquired about its history and position. We were told proudly that it was a Swedish town, and by no means German, but that the Swedes had pawned it to the grand Duke of Mecklenburgh-Schwerin, for a great sum of money, and that they might redeem it if they liked in 1903. Upon further inquiry concerning this Grand Duke, we were handed the Schwerin M 202 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Directory with a full account of his pedigree, titles, and household. It appeared to put our royal state to shame. Not only was the Grand Duke a lineal inheritor from a chief of the Obotrites in 1 125, but his mother was the daughter of Prince Henry the sixty-third of Reuss-Schleitz-Kostritz, a potentate of whose name and august descent we are all scandalously ignorant.1 However the existing Grand Duke appears to have been de corated with twenty orders, so he must be a very distinguished person, apart from his pedigree. That which fascinated us most in the list of his orders was the Japanese order of the Chrysanthemum. This ruler has invested a great deal upon his short lease of Wismar, for he has restored most admirably the fine Renaissance Rathhaus, which has all its windows framed in very excellent red terra-cotta work. The house stands in the midst 1 We have since learned that it is the practice of this family, which owns a very small dominion, to christen all their sons Henry, and to go on counting them by numbers till they reach one hundred, when they begin again. This being the case, it seems odd that they do not add some note of the cycle in which the prince occupies No. 63. For he is by no means the first who has attained this high figure. Churches at Wismar. 203 of a group of buildings not easilv to be surpassed — two great churches, that of St. George and the Marien Kirche ; a very ornate black and red brick house known as the Altschule, in which there is a local museum ; an old weighing house, and several good private houses, all either of ruby red brick, or of red and black, the black being glazed, and often faded to a dark green colour. The west tower of St. George's Church, which is not on the scale of the nave, and therefore belongs to an older building, is given in the adjoining cut. Fine as this church is, it is eclipsed by the Marien Kirche, which has not only a great western tower, ending in a plain gable, without any onion orna ments, or other vulgarity on its summit, but with some coloured bricks making a pattern on the face of the gable. This treatment is common in the other churches, especially in the gable end of the transepts, in which glittering black tiles make a large bold rose pattern, easily seen from a distance. The apses are of that very elegant broken penta gon form, by which fifteen surfaces produce five small chapels behind the altar. There was also at the north-east point, inside the north tran- M 2 204 A Tour in Ho liana and Germany. sept, a decorated member looking like the base of a tower, crowned by florid panelling in coloured tiles, which seemed to have no use but to hold one of the doors. In no case was the west door even when it was central, of the smallest import- TOWER OF ST. GEORGE S CHURCH, WISMAR. ance. Probably the practice of gorgeous proces sions was the stimulating cause for all the great west doors in our Cathedrals. Had these churches been built in Protestant days, we can understand the state Churches at Wismar. 205 entrance being omitted, but as they date from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, we must only conjecture that the great towers of brick did not allow of anything but a solid wall of masonry under them. The west doors are often put in at the side, and clear of the tower. If at Rostock the peculiarity in tiled roofs was the mixture of colours, so here, where the bricks were all almost ruby red, moss and green plants were growing on many of them, as well as 01 the streets, which gave a very distinct tone to the architecture. As in all other cases of good building, none of the designs of these churches was copied from another. They were all very similar, and yet all quite distinct. In one the nave and choir are very lofty, the transepts much lower, and separated in roof from the church, though within this is not apparent. In another the nave and transepts are lofty and the choir on a small scale. One has a short, thick-set tower, which we have given (p. 206), the others great square towers without spires, but here again the roofing of the spire shows only two gables in one case and four in the other. 206 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Still more remarkable were the interiors. The floors were all of brick, set in all over the church with gray sandstone tombstones covered with inscriptions. Mural monuments were few and insignificant, but here and there antique and richly painted. The main thing was that the Wismar people had wakened ud to the horror of whitewashing their churches, and had taken to scraping the interiors. They discovered in many side-chapels old designs in blue, green, and red, painted on a white surface, showing that long ago the brick dark red surface was considered too plain for ornate chapels. But still almost the whole of the Nicolai Kirche when we saw it had recovered its old brick colour. The ceiling was left white, and painted with simple designs in good taste, had not a showy green been too predominant. The inner effect of this vast nave in red, with red lines mark ing the engaged pillars of the clerestory is simply magnificent. Unfortunately a closer examination showed that they had given up the scraping as too difficult, and simply washed in red, mark ing the joinings of the bricks with white lines. Inside the Churches. 207 So after all the real thing has not yet been attained. Still the advance is marvellous, and enabled us at last to admire one of these great edifices in some of its pristine splendour. The naves were perhaps 120 to 140 feet high, and the side aisles often as high as the centre roof. St. George's Church we saw under restoration, and near the west end had been uncovered a mural fresco with Bishop Boddeker who died in 1492, and who had enlarged the church. Here, after picking off the new red colour with a knife, you come on nearly a quarter of an inch of whitewash, and then the browny red of the old bricks. But in the Nicolai Church the same experiment only showed a coat or two of white under the new red. In St. George's there are fine old oak ends to the new pews, which all date from the sixteenth century, when people put their initials, date, and coat of arms, with some religious motto, on these ends. These oak pew-ends were also to be seen in the Heiligegeist Kirche, all dated in the years 1570-90, and here there was a splendid painted wooden ceiling, the boards between each of the 208 A I our in Holland and Germany. great cross beams being alternately red, buff, and white with large flower patterns in black and white, with an oval painting in the centre. There are few such ceilings, untouched save where a board had been replaced without an attempt to paint it, to be found in Germany. The Wismar people have their churches open after the good old Catholic fashion, so that the visitor is not obliged, as elsewhere in North Germany, to hunt for the Kuster, and pay him money to see the interior. The altars and organs were generally hideous seventeenth or eighteenth century structures ; there was almost everywhere a fine old font of worked bronze resting on four kneeling angels, and dating from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Another fashion was to set behind the altar one of those wonderful clocks which tell the day, the month, the year, the state of the moon, the sign of the zodiac, the date of Easter, and what not. But we are too full upon these remarkable churches ; let it be our excuse that not one English traveller in a thousand has ever heard of them. Here is a view of the Nicolai Kirche, as seen from the south-east. NICOLAI KIRCHE, WISMAR. P. 109. Isolation of the Towns. 2 1 1 The secular buildings are on a far smaller scale, but not less peculiar. Here is seen the perfection of that screening the front with arcading of brick in black and red, which reaches up to make an open-work parapet into which the roof protrudes its eaves. We tried in vain to get by boat from one of these towns to another. They all lie on estuaries and at no long distances ; nevertheless there are no coasting steamers. The people of each town — Stralsund, Rostock, Wismar, Lubeck — go to their own watering-places at the mouth of their estuary and do not care to visit their neighbours. So a circuitous railway route is the only means of communication. This keeps them quiet and un pretending, and consequently more interesting than the larger centres, like Lubeck, which in deed we had counted as one of them, but which has sufficient importance to receive distinct consideration. CHAPTER XI. Lubeck. UBECK is noticeable rather for its secular buildings than for its churches. Not that there are wanting great churches and spires, which strike the traveller as he approaches from afar. But internally these vast buildings have been shockingly maltreated both with whitewashing and by the setting of huge monu ments in as bad taste as those of Westminster Abbey, and not on the CATHEDRAL OF LUBECK. ground, but high on the pillars, so destroying the effect of the lofty and beautifully-planned 214 A Tour in Holland and Germany. naves. We actually found two ruffians busy whitewashing the cathedral, which is in many respects remarkable as a Romanesque foundation of Henry the Lion. Within it looks very bare and cold, and very low in the ceiling when you have not seen a nave under ioo feet high for a long time. There is a splendid triptych by H. Memling in one of the chapels ; there is a handsome restored north-east porch, and that is all. But the outside which we here give is as fine as most of these churches. The Marien Kirche, with its nave of 160 feet high and its two spires of 400 feet, is so mangled within as to be hardly worth visiting. But two of the gates have been preserved, of which we give the Burgthor, which has the most picturesque sur roundings, and is perhaps more striking than the other (the Holstein gate), which has been restored very well, but still . The Rath haus and the place about it are also quite exceptionally rich and worth a visit, and there is no pleasanter place than Lubeck to spend a few days. The famous old Schifferhaus is an excellent restaurant, in which there are all kinds INTERIOR OF SCI1IFFERIIAUS, LUBECK. P. 2I5. L iibeck. 217 of precious mementoes of former days hanging from the ceiling. It is a gloomy-, and quaint THE BURGTHOR, LUBECK. and comfortable place, where the traveller feels rest and comfort. 2 i 8 A Tour in Holland and Germany. There are many pretty excursions for the day, and pleasant open-air theatres for the evening, where we admired the very good looks and fresh complexions of the young ladies of the population. They look like Englishwomen in colour, as also the sur rounding country looks like England with its hedgerows, which are hardly to be met with elsewhere on the Continent. The town seems small for the number of its inhabitants, and the river which affords it a port is narrow and of no splendour. But on the other side is a large lake or mere, well planted about, and protected by great sedgy weeds, so that it is often calm and reflects the great buildings in its mirror. Here it is that the most picturesque general view can be enjoyed. In this town, too, you come again upon some traces of costume in the fishermen and country- people, which the middle of Germany seldom affords. But both in Lubeck and Hamburg there are constantly figures passing in the streets which make one regret the general invasion of the ugly Frankish costume ; in a century more LUBECK — GENERAL VIEW. P. 219. Liineburg. 221 national costumes will be mere artificial staee dresses, unknown in real life. LtJNEBURG. The journey from Lubeck to Hamburg is so short that we thought it worth while to turn aside and look at one more ancient and typical town, Liineburg, also famous for its Rathhaus. The journey- leads through a rich flat country, cultivated for the most part like Holland, but for the hedgerows ; and every few miles you meet a picturesque little town, such as Molln, and Lauenburg on the Elbe, which make one long to break the journey again and again. But the wealth of picturesque materials in these towns is such that we felt we could not possibly take in more than we had already planned. Liineburg, which is as remarkable for antiquity and undis- turbedness as any of them, stands somewhat midway in character between the Baltic and the inland German style. There is the same over laying of Gothic with Renaissance that there is in all of them, but the churches are distinctly of 222 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the northern type, tall, and of brick ; and here we at last found a church neither whitewashed nor painted afresh with red, but honestly scraped, and restored to its pristine dignity and beauty. The Nicolai Kirche of Liineburg is not so enormous as most of its rivals : the nave is only ioo feet high, and now looks very short in proportion to its length. But the style is as perfect as any of them, as it dates from the earliest part of the thirteenth century. It has as usual an old font, but the picture of Luther with the swan and other such adornments have been removed ; and as you stand at the west end you can see what a brick church ought to be in its interior. This admirable restoration, or rather cleaning, was clone as early as 1868. A new pulpit and reading desk of coloured and glazed bricks have been put in, a couple of horrible windows — the only eyesore — the rest is far the most satisfying interior we had seen in all our journey. The famous Rathhaus is rather a block of buildings than a single structure, and the front is disappointing, but the interior contains splendid painting upon ceilings, wood carving in oak, and Munich v. Diisseldorf. iron doors which are famous all over the world. The inhabitants are quite convinced that the oak- room, all carved by the hand of one master, Soest, who spent nearly twenty years (1560-80) in producing his master-piece, is the finest in the world. The intricacy of this carving is very astonishing. Perhaps the most so is his carving of the back of a crowd, all listening to a judge sitting on his bench at the deepest point of the scene. The so-called Laube (from its floral roof painting) has been lately retouched by artists from the Munich and Diisseldorf schools. Then arose a conflict between them, the former asserting (and rightly) that the Diisseldorf artist was laying on his.colours too bright. There was an appeal to the authorities, and the Munich people fortunately carried the day. The external decoration, of which we give a specimen, is peculiar in showing the rope pattern in brick or polished tiles, which meets you all over the town. Every street affords examples of this design on beautiful brick houses, which have the plan of Baltic Gothic, without using pinnacles and arches as a mere screen. The whole colour of the N 224 A Tour in Holland and Germany. streets is dark red, with the roof of the very brightest tile red imaginable. AU this can be gathered into a single prospect of great interest and beauty, and THE RATHHAUS, LUNEBURG. seen from a curious little hill outside the town, which shows steeples, roofs, and gables in the Liineburg. 225 most charming confusion. It is called the Kalk- steinberg, from its limestone quarry. Here you perceive for the first time that in the suburbs Liineburg has ugly modern factories. The old town is fortunately as yet undisturbed and un- violated hy modern progress. Hamburg. You are generally told in the guide books that Hamburg presents few features of antiquity or of historic interest, both from the mercantile enterprise of its inhabitants, who are always improving away what is old and shabby, and also owing to the terrific fire of 1842, which swept away whole streets of splendid old fifteenth century buildings. But though these causes are really or have been really active, it is far from true that this brilliant and fascinating town is altogether new, or that there is not much still remaining to interest the amateur of the antique. It is indeed changing very rapidly. Wmere there were windmills twenty-five years ago, there are now bridges and gas lamps ; where there were then n 2 226 A Tour in Holland and Germany. open quays, with old streets facing them, great lines of warehouses have sprung up, shutting out A BIT OF OLD HAMBURG, LEFT STANDING. free access to the Elbe. But still, behind these warehouses, there are series of parallel streets, with canals between them, along which the backs Old Hamburg. 227 of the houses rise high, straight from the water, showing great rows of old blackened brick and timber building as characteristic as anything at Lubeck or Rostock ; and indeed all through the town, in the middle of great stone-built streets, which remind one of Manchester or Liverpool, there are islands of old work left, red roofs and gables, with elaborate timber work, pointing to the time when all Hamburg was of this character. But according to Baedeker, it is now being everywhere rebuilt ' in a superior style.' The old streets look grimy from the smoke of the great city, and so have lost the rich colour still remaining in quieter and smaller towns. We did not notice any carving of texts or other ornament on these backs, and the fronts have been generally rebuilt to look like modern houses. But about this part of the town there are endless nooks for the artist, as there are everywhere brilliant modern proofs of the splendour and good taste of the town. Hamburg is by far the most beautiful and agree able town in Germany. The comparison with Berlin naturally starts into one's mind, and the 228 A Tour in Holland and Germany. comparison is almost altogether a contrast of what is beautiful and gay and bright with what is ugly and pretentious and disagreeable. Ham burg is provided with water as no other city in Europe is provided. Not only is there the Elbe with all its shipping, but two other rivers, the Alster and the Bille, provide it, the former with the two splendid lakes called Binnen and Aussen Alster, the latter with canals intersecting the town like Amsterdam. The main square of the city is in fact a huge square with fresh water for its central area, and all through the new city there are heights with trees, and hollows with water, so that you are in doubt whether it is indeed a city or a beautiful suburb. There is everywhere an air of gaiety and prosperity about the people, as well as a manifest tendency to adopt English ways and treat English prejudices with kindness, English manners with respect. In all this the contrast with Berlin is very marked. Not that the Prussians are now, as they were at first, insolent or overbearing under their new greatness. But yet Berlin is intensely proud of being German, while Hamburg is equally proud A BIT OF OLD HAMBURG RECENTLY PULLED DOWN P. 229. The Great Nicolai Church. 231 of knowing and doing many things that are English. You can buy English clothes there, and if you want anything people will volunteer to speak to you in English. The result has been that Hamburg has profited by English influences in a manner which would have left Berlin quite a different town had the same policy been adopted. The great glory of Hamburg is Sir Gilbert Scott's Nicolai Church. It is worth all the build ings in Berlin put together. And though Berlin's gallery of old masters is not to be surpassed, the modern masters there are very second rate ; whereas Hamburg owes to an English merchant (Mr. Schwabe) an excellent and representative collection of English pictures, in addition to the collection of foreign masters purchased, or bequeathed by the city people. The modern gallery here is accordingly worth ten times the modern collection in the capital. We went to service in the great Nicolai Church to see how the ritual corresponded with the splendid conception of Sir G. Scott. Though, as might be expected, he shows himself very crockety outside, the interior at once reminds 232 A Tour in Holland and Germany. one in its details of Westminster Abbey, though it is very much shorter for its height (100 feet). There was a congregation of some 300 people there on Sunday morning — little more than a large group about the central pews of the church. A venerable pastor in black, with a large ruff round his neck, the exact reproduction of the portraits of the old Reformers, preached an evangelical sermon for half an hour, concluding with a short prayer from a prayer-book. Then he went up to the altar and read some more prayers, with a hymn and some florid amens sung by an invisible choir of men and boys in three parts ; the accompaniment was played upon an organ in the recess of the chancel, and without any skill. Yet the whole effect was simple and majestic, and the old man dismissed us with a blessing delivered from the front of the altar in the Catholic attitude. There was a large proportion of men in the small congregation, which was not what we had been led to expect. For the popu lation has the reputation of bsing very frivolous in this respect, and indeed the extraordinary series of evening amusements to be seen crowding the Popular Amusements. main thoroughfare of S. Pauli, which joins Ham burg and Altona, would corroborate this opinion. Open-air concerts, with beer and tobacco, ad nauseam, go on from seven till midnight or later ; all the military bands being apparently occupied in providing this amusement to the public, no doubt with profit to themselves. But though we heard one band use strings respectably, there was nothing comparable to the great Dutch band we had heard at Dordrecht. Whether all this gay and jovial life will continue at Hamburg may possibly be doubted, seeing that at last the city has agreed to enter the German Zollverein, and will cease to be a ' free city.' The lightness of heart and abandon of spirits which all the Radical historians tell us are the apanage of political liberty, ma) therefore pass away, and future travellers may find this great town reduced to the pompous solemnity and dulness which weighs even upon the volatile Berliner. Military considerations are said to have determined this grave change. The Han- seatic forces are abolished, and Hamburg enjoys the powerful protection of the whole Prussian 234 A Tour in Holland and Germany. army if necessary. It is one more step towards that larger unifying of Germany, which is the practical contradiction in Europe to the aspirations of separate nationalities, or sections of nations boasting this title. But in Germany these changes are carried out soberly and quietly, without discussions lasting for years and support ing a large number of hungry agitators. Since the last paragraph was written, the actual change has taken place, and on Sunday night, October 14, 1888, the great old port ceased to be free, and passed into its new condition of customs and of a protectionist policy. Bremen is to follow suit in a few days, and so our day has witnessed the close of the great Hanseatic League, which has withstood so many centuries of change. Empires have risen and disappeared since these old merchants determined to protect themselves by a free Federation. Perhaps, however, the long decadence of this League is more remarkable than its sudden growth and importance. Formed specially (in 1 2 19) to clear the sea of pirates and protect in land traffic from exactions, attaining its greatest The Hanseatic League, and its End. 235 power in fifty years (1266), it was actually declining rapidly from the year 1600 onward, so that its sur vival in even the most shadowy form to the present day exemplifies the slow death of those political things, which, however insignificant, do no harm. There was a day when the Hanseatic League was a power, not only in London, but all over the world, and it has been well pointed out that the Hansa suggested the idea of the East India Company, and the present trading companies in Africa. Though there is no chance of the free trade policy of these coast cities affecting the policy of the German Empire, it is earnestly to be hoped that the friendly and cosmopolitan spirit of the Hamburgers may do something to leaven the narrow exclusiveness and silly sensitiveness which so often astonishes us, not only in private German life, but in the public acts of the German Govern ment. We may well doubt, for example, whether any council of Hamburgers would have made the series of blunders which are at this moment occupying the public mind as regards the Mackenzie-Bergmann quarrel. In this con- 236 A Tour in Holland and Germany. troversy each party desires to have his say, and to prevent the other from being heard ; but on the English side, Sir Morell stands by himself, whereas the German side is worked under official sanction and co-operation. That a Government — that a person of Prince Bismarck's size — should first authorize a violent personal attack upon a private individual, and then interdict, even for a week, the German version of his reply, will here after be looked upon as the most grotesque blunder (in a small matter) made by any respon sible rulers in this generation. Such a proceeding is almost enough to reconcile us with the injustices and corruptions of a free Press as we experience it in our country. Let us hope that the spirit of the Free Towns will pass, with their absorption, into Berlin, and do something to mitigate these uncivilized absurdities. CHAPTER XII, Ox the Way Ho m e. is separated by eighty miles of the Elbe from the sea, and we were much disposed to adopt that route for our homeward journey, even though at the moment 238 A Tour in Holland and Germany. the river had not attained to the exciting dignity of being full of escaped crocodiles, as the papers reported but a few days after our departure. The steamers, however, have the common vice of leaving in the evening, and passing through all the picturesque part of the voyage in the dark, and then the weather is a serious thing even for good sailors in a thirty-six hours' journey. So we undertook the long but well-appointed train journey to Flushing, which gave us ample time to think over our experiences and formulate our satisfactions and our regrets. On the whole the Dutch people, though we considered that they made us pay too much for their hospitality, were the more agreeable and interesting. It is hard to give definite reasons for an impression of this kind, for when you come to compare point with point, the Germans too have many virtues, while the Dutch have their vices. Perhaps the deciding point is this, that while both nations are always smoking, the Dutch never spit. On the other hand we found the Dutch very much the same as we had found them years Improvement in Prussian Officials 239 before, whereas the Germans were undergoing what seemed a rapid transformation both in their political and their artistic side. This is not the case with their great capital Berlin, which though vastly increased, and adapted to the comforts of modern life, is still a very vulgar and ugly town, and so far quite justifies the general neglect of it by European (especially English) tourists, on which point the Germans feel rather sore. But far more novel than the material appoint ments of the houses, which seemed excellent, were the civility and attention of all the officials who, instead of being overbearing and brutal, were quite polite and most intelligent. Some years ago it used to be said that English people were often treated with deliberate incivility in Prussia. We feel certain that any such allegation, if ever true, is now false. Possibly the sudden awaken ing to find themselves famous, the sudden jump into the first position in Europe, may have turned the heads even of sober North-Germans, as it still seemed to have turned the heads of the young sailors we saw parading Berlin. These 240 A Tour in Holland and Germany. young persons were swaggering along as if they too had won their laurels at Metz and at Sedan. But the Prussian officers seemed as sober, earnest, hard-working a set of men as could be found any where, very smart moreover, carefully drilled, and in all respects very gentlemanly. For all that, Berlin produces a very poor im pression upon the stranger. This is principally due to its very mean and vulgar architecture. Though the statue monuments in the main streets and on the bridge are remarkably fine, and much better than those of most capitals, the public buildings are extraordinarily ugly. There are no churches worth looking at ; 1 the Palace is an enormous ugly pile, and the external aspect of the University and Museums is decidedly below the average. On the other hand, the huge monument of the Prussian victories in their pretty park is very tawdry and pretentious, and is guilty 1 So much so that the new Emperor has already appealed to them to rebuild their hideous Cathedral in some decent style — a work which had begun when we were there, but which had not advanced sufficiently to afford us any clue to the new plan. Unless they call in some foreign genius like Mr. Cuypers, of Amsterdam, it is not likely that they will make their new Dom an exception to all the surrounding ugliness. Militarism Rampant. 241 (we think) of a gross violation of taste in exhibit ing in gilded tiers the cannon taken from Danes and Austrians as war spoil of the same kind as the cannon taken from the French. One should have thought the former two victories were to be forgotten by a prudent nation of victors, and to be obscured by the third, which was a great conflict with an opposed and hostile nationality. But, as we found again and again, good taste is the very quality in which the Prussians are sadly- deficient. They could not be expected to forget any of their successes. We say this though in some points of style they differ on principle from our notions. We do not here animadvert on the fact that they even ride steeplechases in uniform, possibly they sleep in it, and seem to own no civil clothes, so that we saw people going out to shoot with orders and decorations. These things strike one at every turn. Thus at a railway station we were fas cinated by the following tableau : A respectable elderly officer, probably a colonel or major, was walking down the platform with his wife on his arm. Some paces behind came a servant in a o 242 A Tour lit Holland and Germany. sky-blue postilion livery, that is with belt, top boots, and a rosette to his hat. In one hand he carried a battered band-box, through which the lady's bonnet was apparent ; in the other a red cotton handkerchief, knotted at the ends, which half concealed the major's Pickelhaube. The whole procession was eminently respectable — but the style ? And we heard on authority which the reader would not question, that the habits of the more fashionable officers as to eating and drinking were not by any means so good as those of our regimental messes. In this, as in so many other respects, English culture may be taken as some generations in advance of the German, an advan tage difficult to overtake so long as the conditions of private wealth remain so different in the two countries. For the German officer, on the average, has not one-third the means of the corresponding English one. As regards politics, it struck us everywhere what steady progress had been made in estimating not only the condition of Europe, but, what is more difficult, the strength and weakness of the empire itself. There is no doubt an extraordinary Enthusiasm for the Imperial House. 243 outbreak of enthusiasm about the Imperial House. The " three holy kings " of sacred legend have not been more widely celebrated in art than the three German Emperors — if photography may count as art ; and the photographers have certainly made far more money by representing them than ever was made by the pious painters of the Wise Men from the East. But in spite of this enthusiasm we heard the freest and fairest comment on what appeared to be mistakes in taste, or retrogressions in policy, though made by the Emperor. The great burst of loyalty was accepted as a healthy and useful, if not a reasonable, phenomenon, but it was distinctly estimated at its real value. The same may be said of those burning ques tions on which national jealousy generally blinds men's judgment and causes them to miss the truth. The sensation of the moment was the German pamphlet on the Emperor Frederick's sickness— we left the country too soon to gather opinion on the somewhat nauseous title devised by (or for) Sir M. Mackenzie for his reply — and on this it was very easy to gauge the public mind, o 2 244 A Tour in Holland and Germany. While the feeling was, justly or unjustly, very adverse to Sir Morell, no one could be found who did not brand the German doctors as un professional or ungentlemanly, or carried away by the most furious jealousy. No prejudice for German as opposed to English skill seemed to warp people's calm appreciation of the tone of this notorious pamphlet, and of the policy which permitted its publication. Since these words were written, another step has been reached in the controversy, which illus trates the weaknesses of the German character in a manner which we might call amusing, if the whole affair were not a hideous and lamentable tragedy. Sir Morell Mackenzie, as we already observed, was foolish enough to threaten an action for libel against any English translator who published a version of the attack. But when he had written his reply, and attempted to bring it out in a German form, it was seized and interdicted by a local court representing the Government which had authorized this attack. The grounds which we see alleged by the State Officials Sacrosanct 245 Germans are, if possible, more grotesque than the blunder in policy. We are informed that their ground of interference is the occurrence in Sir Morell's pamphlet of expressions disre spectful to the Emperor and to Prince Bismarck ; nay, more, disrespectful to two of the physicians who wrote the attack, and that the interdiction is in pursuance of a clause in the German Pennl Code, which makes it criminal to speak with disrespect of any State officials. As the term State official applies not only to the physicians- in-ordinary to the Court, but also to every under strapper, it follows logically that to say a dish at a State banquet is badly cooked, or the wine corked, would be an expression disrespectful to the State cook or butler, and must be visited by pains and penalties, such as imprisonments or fines. If poor old Prince Bismarck has come down to this, we can only regret that a man once thought the arbiter of Europe should give such reasonable colour to the new suspicion, that, after all, the Crown Prince Frederick was the author of the German Empire, and that we 246 A Tour 111 Holland and Germany. have all been hoodwinked in a matter of con temporary history. In any case, did ever a Government exhibit more signal and ridiculous fatuity ? But now, it seems, they have thought better of their interdict ; and Sir Morell's pamphlet is after all to be permitted to poison the German mind, while Dr. Geffcken, who has let out the private jottings of the Emperor Frederick's mind, which insinuate that Prince Bismarck was not the prime mover of events, is kept in durance vile, and thus is being punished without ever being tried. When once this tyrannous spirit is displayed it is sure to come out in a thousand details, and the mending of one blunder will be followed by the making of another. To return for a moment to Sir Morell's defence. The outcome of the whole thing seems to be that any one theory in medicine is better, from the patient's point of view, than any two worked alternately, and that whatever may have been the poor Emperor's original chance of escape, he was doomed, according to Sir Morell's very marvellous quotation — hceret lateri fatalis hirudo ! Probable Cause of the Misunderstanding. 247 Whatever knowledge of Latin this sentence may imply — the real Virgil was here (page 186) the only possible logical quotation — We can readily imagine the German doctors, if they knew a little more, replying with Quam temere in nosmet legem sancimus iniquam ! The fatal leech, they will say, indeed clung to the Emperor's side. But this exhibition of Latin suggests a word of more serious importance concerning the con troversy. We do not hear from either side in what language the discussions of the assembled doctors were carried on, with the exception of the one delightful piece of English attributed by Dr. Gerhardt to Sir Morell, who is alleged to have replied to an awkward question : // can be. This is of course a translation of Es kann sein, and a bad one, for it is not English. On the other hand, there are not wanting signs that German is hardly familiar to Sir Morell Mac kenzie. We cannot therefore but suspect that some of the mutual misunderstandings arose from the respective specialists not apprehending clearly what the others said, and even if they understood 248 A . Tour in Holland and Germany. the actual words, attributing either too much or too little meaning to the associations they implied. We know from experience that words in a foreign language are poor and bare to one who uses them without the crowd of delicately-shaded implications which adhere to them in the mind of a native, and for that reason a German, in using English, will express himself very violently, because he feels that the words have not as much suggestion in them as his corresponding native words. Hence we venture to think that this kind of misprision may have been at the root of much of the dispute. It is however not fair to part from it without saying that Sir Morell's reply is (apart from its Latin and German) a very able and persuasive document, and that whatever the rights of the question may be, he certainly seems to have the best of the controversy. The permanent feature in the dispute, and the only one of interest for this book, is the proof it affords of the feminine sensitiveness and sentimentality which infect even the ruder middle classes, from which pro fessional men are taken, in Germany. One would Russia versus Germany. 249 think such delicate feelings would lead necessarily to refinement of manners, but for that result we must still hope in the. future. We turn gladly to a larger question, on which people appeared to us to show more common sense. The visit of the Emperor to Russia was being lauded in all the European press as the master-stroke of Prince Bismarck. It excited no enthusiasm in the average man who spoke about it in Germany when you met him by the way. What generally was told us amounted to this : that after all Russia was no proper ally for civilized Germany ; that the interests of Russia were really opposed to that empire, and that the effusive hospitalities of the moment, if they meant anything serious, rather pointed to a deterioration in the policy of the reigning house. There was a generally implied, though seldom expressed feeling, that a close alliance with England was the real thing for the higher interests of both nations. But if our informants did no injustice to the new Emperor, he embodies that kind of Prussian patriotism which desires to make the German 250 A Tour in Hollani and Germany. Emperor the naval as well as military dictator in European politics. His dislike of England and the English was openly asserted. But this only affects non-Germans. What is far more serious for his own people is his open avowal of an anti-Liberal policy, and this in direct opposition to the views of his noble father. The inhabitants of East Prussia whom we met were particularly angry, in that the new German policy tended to overlook Russian insolences on the frontier, and men complained that while Germany had paid full damages to France for the death of French citizens on the Alsatian frontier, the Cossacks on the Russian frontier had lately com mitted both rape and murder on German territory without suffering any punishment. The possible dangers to England from a close alliance between Russia and the present Emperor they did not discuss. We have here mentioned people of Liberal opinions whom we met, and who spoke their mind to us. It is not to be expected that this should have happened in Berlin. In the first place, one still sees in the German papers prose- Can a Free Press be Orderly ? 251 cutions for language considered disrespectful to the Sovran. The notion of perfect liberty of speech being compatible with good government and social order is still — perhaps justly — foreign to the Prussians. They used to ridicule to us the good-humoured simplicity of the English Govern ment, who imagine that they can allow the op position press to revile every member of the Executive, traduce every act of justice, invent every- kind of calumnious falsehood concerning English rule, and yet imagine that the Empire can be maintained in peace, and in orderly respect for the laws thus assailed. But, secondly, the Liberal party at Berlin is really small, and owes its whole influence to the press, which is controlled by the Jews. These latter are, and must be, advocates of Liberal views wherever they settle, more especially in a country where a good deal of mediaeval barbarism still survives among the people. This may seem a hard saying ; but it is justified not merely by the very untidy manners and customs which prevail among the middle classes, but by the attitude often publicly advocated against the 252 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Jews, and recently reviving through the new Emperor's open countenancing of its coryphaeus, the Rev. Dr. Stoecker. This person, whose views correspond with the sixteenth century rather than the nineteenth, is now accepted as the spokesman of a policy which seeks to depress or even persecute that brilliant race whom civil ized European nations have at last learned to embody among their people, and who have certainly become in England the most orderly, the most charitable, as well as the most enter prising of our citizens. It is to be presumed that they will become so elsewhere, as soon as they find themselves secure, and not threatened with confiscation. In the latter case they naturally seek to accumulate "invisible property," and, like their ancestors, to " spoil the Egyptians " where they are but hated sojourners. Another topic with which we will here venture to delay the reader is the relation of the Prussians to the subject provinces — we mean more par ticularly those which have lost their former rulers, and are now practically integral portions of the Prussian kingdom. Of course such a change An Effective Stroke of Policy. cannot possibly be popular among the relations and dependents of the old reigning houses. A great deal has been lost by the abolition of local courts, and here the Prussians have not always shown tact in their arrangement of the new state of things. On this the reader may look back to what we have said about Brunswick and Hessen- Cassel respectively. But there is a kindred point which we had omitted to mention in relation to the many re storations of churches and other buildings so fre quently discussed through these pages. During the so-called Kulturkampf, or struggle of the Prussian Government with the Roman Catholic Church, when sundry bishops, such as he of Fulda, were suspended, a large sum of money, in abey ance from their salaries, came into the power of the State. By a most effective stroke of policy, this money — they say every mark of it — was applied to the restoration of old churches within these several sees, in order to show that the Im perial Government was not only not insensible to the dignity of religious worship, but knew how to honour the great shrines where their Roman 254 A Tour in Holland and Germany. Catholic subjects were wont to worship. We heard this called by Ultramontanes the wisdom oi the serpent. It was at all events the wisdom of some one more subtle than the ordinary beasts of the political field. If the Prussians were more affable, even the smaller towns might be won over to their policy by the large and obvious advantages which it confers. They have persuaded all their dependent provinces that the military system they have devised, though costing the country some 15 per cent, of its labour, and therefore amounting to a yearly tax of many millions, is, after all, so excellent a discipline for any population that it is probably worth this enor mous expense. The great King of Italy, Victor Emanuel, applied the same system not only to the consolidation of Italian unity, but to the education of his very backward people. If every man in England, Ireland, and Scotland were taught to obey for two years, the effects here also might be worth any sum it would cost. So also the consoli dation of railways, of customs, and of postal arrangements are great and striking benefits. It remains that the Imperial nation should sacrifice Advantages of the War of 1870 to Prussia. 255 something to sentiment, and learn to conquer by giving way on trifling points. But, as a Prussian observed to one of us, " We are dis liked because we have as bad manners as you English have." The war of 1870 was of inestimable benefit to the Prussian sway, for it silenced all petty dis content, and gave people a common national enemy upon whom they could vent all their energies. Even now there seems to be special care taken to keep up in German hearts the memories of all the mischief done by French occupation. If you see a ruined Schloss, you are now told at once that the French destroyed it. If you make any remark about the poverty of the country, you are asked how could any land recover the devastation of the French ? In this way the genuine enthusiasm of patriotism is reinforced with a subvention of national antipathy. But the day will surely come when all the advantages of this high spirit, and all the ad mitted benefits of the great military Juggernaut which now commands the worship of the nation, will not withstand the criticisms of poverty and 256 A Tour in Holland and Germany. want, coupled with the assertion of individual liberty. The effects of this system are indeed far-reaching, and colour the whole of German life. It conflicts with emigration, for any youth who leaves the country before his military service is completed is regarded as a deserter. It puts great and mis chievous pressure on the lads of the better middle classes, who can only escape with a year's service by passing an examination above a certain stand ard. So it is that the whole nation looks pale and unhealthy, that their large bodies look clumsy from want of exercise, and that they come into life wearied with schoolwork instead of being fitted for their struggle. There was published at Strasburg, a couple of years ago, a most interesting report by several great physicians on the questions of over work and of national failure of eyesight, in which these experienced men stated that the overtaught schoolboys who now came to receive clinical instruction at the age of twenty were by no means so intelligent or so fit to answer a common-sense question as the same class had been some years ago. Gymnastics and Culture. Attempts are made to develop the German physique by systematic gymnastics, worked as a sort of military drill. But it is quite curious how helpless the mere exercising of muscle is to improve the health and give elasticity to the figure, when the mind is not thoroughly diverted. The presence of the drill-master and the regulations of the authorities completely destroy any proper notion of amusement in this solemn recreation. Hence a game of cricket, not to speak of the great field sports in our country, does more to make our youth real men, with free limbs and free minds, than all the professional gymnastics in the world. Our German friends were disposed to allow this, but urged that every nation must act its own way. They were not guilty of the absurdity one sees in some books on the subject, of making it a subject of national dignity not to adopt a foreign game. There is a widespread notion that the German culture is new and raw, because of the terrible Thirty Years War, which destroyed most of what was old and precious, and threw back the whole population centuries in civilization. They are 258 A Tour in Holland and Germany. supposed to have been only gradually recovering from these disasters when all the German courts fell under French influence, and so a mongrel culture with bad architecture, bad painting, bad sculpture, invaded the country. This latter is true. There was more infamous destruction of splendid old buildings in the eighteenth century in Germany than elsewhere, Great Romanesque churches, such as the Cathedrals of Hildesheim and Fulda, were so completely ruined by restoration in the rococo style as to be beyond all cure. But now that the intelligence of the nation has been applied to the history of architecture, and that all care is taken to prevent more injury and to repair damage, whenever possible, it turns out that Germany is still rich in every kind of ancient splendour. The common formula of historians that a city was destroyed, and the whole population massacred, turns out as usual to be false. There are numbers of old churches, old houses, splendid wood-carving, metal-work, painting, embroidery, still preserved in the German towns. In fact, there is no country richer in the splendid work of earlier days which is justly held to be so instructive Scenery and Tourists. 259 and exalting for men of our day to examine. It is true that their Romanesque churches are very inferior to the far richer and more elegant churches of the same period in England and France. It is true that their Gothic church- building is also inferior to ours ; but in house building, in shrines and fonts and sepulchres, they are surely far richer than we are. As regards natural beauties they have several isolated tracts of picturesque forest and mountain, such as the Rhon, the Harz, the Black and Thiiringian forests, where they can refresh their city and suburban life with a whiff of mountain air and some contact with that Nature which figures so prominently in all sentimental Ger man poetry. The Germans seem fully alive to the educating effect of these things, and accordingly every route is overrun with tourists, who set about their re creation with very great earnestness and very little luggage, eating sausages in the trains, drinking beer at the stations, and always voyaging with a distinct object. It is either a Kunstreise to see pictures and wood-carving, or an Erholungsreise in the p 2 260 A Tour in Holland and Germany. mountains, or along the sea, or a pilgrimage to the homes of the great worthies who have shed lustre on the history of the country. Of these the great favourite is Luther, whose every residence, whose every journey, whose every utterance is chronicled, and of wl)om traces are found everywhere. No respectable library seems complete without some specimens of his handwriting; almost every Lutheran church has a picture of him with a swan — possibly the goose of Saint Martin glorified 1 — hanging on a pillar close to the pulpit. The very spot where he was seized in the Thiiringen forest to be carried to the Wartburg, is visited by thousands. And the Wartburg, with its legends of the Sangerking, of the great Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, and its Luther memorials, may be re garded as the El Dorado for the sentimental German. But what one does wonder at is the small in fluence which all this touring about among fine things has as yet had upon house architecture, furniture, and the higher arts. Rich Germans do not seem to think of copying the beautiful models 1 For more on this subject, cf. Preface. Architecture and Painting. 261 a ¦ afforded by their towns. Thus, at Hildesheim, the way from the station into that splendid old town, with its houses not to be surpassed anywhere for rich colour and picturesque outline, leads you through a rich suburb, where thriving tradespeople build themselves villas surrounded with lovely flowers. But the villas are in the vulgarest nine teenth century style, such as were built in England forty or fifty years ago. Thus at Berlin, in the great picture gallery, intended to shed glory on modern German art, there is an average of pictures — remember, we say an average — which would disgrace any respectable gallery in France, England, or Holland. In the restoration of old public buildings and churches they have at last awakened to some purity, and such a castle as the Wartburg, saved from ruin and turned into a residence of the present Grand Duke of Saxe- Weimar, would be an honour to the taste of any nation. But the private houses of ordinary people, their furniture, and their dress seemed about the level of the English life of the 1840's, which the reader may best study in the society pictures of the Punch of that day. »62 A Tour in Holland and Germany. But while we have been meandering through these vast subjects, and fre quently dozing by the way, lo ! the very mild and gentlemanly douaniers of Roozendaal wake us up to the fact that we are again TOWS HALL OF MIDDELBURG. in our beloved Holland. Will ingly should we have disembarked for a day or a week, but it was only vouchsafed us From Holland to Queenborough. 263 to descend for an hour at the very charac teristic town of Middelburg, close to Flushing, when the picturesque town hall tempted us to unpack our portfolio, and add a parting sketch to the collection. The day was showery, and the weather, as it had been everywhere all the summer, sad and gloomy, yet for all that we felt the beauty of the broad Dutch meres, and the quiet-looking port of Flushing, round which so many storms of history have broken. A journey by steamer is also a place for moral izing when it is not too rough and wet, but then the morality assumes rather a physiological than a psychological complexion. When the passage is only for some hours, the company consists of units which are not welded into a society^, as are the crowd on board an Atlantic steamer. Here then we recover the privilege of reverting into natural Englishmen, eating, sleeping, and smoking for ourselves, and scowling at the rest as our natural foes. So we arrive at our old friend the Thames. It is not our intention to repeat ourselves upon ;64 A Tour in Holland and Germany. this portion of the route, so we were well satisfied at the steamer taking us aside into Queenborough, an ancient village long since visited by famous travellers. We copyr from a sketch of Hogarth its appearance when he had his frolic there, and QUEENBOROUGH IN HOGARTH S TIME. we add a view of the town from exactly the same point in our own day. The changes are probably more considerable in the external appearance of the place than in the morals and habits of the people. We shall conclude by quoting from the account Queenlo rough i 265 of the place given by the well-known painter and his friends, a memento of travelling in other days, which seems to us so far more pleasant than rushing along in steamers and in trains. " The town is but one street, situate on the fis QUEENBOROUGH AS AT TRESENT. east side of a creek, called after the town's name, and branching out of the Medway near the town. The street is clean and well paved, and answers the description I have had of a Spanish town, viz. there is no sign of any trade, nor were many 266 A Tour in Holland and Germany. human creatures to be seen at our first arrival, The church is low and ill-built : among many tombstones there are but few epitaphs worth noting, and the most material I take to be the following one, viz. : " ' Henry Knight Master of a Shipp to Greenland and Herpooner 24 Voyages In Greenland I whales Sea Horses Bears did Slay Though now my body is Intombe in Clay.' " The town-house or clock-house (as it is called) stands in the middle of the street, supported by four piers, which form four arches, and (it being holiday) was decorated with a flag, in which is delineated the arms of the Corporation. " We took up our quarters at the Red Lyon (which the people call the Swans) fronting the river, and met with a civil prating landlady ; but she being unprovided with beds, we applied to a merry woman at a private house, who furnished us with what we wanted. We then took another walk up the town, had a view of the inside of the church, and a conference with the grave-digger who informed us of the state of the Corporation. Hogarth at Queenborough. 267 "Among other things we were told that the Mayor is a Custom House officer, and the parson a sad dog. We found, to our sorrow, that although the town has two market-days, yet there was not one piece of fresh meat of any sort, nor any poultry or fish, except lobsters, to be got, with which, and some eggs and bacon, we made our supper. " We walked up the hill behind the town to a well of very good water : over which (we were informed) a palace formerly stood, built by King Edward the Third for his Queen Philippa. " Whilst we were at the well two sailors came and drew a bucket of water to drink, and told us that they and four more, belonging to the Rose man-of-war, were obliged the day before to attend one of their midshipmen, a son of General S , in a yawl up the creek, and run the vessel ashore, where the midshipman left them (without any sustenance, but a few cockles, or one penny of money to buy any) and went to Sheerness, and was not yet returned, and they half starved. "We gave the fellows sixpence, who were very thankful, and ran towards the town to buy victuals 268 A Tour in Holland and Germany. for themselves and their companions, who lay asleep at some distance. We going to view their boat that stuck fast in the mud, one of the sailors returned hastily and offered us some cockles ; this seemed an act of so much gratitude that we followed the fellows into the town, and gave them another sixpence ; and they fetched their com panions, and all refreshed themselves, and were very thankful and merry. " About seven we passed through the town, and saw and conversed with several pretty women, which we did not expect, not having seen any at our arrival, and returned to our quarters. " We got a wooden chair, and placed Hogarth in it in the street, where he made the Drawing No. 6, and gathered a great many men, women, and children about him, to see his performance. " Having finished his drawing, we again walked up town, and at the Mayor's door saw all the sailors before mentioned, who informed me (with ' your worship ' at every word) that the midshipman was lately returned from Sheerness, and had been up the creek, to see how the boat lay ; and coming back, had met a sailor in com- Hogarth at Queenborough. 269 pany with a woman whom the midshipman wanted to be free with, and the sailor opposed, insisting she was his wife, and hindered him from being o rude ; which the midshipman resenting, was gone to the Mayor to redress his grievances. WTe thought this a very odd affair, but did not stay to see the result of it. " About nine we returned to our quarters, drank to our friends as usual, and emptied several cans of good flip, and all sung merrily ; but were quite put out of countenance by some Harwich men, who came with lobsters, and were drinking in the next room. They sung several sea-songs so agreeably that our St. John could not come in competition, nor could Pishoken save us from disgrace ; so that after finishing the evening as pleasantly as possible, we went out of the house the back way to our lodgings, at near eleven. "When we came there, our landlady had pro vided a bed for Scott in the garret, which made him grumble, and us laugh : this provoked him so far that he absolutely refused to lye there ; and Tothall, out of pure good nature, offered him his bed at the house we came from, and that he 270 A Tour in Holland and Germany. would lye in the garret. This Scott accepted, and went away ; and Tothall going upstairs, found he was to lye in a flock bed, without curtains ; so came down again immediately, and went after Scott, at which we were very merry, and slept upon it till six in the morning. " Tuesday morning, at six, Hogarth called up, and told me, the good woman insisted on being paid for her bed, or having Scott before the Mayor ; which last we did all in our power to promote, but to no effect ; so coming to the publick house where Scott and Tothall lay, we found the doors open (a thing common in this town) and nobody up. However Hogarth soon roused them ; and then Scott related another distress he had the last night, viz. when he left us, and was going to bed, he perceived something stir under the bed-cloathes, which he (collecting all his courage) was resolved to feel ; at which something cried out (seemingly affrighted) and scared him out of his wits ; but, resuming courage enough to enquire into the nature of affairs, he found it to be a little boy of the house who had mistook the bed. Conclusion. 271 " This relation, according to custom, made us very merry, and Tothall provided some breakfast ; after which we left the Swans, and went up town, where our shirts were sent to be washed ; but not having time to dry, we took them wet, and had them dried and ironed at the next town." Richard Clay and Sons, Limited, london and bungay. WORKS BY THE REV. J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A., B.D., Fellow of Trinity College, .Dublin. Social Life in Greece, from Homer to Menander- Sixth Edition, enlarged. Crown 8vo. 9s. The Athenaitm says : — " Mr. Mahaffy has, in this little volume, given us the results of considerable reading, and has given them in a form which is both pleasant and interesting. . . . No omission greatly detracts from the merits of a book so fresh in its thought and so independent in its criticism. . . . 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