conglomerate of palatial modern hotels. But immediately behind—immediately you quit the broad sweep of quays and promenades, and plunge almost anywhere at random into the network of ancient streets—you are able to forget at once, whether you linger in the shadow of the fifteenth-century church of the Bare-foot Friars (the Barfüsserkirche, or Church of the Franciscans); or bask in open sunlight on the narrow quay, at the back of the sixteenth-century Rathhaus, by the side of the green and rushing Reuss; or climb the steep pitch of hill behind the town to the line of ancient walls, with their long line of stately watch-towers (like those at Fribourg and Morat) that stretches with so much picturesque dignity across the base of the blunt angle—so blunt as scarcely to be an angle at all—between the river and the lake; or seek shelter from the glare in the long galleries of the two old wooden bridges, with their mellow red-tiled roofs, that manage to survive across the river—plunge, I repeat, where you will into this labyrinth of old thoroughfares, with their plastered and painted house-fronts, and gaily splashing fountains in courts and corners, and broad eaves that project far across the street, and you are reminded at every step, not of the modern tourist resort of world-wide reputation that is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, but of that old Lucerne that grew up gradually round the Benedictine monastery that was founded here in the year 750, or thereabouts, by the abbots of Murbach in Alsace, and that gets its name from that St. Leodegar, or Leger, who was patron of the monastery. The monks gave way to a college of secular canons in 1455. Unhappily, of the old collegiate church there are virtually no remains. The twin west spires, indeed, date from the beginning of the sixteenth century, and are good Flamboyant Gothic; but the body of the existing building was erected after a fire in 1633—the date is on the west doorway—and is purely Classical, though quite a good example of its particular style and date. Correspondingly late is the woodwork inside, including the fine stalls in the choir. Other points of interest will be found by those who seek for them: the panels of old glass (one is dated 1650); the ironwork and carving of the great west door; and the two richly sculptured reredoses at the ends of the two aisles, one of which has a Pietà, and one a Death of the Virgin. Even more remarkable is the stately, classical cloister that encompasses the whole church like an Italian Santo Campo. All is very splendid, yet all would be gladly surrendered in exchange for what the relentless flames devoured in 1633. The one is a work of the completed Renaissance—learned, correct, and conscious, but perhaps a trifle cold. The other, we may be certain, though it may have presented to the critic a thousand faults of detail, whispered at least from its dim aisles and chapels "the last enchantments of the Middle Age." The one is the laborious product of the textbook and the studio; the other the inevitable offspring of a vigorous and vital art. The one is the clever expression of an individual talent; the other the collective offering of a people's enthusiasm and faith.

THE OLD BRIDGE WITH SHRINE, LUCERNE.

The Hofkirche, then, may be entered casually, examined superficially, and quitted without regret. Time will be better spent in lingering on the old wooden foot-bridges that still span the green and insurgent Reuss at some little distance below its exit from the lake. Formerly there were three; but the longest—the old Hof-brücke—was sacrificed in 1852 to the passion for spurious improvement. Of the two that survive, the Kapell-Brücke is by far the most important, and apparently gets its name from the old St. Peter's Chapel on the north shore of the river, to which it leads diagonally across the clear and voluminous stream. In actual touch with this, but nearer the southern shore, rises the picturesque old Wasserturm, which is said once to have served as a lighthouse (lucerna), and to have given Lucerne its name. The Premonstratensian Abbey of La Lucerne, near Avranches, in Normandy, is stated in Joanne's handbook to have got its title from the same source; but the Swiss Lucerne is perhaps better derived (I do not profess to understand by what strange process of corruption) from the name of its patron, Leodegar. Anyhow, this old Water-Tower is a decidedly striking object, and conspicuous in most photographs and pictures of Lucerne, with its typical octagonal cap. Both the two old wooden bridges, as is common in Switzerland, are protected from the weather by open timber roofs; and inserted in the framing of these last is a series of eighteenth-century paintings, representing, in the case of the Kapell-Brücke, scenes from the history of the city, and from the lives of its patronal saints, St. Mauritius and St. Leodegar; and in the case of the lesser Spreuer, or Mühlen, Brücke a late, post-medieval representation of the grim, medieval humours of the ghastly Dance of Death. This strange memento mori was a favourite morality of the Middle Time; Death in the form of a skeleton (Wordsworth's "Death the Skeleton") presents himself in turn to all kinds and conditions of men—in the great series at the old abbey church of La Chaise-Dieu (Haute-Loire) in France to actually not less than thirty-five, now setting his foot with timid determination on the trailing robe of a sacrosanct Pope; now greeting with mocking glance a Cardinal, who averts his head with hasty terror; now dancing with insolent familiarity in front of an aged man; now laying his bony grasp on a troubadour, who lets his mandoline clatter to the ground in access of sudden fear. These are subjects depicted at La Chaise-Dieu; but just the same spirit of gruesome raillery inspires the danse macabre wherever found:

At Hexham there are still four paintings on panel, representing Death with a Pope, an Emperor, a King, and a Cardinal. Browning tells us in connection with the old revellers of Venice how

but the Death of the danse macabre at Hexham, as perhaps always, so far from stepping tacitly, is a grinning and grisly contortionist, writhing his repulsive anatomy into a dozen different shapes of derision. The victims alone have dignity, whilst Death is merely the jester or buffoon. Different, indeed, is the shadowy Death of the Apocrypha—"And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death"; or the mysterious, shrouded, blood-sprinkled figure (to couple small images with great) of the Masque of the Red Death. These particular paintings at Lucerne are necessarily small in scale, and perhaps not very legible in the dim recesses of the roof. I have never had the patience to decipher them, nor do they perhaps conform, since so unusually late in date, to the stereotyped convention of the fourteenth and fifteenth