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Title: Our Fathers Have Told Us
       Part I. The Bible of Amiens

Author: John Ruskin

Release Date: January 26, 2008 [EBook #24428]

Language: English

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Library Edition

THE COMPLETE WORKS

OF

JOHN RUSKIN

ARROWS OF THE CHACE

OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US

THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

HORTUS INCLUSUS

NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

NEW YORK      CHICAGO

"Our Fathers Have Told Us"

SKETCHES OF THE HISTORY OF CHRISTENDOM

FOR BOYS AND GIRLS

WHO HAVE BEEN HELD AT ITS FONTS

PART I.

THE BIBLE OF AMIENS

CONTENTS.

PLATES.

PREFACE.

[Go to Table of Contents]

The long abandoned purpose, of which the following pages begin some attempt at fulfilment, has been resumed at the request of a young English governess, that I would write some pieces of history which her pupils could gather some good out of;—the fruit of historical documents placed by modern educational systems at her disposal, being to them labour only, and sorrow.

What else may be said for the book, if it ever become one, it must say for itself: preface, more than this, I do not care to write: and the less, because some passages of British history, at this hour under record, call for instant, though brief, comment.

I am told that the Queen's Guards have gone to Ireland; playing "God save the Queen." And being, (as I have declared myself in the course of some letters to which public attention has been lately more than enough directed,) to the best of my knowledge, the staunchest Conservative in England, I am disposed gravely to question the propriety of the mission of the Queen's Guards on the employment commanded them. My own Conservative notion of the function of the Guards is that they should guard the Queen's throne and life, when threatened either by domestic or foreign enemy: but not that they should become a substitute for her inefficient police force, in the execution of her domiciliary laws.

And still less so, if the domiciliary laws which they are sent to execute, playing "God save the Queen," be perchance precisely contrary to that God the Saviour's law; and therefore, [Pg iv] such as, in the long run, no quantity either of Queens, or Queen's men, could execute. Which is a question I have for these ten years been endeavouring to get the British public to consider—vainly enough hitherto; and will not at present add to my own many words on the matter. But a book has just been published by a British officer, who, if he had not been otherwise and more actively employed, could not only have written all my books about landscape and picture, but is very singularly also of one mind with me, (God knows of how few Englishmen I can now say so,) on matters regarding the Queen's safety, and the Nation's honour. Of whose book ("Far out: Rovings retold"), since various passages will be given in my subsequent terminal notes, I will content myself with quoting for the end of my Preface, the memorable words which Colonel Butler himself quotes, as spoken to the British Parliament by its last Conservative leader, a British officer who had also served with honour and success.

The Duke of Wellington said: "It is already well known to your Lordships that of the troops which our gracious Sovereign did me the honour to entrust to my command at various periods during the war—a war undertaken for the express purpose of securing the happy institutions and independence of the country—at least one half were Roman Catholics. My Lords, when I call your recollection to this fact, I am sure all further eulogy is unnecessary. Your Lordships are well aware for what length of period and under what difficult circumstances they maintained the Empire buoyant upon the flood which overwhelmed the thrones and wrecked the institutions of every other people;—how they kept alive the only spark of freedom which was left unextinguished in Europe.... My Lords, it is mainly to the Irish Catholics that we all owe our proud predominance in our military career, and that I personally am indebted for the laurels with which you have been pleased to decorate my brow.... We must confess, my Lords, that without Catholic blood and Catholic valour no victory could ever have been obtained, and the first military talents might have been exerted in vain." [Pg v] Let these noble words of tender Justice be the first example to my young readers of what all History ought to be. It has been told them, in the Laws of Fésole, that all great Art is Praise. So is all faithful History, and all high Philosophy. For these three, Art, History, and Philosophy, are each but one part of the Heavenly Wisdom, which sees not as man seeth, but with Eternal Charity; and because she rejoices not in Iniquity, therefore rejoices in the Truth.

For true knowledge is of Virtues only; of poisons and vices, it is Hecate who teaches, not Athena. And of all wisdom, chiefly the Politician's must consist in this divine Prudence; it is not, indeed, always necessary for men to know the virtues of their friends, or their masters; since the friend will still manifest, and the master use. But woe to the Nation which is too cruel to cherish the virtue of its subjects, and too cowardly to recognize that of its enemies!

THE BIBLE OF AMIENS.

CHAPTER I.

[Go to Table of Contents]

BY THE RIVERS OF WATERS.

The intelligent English traveller, in this fortunate age for him, is aware that, half-way between Boulogne and Paris, there is a complex railway-station, into which his train, in its relaxing speed, rolls him with many more than the average number of bangs and bumps prepared, in the access of every important French gare, to startle the drowsy or distrait passenger into a sense of his situation.

He probably also remembers that at this halting-place in mid-journey there is a well-served buffet, at which he has the privilege of "Dix minutes d'arrêt."

He is not, however, always so distinctly conscious that these ten minutes of arrest are granted to him within not so many minutes' walk of the central square of a city which was once the Venice of France.

Putting the lagoon islands out of question, the French River-Queen was nearly as large in compass as Venice herself; and divided, not by slow currents of ebbing and returning tide, but by eleven beautiful trout streams, of which some four or five are as large, each separately, as our Surrey Wandle, or as Isaac Walton's Dove; and which, branching out of one strong current above the city, and uniting again after they have eddied through its streets, are bordered, as they flow down, (fordless except where the two Edwards rode them, the day before Crecy,) to the sands of St. Valery, by [Pg 2] groves of aspen, and glades of poplar, whose grace and gladness seem to spring in every stately avenue instinct with the image of the just man's life,—"Erit tanquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum."

But the Venice of Picardy owed her name, not to the beauty of her streams merely, but to their burden. She was a worker, like the Adriatic princes, in gold and glass, in stone, wood, and ivory; she was skilled like an Egyptian in the weaving of fine linen; dainty as the maids of Judah in divers colours of needlework. And of these, the fruits of her hands, praising her in her own gates, she sent also portions to stranger nations, and her fame went out into all lands.

"Un règlement de l'échevinage, du 12^me avril 1566, fait voir qu'on fabriquait à cette epoque, des velours de toutes couleurs pour meubles, des colombettes à grands et petits carreaux, des burailles croises, qu'on expédiait en Allemagne—en Espagne, en Turquie, et en Barbarie!" [1-1]

All-coloured velvets, pearl-iridescent colombettes! (I wonder what they may be?) and sent to vie with the variegated carpet of the Turk, and glow upon the arabesque towers of Barbary! [1-2] Was not this a phase of provincial Picard life which an intelligent English traveller might do well to inquire into? Why should this fountain of rainbows leap up suddenly here by Somme; and a little Frankish maid write herself the sister of Venice, and the servant of Carthage and of Tyre?

And if she, why not others also of our northern villages? Has the intelligent traveller discerned anything, in the country, or in its shores, on his way from the gate of Calais to the gare of Amiens, of special advantage for artistic design, or for commercial enterprise? He has seen league after league of sandy dunes. We also, we, have our sands by Severn, by Lune, by Solway. He has seen extensive plains of useful and [Pg 3] not unfragrant peat,—an article sufficiently accessible also to our Scotch and Irish industries. He has seen many a broad down and jutting cliff of purest chalk; but, opposite, the perfide Albion gleams no whit less blanche beyond the blue. Pure waters he has seen, issuing out of the snowy rock; but are ours less bright at Croydon, at Guildford, or at Winchester? And yet one never heard of treasures sent from Solway sands to African; nor that the builders at Romsey could give lessons in colour to the builders at Granada? What can it be, in the air or the earth—in her stars or in her sunlight—that fires the heart and quickens the eyes of the little white-capped Amienoise soubrette, till she can match herself against Penelope?

The intelligent English traveller has of course no time to waste on any of these questions. But if he has bought his ham-sandwich, and is ready for the "En voiture, messieurs," he may perhaps condescend for an instant to hear what a lounger about the place, neither wasteful of his time, nor sparing of it, can suggest as worth looking at, when his train glides out of the station.

He will see first, and doubtless with the respectful admiration which an Englishman is bound to bestow upon such objects, the coal-sheds and carriage-sheds of the station itself, extending in their ashy and oily splendours for about a quarter of a mile out of the town; and then, just as the train gets into speed, under a large chimney tower, which he cannot see to nearly the top of, but will feel overcast by the shadow of its smoke, he may see, if he will trust his intelligent head out of the window, and look back, fifty or fifty-one (I am not sure of my count to a unit) similar chimneys, all similarly smoking, all with similar works attached, oblongs of brown brick wall, with portholes numberless of black square window. But in the midst of these fifty tall things that smoke, he will see one, a little taller than any, and more delicate, that does not smoke; and in the midst of these fifty masses of blank wall enclosing 'works'—and doubtless producing works profitable and honourable to France and the world—he will see one mass of wall [Pg 4] —not blank, but strangely wrought by the hands of foolish men of long ago, for the purpose of enclosing or producing no manner of profitable work whatsoever, but one—

"This is the work of God; that ye should believe on Him whom He hath sent"!

Leaving the intelligent traveller now to fulfil his vow of pilgrimage to Paris,—or wherever else God may be sending him,—I will suppose that an intelligent Eton boy or two, or thoughtful English girl, may care quietly to walk with me as far as this same spot of commanding view, and to consider what the workless—shall we say also worthless?—building, and its unshadowed minaret, may perhaps farther mean.

Minaret I have called it, for want of better English word. Flêche—arrow—is its proper name; vanishing into the air you know not where, by the mere fineness of it. Flameless—motionless—hurtless—the fine arrow; unplumed, unpoisoned, and unbarbed; aimless—shall we say also, readers young and old, travelling or abiding? It, and the walls it rises from—what have they once meant? What meaning have they left in them yet, for you, or for the people that live round them, and never look up as they pass by?

Suppose we set ourselves first to learn how they came there.

At the birth of Christ, all this hillside, and the brightly-watered plain below, with the corn-yellow champaign above, were inhabited by a Druid-taught race, wild enough in thoughts and ways, but under Roman government, and gradually becoming accustomed to hear the names, and partly to confess the power, of Roman gods. For three hundred years after the birth of Christ they heard the name of no other God.

Three hundred years! and neither apostles nor inheritors of apostleship had yet gone into all the world and preached the gospel to every creature. Here, on their peaty ground, the wild people, still trusting in Pomona for apples, in Silvanus for acorns, in Ceres for bread, and in Proserpina for rest, hoped but the season's blessing from the Gods of Harvest, and feared no eternal anger from the Queen of Death.

But at last, three hundred years being past and gone, in the [Pg 5] year of Christ 301, there came to this hillside of Amiens, on the sixth day of the Ides of October, the Messenger of a new Life.

His name, Firminius (I suppose) in Latin, Firmin in French,—so to be remembered here in Picardy. Firmin, not Firminius; as Denis, not Dionysius; coming out of space—no one tells what part of space. But received by the pagan Amienois with surprised welcome, and seen of them—forty days—many days, we may read—preaching acceptably, and binding with baptismal vows even persons in good society: and that in such numbers, that at last he is accused to the Roman governor, by the priests of Jupiter and Mercury, as one turning the world upside-down. And in the last day of the Forty—or of the indefinite many meant by Forty—he is beheaded, as martyrs ought to be, and his ministrations in a mortal body ended.

The old, old story, you say? Be it so; you will the more easily remember it. The Amienois remembered it so carefully, that, twelve hundred years afterwards, in the sixteenth century, they thought good to carve and paint the four stone pictures Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4 of our first choice photographs. (N. B.—This series is not yet arranged, but is distinct from that referred to in Chapter IV. See Appendix II.). Scene 1st, St. Firmin arriving; scene 2nd, St. Firmin preaching; scene 3rd, St. Firmin baptizing; and scene 4th, St. Firmin beheaded, by an executioner with very red legs, and an attendant dog of the character of the dog in 'Faust,' of whom we may have more to say presently.

Following in the meantime the tale of St. Firmin, as of old time known, his body was received, and buried, by a Roman senator, his disciple, (a kind of Joseph of Arimathea to St. Firmin,) in the Roman senator's own garden. Who also built a little oratory over his grave. The Roman senator's son built a church to replace the oratory, dedicated it to Our Lady of Martyrs, and established it as an episcopal seat— the first of the French nation's. A very notable spot for the French nation, surely? One deserving, perhaps, some little memory or monument,—cross, tablet, or the like? Where, therefore, [Pg 6] do you suppose this first cathedral of French Christianity stood, and with what monument has it been honoured?

It stood where we now stand, companion mine, whoever you may be; and the monument wherewith it has been honoured is this—chimney, whose gonfalon of smoke overshadows us—the latest effort of modern art in Amiens, the chimney of St. Acheul.

The first cathedral, you observe, of the French nation; more accurately, the first germ of cathedral for the French nation—who are not yet here; only this grave of a martyr is here, and this church of Our Lady of Martyrs, abiding on the hillside, till the Roman power pass away.

Falling together with it, and trampled down by savage tribes, alike the city and the shrine; the grave forgotten,—when at last the Franks themselves pour from the north, and the utmost wave of them, lapping along these downs of Somme, is here stayed, and the Frankish standard planted, and the French kingdom throned.

Here their first capital, here the first footsteps [1-3] of the Frank in his France! Think of it. All over the south are Gauls, Burgundians, Bretons, heavier-hearted nations of sullen mind: at their outmost brim and border, here at last are the Franks, the source of all Franchise, for this our Europe. You have heard the word in England, before now, but English word for it is none! Honesty we have of our own; but Frankness we must learn of these: nay, all the western nations of us are in a few centuries more to be known by this name of Frank. Franks, of Paris that is to be, in time to come; but French of Paris is in year of grace 500 an unknown tongue in Paris, as much as in Stratford-att-ye-Bowe. French of Amiens is the kingly and courtly form of Christian speech, Paris lying yet in Lutetian clay, to develope into tile-field, perhaps, in due time. Here, by soft-glittering Somme, reign Clovis and his Clotilde. [Pg 7] And by St. Firmin's grave speaks now another gentle evangelist, and the first Frank king's prayer to the King of kings is made to Him, known only as "the God of Clotilde."

I must ask the reader's patience now with a date or two, and stern facts—two—three—or more.

Clodion the leader of the first Franks who reach irrevocably beyond the Rhine, fights his way through desultory Roman cohorts as far as Amiens, and takes it, in 445. [1-4]

Two years afterwards, at his death, the scarcely asserted throne is seized—perhaps inevitably—by the tutor of his children, Merovée, whose dynasty is founded on the defeat of Attila at Chalons.

He died in 457. His son Childeric, giving himself up to the love of women, and scorned by the Frank soldiery, is driven into exile, the Franks choosing rather to live under the law of Rome than under a base chief of their own. He receives asylum at the court of the king of Thuringia, and abides there. His chief officer in Amiens, at his departure, breaks a ring in two, and, giving him the half of it, tells him, when the other half is sent, to return.

And, after many days, the half of the broken ring is sent, and he returns, and is accepted king by his Franks.

The Thuringian queen follows him, (I cannot find if her husband is first dead—still less, if dead, how dying,) and offers herself to him for his wife.

"I have known thy usefulness, and that thou art very strong; and I have come to live with thee. Had I known, in parts beyond sea, any one more useful than thou, I should have sought to live with him."

He took her for his wife, and their son is Clovis.

A wonderful story; how far in literalness true is of no manner of moment to us; the myth, and power of it, do manifest the nature of the French kingdom, and prophesy its future destiny. Personal valour, personal beauty, loyalty to [Pg 8] kings, love of women, disdain of unloving marriage, note all these things for true, and that in the corruption of these will be the last death of the Frank, as in their force was his first glory.

Personal valour, worth. Utilitas, the keystone of all. Birth nothing, except as gifting with valour;—Law of primogeniture unknown;—Propriety of conduct, it appears, for the present, also nowhere! (but we are all pagans yet, remember).

Let us get our dates and our geography, at any rate, gathered out of the great 'nowhere' of confused memory, and set well together, thus far.

457. Merovée dies. The useful Childeric, counting his exile, and reign in Amiens, together, is King altogether twenty-four years, 457 to 481, and during his reign Odoacer ends the Roman empire in Italy, 476.

481. Clovis is only fifteen when he succeeds his father, as King of the Franks in Amiens. At this time a fragment of Roman power remains isolated in central France, while four strong and partly savage nations form a cross round this dying centre: the Frank on the north, the Breton on the west, the Burgundian on the east, the Visigoth strongest of all and gentlest, in the south, from Loire to the sea.

Sketch for yourself, first, a map of France, as large as you like, as in Plate I., fig. 1, marking only the courses of the five rivers, Somme, Seine, Loire, Saone, Rhone; then, rudely, you find it was divided at the time thus, fig. 2: Fleur-de-lysée part, Frank; diagonal shading upper left to lower right, Breton; diagonal shading upper right to lower left, Burgundian; horizontal shading, Visigoth. I am not sure how far these last reached across Rhone into Provence, but I think best to indicate Provence as semée with roses.

Plate I. —  The Dynasties of France

[Go to Table of Contents]

Now, under Clovis, the Franks fight three great battles. The first, with the Romans, near Soissons, which they win, and become masters of France as far as the Loire. Copy the rough map fig. 2, and put the fleur-de-lys all over the middle of it, extinguishing the Romans (fig. 3). This battle was won by Clovis, I believe, before he married Clotilde. He wins his princess by it: cannot get his pretty vase, however, to present to her. Keep that story well in your mind, and the battle of Soissons, as winning mid-France for the French, and ending the Romans there, for ever. Secondly, after he marries Clotilde, the wild Germans attack him from the north, and he has to fight for life and throne at Tolbiac. This is the battle in which he prays to the God of Clotilde, and quits himself of the Germans by His help. Whereupon he is crowned in Rheims by St. Remy.

And now, in the new strength of his Christianity, and his twin victory over Rome and Germany, and his love for his queen, and his ambition for his people, he looks south on that vast Visigothic power, between Loire and the snowy mountains. Shall Christ, and the Franks, not be stronger than villainous Visigoths 'who are Arians also'? All his Franks are with him, in that opinion. So he marches against the Visigoths, meets them and their Alaric at Poitiers, ends their Alaric and their Arianism, and carries his faithful Franks to the Pic du Midi.

And so now you must draw the map of France once more, and put the fleur-de-lys all over its central mass from Calais to the Pyrenees: only Brittany still on the west, Burgundy in the east, and the white Provence rose beyond Rhone. And now poor little Amiens has become a mere border town like our Durham, and Somme a border streamlet like our Tyne. Loire and Seine have become the great French rivers, and men will be minded to build cities by these; where the well-watered plains, not of peat, but richest pasture, may repose under the guard of saucy castles on the crags, and moated towers on the islands. But now let us think a little more closely what our changed symbols in the map may mean—five fleur-de-lys for level bar.

They don't mean, certainly, that all the Goths are gone, and nobody but Franks in France? The Franks have not massacred Visigothic man, woman, and child, from Loire to Garonne. Nay, where their own throne is still set by the Somme, the peat-bred people whom they found there, live there still, though subdued. Frank, or Goth, or Roman may fluctuate[Pg 10] hither and thither, in chasing or flying troops: but, unchanged through all the gusts of war, the rural people whose huts they pillage, whose farms they ravage, and over whose arts they reign, must still be diligently, silently, and with no time for lamentation, ploughing, sowing, cattle-breeding!

Else how could Frank or Hun, Visigoth or Roman, live for a month, or fight for a day?

Whatever the name, or the manners, of their masters, the ground delvers must be the same; and the goatherd of the Pyrenees, and the vine-dresser of Garonne, and the milkmaid of Picardy, give them what lords you may, abide in their land always, blossoming as the trees of the field, and enduring as the crags of the desert. And these, the warp and first substance of the nation, are divided, not by dynasties, but by climates; and are strong here, and helpless there, by privileges which no invading tyrants can abolish, and through faults which no preaching hermit can repress. Now, therefore, please let us leave our history a minute or two, and read the lessons of constant earth and sky.

In old times, when one posted from Calais to Paris, there was about half an hour's trot on the level, from the gate of Calais to the long chalk hill, which had to be climbed before arriving at the first post-house in the village of Marquise.

That chalk rise, virtually, is the front of France; that last bit of level north of it, virtually the last of Flanders; south of it, stretches now a district of chalk and fine building limestone,—(if you keep your eyes open, you may see a great quarry of it on the west of the railway, half-way between Calais and Boulogne, where once was a blessed little craggy dingle opening into velvet lawns;)—this high, but never mountainous, calcareous tract, sweeping round the chalk basin of Paris away to Caen on one side, and Nancy on the other, and south as far as Bourges, and the Limousin. This limestone tract, with its keen fresh air, everywhere arable surface, and quarriable banks above well-watered meadow, is the real country of the French. Here only are their arts clearly developed. Farther south they are Gascons, or Limousins, or Auvergnats, or the [Pg 11] like. Westward, grim-granitic Bretons; eastward, Alpine-bearish Burgundians: here only, on the chalk and finely-knit marble, between, say, Amiens and Chartres one way, and between Caen and Rheims on the other, have you real France.

Of which, before we carry on the farther vital history, I must ask the reader to consider with me, a little, how history, so called, has been for the most part written, and of what particulars it usually consists.

Suppose that the tale of King Lear were a true one; and that a modern historian were giving the abstract of it in a school manual, purporting to contain all essential facts in British history valuable to British youth in competitive examination. The story would be related somewhat after this manner:—

"The reign of the last king of the seventy-ninth dynasty closed in a series of events with the record of which it is painful to pollute the pages of history. The weak old man wished to divide his kingdom into dowries for his three daughters; but on proposing this arrangement to them, finding it received by the youngest with coldness and reserve, he drove her from his court, and divided the kingdom between his two elder children.

"The youngest found refuge at the court of France, where ultimately the prince royal married her. But the two elder daughters, having obtained absolute power, treated their father at first with disrespect, and soon with contumely. Refused at last even the comforts necessary to his declining years, the old king, in a transport of rage, left the palace, with, it is said, only the court fool for an attendant, and wandered, frantic and half naked, during the storms of winter, in the woods of Britain.

"Hearing of these events, his youngest daughter hastily collected an army, and invaded the territory of her ungrateful sisters, with the object of restoring her father to his throne; but, being met by a well disciplined force, under the command of her eldest sister's paramour, Edmund, bastard son of [Pg 12] the Earl of Gloucester, was herself defeated, thrown into prison, and soon afterwards strangled by the adulterer's order. The old king expired on receiving the news of her death; and the participators in these crimes soon after received their reward; for the two wicked queens being rivals for the affections of the bastard, the one of them who was regarded by him with less favour poisoned the other, and afterwards killed herself. Edmund afterwards met his death at the hand of his brother, the legitimate son of Gloucester, under whose rule, with that of the Earl of Kent, the kingdom remained for several succeeding years."

Imagine this succinctly graceful recital of what the historian conceived to be the facts, adorned with violently black and white woodcuts, representing the blinding of Gloucester, the phrenzy of Lear, the strangling of Cordelia, and the suicide of Goneril, and you have a type of popular history in the nineteenth century; which is, you may perceive after a little reflection, about as profitable reading for young persons (so far as regards the general colour and purity of their thoughts) as the Newgate Calendar would be; with this farther condition of incalculably greater evil, that, while the calendar of prison-crime would teach a thoughtful youth the dangers of low life and evil company, the calendar of kingly crime overthrows his respect for any manner of government, and his faith in the ordinances of Providence itself.

Books of loftier pretence, written by bankers, members of Parliament, or orthodox clergymen, are of course not wanting; and show that the progress of civilization consists in the victory of usury over ecclesiastical prejudice, or in the establishment of the Parliamentary privileges of the borough of Puddlecombe, or in the extinction of the benighted superstitions of the Papacy by the glorious light of Reformation. Finally, you have the broadly philosophical history, which proves to you that there is no evidence whatever of any overruling Providence in human affairs; that all virtuous actions have selfish motives; and that a scientific selfishness, with proper telegraphic communications, and perfect knowledge of all the species [Pg 13] of Bacteria, will entirely secure the future well-being of the upper classes of society, and the dutiful resignation of those beneath them.

Meantime, the two ignored powers—the Providence of Heaven, and the virtue of men—have ruled, and rule, the world, not invisibly; and they are the only powers of which history has ever to tell any profitable truth. Under all sorrow, there is the force of virtue; over all ruin, the restoring charity of God. To these alone we have to look; in these alone we may understand the past, and predict the future, destiny of the ages.

I return to the story of Clovis, king now of all central France. Fix the year 500 in your minds as the approximate date of his baptism at Rheims, and of St. Remy's sermon to him, telling him of the sufferings and passion of Christ, till Clovis sprang from his throne, grasping his spear, and crying, "Had I been there with my brave Franks, I would have avenged His wrongs."

"There is little doubt," proceeds the cockney historian, "that the conversion of Clovis was as much a matter of policy as of faith." But the cockney historian had better limit his remarks on the characters and faiths of men to those of the curates who have recently taken orders in his fashionable neighbourhood, or the bishops who have lately preached to the population of its manufacturing suburbs. Frankish kings were made of other clay.

The Christianity of Clovis does not indeed produce any fruits of the kind usually looked for in a modern convert. We do not hear of his repenting ever so little of any of his sins, nor resolving to lead a new life in any the smallest particular. He had not been impressed with convictions of sin at the battle of Tolbiac; nor, in asking for the help of the God of Clotilde, had he felt or professed the remotest intention of changing his character, or abandoning his projects. What he was, before he believed in his queen's God, he only more intensely afterwards became, in the confidence of that before unknown God's supernatural help. His natural gratitude to the Delivering Power, and [Pg 14] pride in its protection, added only fierceness to his soldiership, and deepened his political enmities with the rancour of religions indignation. No more dangerous snare is set by the fiends for human frailty than the belief that our own enemies are also the enemies of God; and it is perfectly conceivable to me that the conduct of Clovis might have been the more unscrupulous, precisely in the measure that his faith was more sincere.

Had either Clovis or Clotilde fully understood the precepts of their Master, the following history of France, and of Europe, would have been other than it is. What they could understand, or in any wise were taught, you will find that they obeyed, and were blessed in obeying. But their history is complicated with that of several other persons, respecting whom we must note now a few too much forgotten particulars.

If from beneath the apse of Amiens Cathedral we take the street leading due south, leaving the railroad station on the left, it brings us to the foot of a gradually ascending hill, some half a mile long—a pleasant and quiet walk enough, terminating on the level of the highest land near Amiens; whence, looking back, the Cathedral is seen beneath us, all but the flêche, our gained hill-top being on a level with its roof-ridge: and, to the south, the plain of France.

Somewhere about this spot, or in the line between it and St. Acheul, stood the ancient Roman gate of the Twins, whereon were carved Romulus and Remus being suckled by the wolf; and out of which, one bitter winter's day, a hundred and seventy years ago when Clovis was baptized—had ridden a Roman soldier, wrapped in his horseman's cloak, [1-5] on the causeway which was part of the great Roman road from Lyons to Boulogne.

And it is well worth your while also, some frosty autumn or winter day when the east wind is high, to feel the sweep of it at this spot, remembering what chanced here, memorable to all men, and serviceable, [Pg 15] in that winter of the year 332, when men were dying for cold in Amiens streets:—namely, that the Roman horseman, scarce gone out of the city gate, was met by a naked beggar, shivering with cold; and that, seeing no other way of shelter for him, he drew his sword, divided his own cloak in two, and gave him half of it.

No ruinous gift, nor even enthusiastically generous: Sydney's cup of cold water needed more self-denial; and I am well assured that many a Christian child of our day, himself well warmed and clad, meeting one naked and cold, would be ready enough to give the whole cloak off his own shoulders to the necessitous one, if his better-advised nurse, or mamma, would let him. But this Roman soldier was no Christian, and did his serene charity in simplicity, yet with prudence.

Nevertheless, that same night, he beheld in a dream the Lord Jesus, who stood before him in the midst of angels, having on his shoulders the half of the cloak he had bestowed on the beggar.

And Jesus said to the angels that were around him, "Know ye who hath thus arrayed me? My servant Martin, though yet unbaptized, has done this." And Martin after this vision hastened to receive baptism, being then in his twenty-third year. [1-6]

Whether these things ever were so, or how far so, credulous or incredulous reader, is no business whatever of yours or mine. What is, and shall be, everlastingly, so,—namely, the infallible truth of the lesson herein taught, and the actual effect of the life of St. Martin on the mind of Christendom,—is, very absolutely, the business of every rational being in any Christian realm.

You are to understand, then, first of all, that the especial character of St. Martin is a serene and meek charity to all creatures. He is not a preaching saint—still less a persecuting one: not even an anxious one. Of his prayers we hear little—of his wishes, nothing. What he does always, is merely the right thing at the right [Pg 16] moment;—rightness and kindness being in his mind one: an extremely exemplary saint, to my notion.

Converted and baptized—and conscious of having seen Christ—he nevertheless gives his officers no trouble whatever—does not try to make proselytes in his cohort. "It is Christ's business, surely!—if He wants them, He may appear to them as He has to me," seems the feeling of his first baptized days. He remains seventeen years in the army, on those tranquil terms.

At the end of that time, thinking it might be well to take other service, he asks for his dismissal from the Emperor Julian,—on whose accusation of faintheartedness, Martin offers, unarmed, to lead his cohort into battle, bearing only the sign of the cross. Julian takes him at his word,—keeps him in ward till time of battle comes; but, the day before he counts on putting him to that war ordeal, the barbarian enemy sends embassy with irrefusable offers of submission and peace.

The story is not often dwelt upon: how far literally true, again observe, does not in the least matter;—here is the lesson for ever given of the way in which a Christian soldier should meet his enemies. Which, had John Bunyan's Mr. Great-heart understood, the Celestial gates had opened by this time to many a pilgrim who has failed to hew his path up to them with the sword of sharpness.

But true in some practical and effectual way the story is; for after a while, without any oratorizing, anathematizing, or any manner of disturbance, we find the Roman Knight made Bishop of Tours, and becoming an influence of unmixed good to all mankind, then, and afterwards. And virtually the same story is repeated of his bishop's robe as of his knight's cloak—not to be rejected because so probable an invention; for it is just as probable an act.

Going, in his full robes, to say prayers in church, with one of his deacons, he came across some unhappily robeless person by the wayside; for whom he forthwith orders his deacon to provide some manner of coat, or gown. [Pg 17] The deacon objecting that no apparel of that profane nature is under his hand, St. Martin, with his customary serenity, takes off his own episcopal stole, or whatsoever flowing stateliness it might be, throws it on the destitute shoulders, and passes on to perform indecorous public service in his waistcoat, or such mediæval nether attire as remained to him.

But, as he stood at the altar, a globe of light appeared above his head; and when he raised his bare arms with the Host—the angels were seen round him, hanging golden chains upon them, and jewels, not of the earth.

Incredible to you in the nature of things, wise reader, and too palpably a gloss of monkish folly on the older story?

Be it so: yet in this fable of monkish folly, understood with the heart, would have been the chastisement and check of every form of the church's pride and sensuality, which in our day have literally sunk the service of God and His poor into the service of the clergyman and his rich; and changed what was once the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, into the spangling of Pantaloons in an ecclesiastical Masquerade.

But one more legend,—and we have enough to show us the roots of this saint's strange and universal power over Christendom.

"What peculiarly distinguished St. Martin was his sweet, serious, unfailing serenity; no one had ever seen him angry, or sad, or, gay; there was nothing in his heart but piety to God and pity for men. The Devil, who was particularly envious of his virtues, detested above all his exceeding charity, because it was the most inimical to his own power, and one day reproached him mockingly that he so soon received into favour the fallen and the repentant. But St. Martin answered him sorrowfully, saying, 'Oh most miserable that thou art! if thou also couldst cease to persecute and seduce wretched men, if thou also couldst repent, thou also shouldst find mercy and forgiveness through Jesus Christ.'" [1-7]

In this gentleness was his strength; and the issue of it is best to [Pg 18] be estimated by comparing its scope with that of the work of St. Firmin. The impatient missionary riots and rants about Amiens' streets—insults, exhorts, persuades, baptizes,—turns everything, as aforesaid, upside down for forty days: then gets his head cut off, and is never more named, out of Amiens. St. Martin teazes nobody, spends not a breath in unpleasant exhortation, understands, by Christ's first lesson to himself, that undipped people may be as good as dipped if their hearts are clean; helps, forgives, and cheers, (companionable even to the loving-cup,) as readily the clown as the king; he is the patron of honest drinking; the stuffing of your Martinmas goose is fragrant in his nostrils, and sacred to him the last kindly rays of departing summer. And somehow—the idols totter before him far and near—the Pagan gods fade, his Christ becomes all men's Christ—his name is named over new shrines innumerable in all lands; high on the Roman hills, lowly in English fields;—St. Augustine baptized his first English converts in St. Martin's church at Canterbury; and the Charing Cross station itself has not yet effaced wholly from London minds his memory or his name.

That story of the Episcopal Robe is the last of St. Martin respecting which I venture to tell you that it is wiser to suppose it literally true, than a mere myth; myth, however, of the deepest value and beauty it remains assuredly: and this really last story I have to tell, which I admit you will be wiser in thinking a fable than exactly true, nevertheless had assuredly at its root some grain of fact (sprouting a hundred-fold) cast on good ground by a visible and unforgettable piece of St. Martin's actual behaviour in high company; while, as a myth, it is every whit and for ever valuable and comprehensive.

St. Martin, then, as the tale will have it, was dining one day at the highest of tables in the terrestrial globe—namely, with the Emperor and Empress of Germany! You need not inquire what Emperor, or which of the Emperor's wives! The Emperor of Germany is, in all early myths, the expression for the highest sacred power of the State, as the Pope is the highest sacred power of the Church. St. Martin was dining [Pg 19] then, as aforesaid, with the Emperor, of course sitting next him on his left—Empress opposite on his right: everything orthodox. St. Martin much enjoying his dinner, and making himself generally agreeable to the company: not in the least a John Baptist sort of a saint. You are aware also that in Royal feasts in those days persons of much inferior rank in society were allowed in the hall: got behind people's chairs, and saw and heard what was going on, while they unobtrusively picked up crumbs, and licked trenchers.

When the dinner was a little forward, and time for wine came, the Emperor fills his own cup—fills the Empress's—fills St. Martin's,—affectionately hobnobs with St. Martin. The equally loving, and yet more truly believing, Empress, looks across the table, humbly, but also royally, expecting St. Martin, of course, next to hobnob with her. St. Martin looks round, first, deliberately; becomes aware of a tatterdemalion and thirsty-looking soul of a beggar at his chair side, who has managed to get his cup filled somehow, also—by a charitable lacquey.

St. Martin turns his back on the Empress, and hobnobs with him!

For which charity—mythic if you like, but evermore exemplary—he remains, as aforesaid, the patron of good-Christian topers to this hour.

As gathering years told upon him, he seems to have felt that he had carried weight of crozier long enough—that busy Tours must now find a busier Bishop—that, for himself, he might innocently henceforward take his pleasure and his rest where the vine grew and the lark sang. For his episcopal palace, he takes a little cave in the chalk cliffs of the up-country river: arranges all matters therein, for bed and board, at small cost. Night by night the stream murmurs to him, day by day the vine-leaves give their shade; and, daily by the horizon's breadth so much nearer Heaven, the fore-running sun goes down for him beyond the glowing water;—there, where now the peasant woman trots homewards between her panniers, and the saw rests in the half-cleft [Pg 20] wood, and the village spire rises grey against the farthest light, in Turner's 'Loireside.' [1-8]

All which things, though not themselves without profit, my special reason for telling you now, has been that you might understand the significance of what chanced first on Clovis' march south against the Visigoths.

Having passed the Loire at Tours, he traversed the lands of the abbey of St. Martin, which he declared inviolate, and refused permission to his soldiers to touch anything, save water and grass for their horses. So rigid were his orders, and the obedience he exacted in this respect, that a Frankish soldier having taken, without the consent of the owner, some hay, which belonged to a poor man, saying in raillery "that it was but grass," he caused the aggressor to be put to death, exclaiming that "Victory could not be expected, if St. Martin should be offended."

Now, mark you well, this passage of the Loire at Tours is virtually the fulfilment of the proper bounds of the French kingdom, and the sign of its approved and securely set power is "Honour to the poor!" Even a little grass is not to be stolen from a poor man, on pain of Death. So wills the Christian knight of Roman armies; throned now high with God. So wills the first Christian king of far victorious Franks;—here baptized to God in Jordan of his goodly land, as he goes over to possess it.

How long?

Until that same Sign should be read backwards from a degenerate throne;—until, message being brought that the poor of the French people had no bread to eat, answer should be returned to them "They may eat grass." Whereupon—by St. Martin's faubourg, and St. Martin's gate—there go forth commands from the Poor Man's Knight against the King—which end his Feasting.

And be this much remembered by you, of the power over French souls, past and to come, of St. Martin of Tours.

Notes to Chapter I:

The reader will please observe that notes immediately necessary to the understanding of the text will be given, with numbered references, under the text itself; while questions of disputing authorities, or quotations of supporting documents will have lettered references, and be thrown together at the end of each chapter. [A] One good of this method will be that, after the numbered notes are all right, if I see need of farther explanation, as I revise the press, I can insert a letter referring to a final note without confusion of the standing types. There will be some use also in the final notes, in summing the chapters, or saying what is to be more carefully remembered of them. Thus just now it is of no consequence to remember that the first taking of Amiens was in 445, because that is not the founding of the Merovingian dynasty; neither that Merovæus seized the throne in 447 and died ten years later. The real date to be remembered is 481, when Clovis himself comes to the throne, a boy of fifteen; and the three battles of Clovis' reign to be remembered are Soissons, Tolbiac, and Poitiers—remembering also that this was the first of the three-great battles of Poitiers;—how the Poitiers district came to have such importance as a battle-position, we must afterwards discover if we can. Of Queen Clotilde and her flight from Burgundy to her Frank lover we must hear more in next chapter,—the story of the vase at Soissons is given in "The Pictorial History of France," but must be deferred also, with such comment as it needs, to next chapter; for I wish the reader's mind, in the close of this first number, to be left fixed on two descriptions of the modern 'Frank' (taking that word in its Saracen sense), as distinguished from the modern Saracen. The first description is by Colonel Butler, entirely true and admirable, except in the implied extension of the contrast to olden time: for the Saxon Alfred, the Teutonic under Charlemagne, and the Frank under St. Louis, were quite as religious as any Asiatic's, though more practical; it is only the modern mob of kingless miscreants in the West, who have sunk themselves by gambling, swindling, machine-making, and gluttony, into the scurviest louts that have ever fouled the Earth with the carcases she lent them.

"Of the features of English character brought to light by the spread of British dominion in Asia, there is nothing more observable than the contrast between the religious bias of Eastern thought and the innate absence of religion in the Anglo-Saxon mind. Turk and Greek, Buddhist and Armenian, Copt and Parsee, all manifest in a hundred ways of daily life the great fact of their belief in a God. In their vices as well as in their virtues the recognition of Deity is dominant.

"With the Western, on the contrary, the outward form of practising belief in a God is a thing to be half-ashamed of—something to hide. A procession of priests in the Strada Reale would probably cause an average Briton to regard it with less tolerant eye than he would cast upon a Juggernaut festival in Orissa: but to each alike would he display the same iconoclasm of creed, the same idea, not the less fixed because it is seldom expressed in words: "You pray; therefore I do not think much of you." But there is a deeper difference between East and West lying beneath this incompatibility of temper on the part of modern Englishmen to accept the religious habit of thought in the East. All Eastern peoples possess this habit of thought. It is the one tie which links together their widely differing races. Let us give an illustration of our meaning. On an Austrian Lloyd's steamboat in the Levant a traveller from Beyrout will frequently see strange groups of men crowded together on the quarter-deck. In the morning the missal books of the Greek Church will be laid along the bulwarks of the ship, and a couple of Russian priests, coming from Jerusalem, will be busy muttering mass. A yard to right or left a Turkish pilgrim, returning from Mecca, sits a respectful observer of the scene. It is prayer, and therefore it is holy in his sight. So, too, when the evening hour has come, and the Turk spreads out his bit of carpet for the sunset prayers and obeisance towards Mecca, the Greek looks on in silence, without trace of scorn in his face, for it is again the worship of the Creator by the created. They are both fulfilling the first law of the East—prayer to God; and whether the shrine be Jerusalem, Mecca, or Lhassa, the sanctity of worship surrounds the votary, and protects the pilgrim.

"Into this life comes the Englishman, frequently destitute of one touch of sympathy with the prayers of any people, or the faith of any creed; hence our rule in the East has ever rested, and will ever rest, upon the bayonet. We have never yet got beyond the stage of conquest; never assimilated a people to our ways, never even civilized a single tribe around the wide dominion of our empire. It is curious how frequently a well-meaning Briton will speak of a foreign church or temple as though it had presented itself to his mind in the same light in which the City of London appeared to Blucher—as something to loot. The other idea, that a priest was a person to hang, is one which is also often observable in the British brain. On one occasion, when we were endeavouring to enlighten our minds on the Greek question, as it had presented itself to a naval officer whose vessel had been stationed in Greek and Adriatic waters during our occupation of Corfu and the other Ionian Isles, we could only elicit from our informant the fact that one morning before breakfast he had hanged seventeen priests."

The second passage which I store in these notes for future use, is the supremely magnificent one, out of a book full of magnificence,—if truth be counted as having in it the strength of deed: Alphonse Karr's "Grains de Bon Sens." I cannot praise either this or his more recent "Bourdonnements" to my own heart's content, simply because they are by a man utterly after my own heart, who has been saying in France, this [Pg 23] many a year, what I also, this many a year, have been saying in England, neither of us knowing of the other, and both of us vainly. (See pages 11 and 12 of "Bourdonnements.") The passage here given is the sixty-third clause in "Grains de Bon Sens."

"Et tout cela, monsieur, vient de ce qu'il n'y a plus de croyances—de ce qu'on ne croit plus à rien.

"Ah! saperlipopette, monsieur, vous me la baillez belle! Vous dites qu'on ne croit plus à rien! Mais jamais, à aucune époque, on n'a cru à tant de billevesées, de bourdes, de mensonges, de sottises, d'absurdités qu'aujourd'hui.

"D'abord, on croit a l'incrédulité— l'incrédulité est une croyance, une religion très exigeante, qui a ses dogmes, sa liturgie, ses pratiques, ses rites!....son intolérance, ses superstitions. Nous avons des incrédules et des impies jésuites, et des incrédules et des impies jansénistes; des impies molinistes, et des impies quiétistes; des impies pratiquants, et non pratiquants; des impies indifférents et des impies fanatiques; des incrédules cagots et des impies hypocrites et tartuffes.—La religion de l'incrédulité ne se refuse même pas le luxe des hérésies.

"On ne croit plus à la bible, je le veux bien, mais on croit aux 'écritures' des journaux, on croit au 'sacerdoce' des gazettes et carrés de papier, et à leurs 'oracles' quotidiens.

"On croit au 'baptême' de la police correctionnelle et de la Cour d'assises—on appelle 'martyrs' et 'confesseurs' les 'absents' à Nouméa et les 'frères' de Suisse, d'Angleterre et de Belgique—et, quand on parle des 'martyrs de la Commune' ça ne s'entend pas des assassinés, mais des assassins.

"On se fait enterrer 'civilement,' on ne veut plus sur son cercueil des priéres de l'Eglise, on ne veut ni cierges, ni chants religieux,—mais on veut un cortége portant derrière la bière des immortelles rouges;—on veut une 'oraison,' une 'prédication' de Victor Hugo qui a ajouté cette spécialité à ses autres spécialités, si bien qu'un de ces jours derniers, comme il suivait un convoi en amateur, un croque-mort s'approcha de lui, le poussa du coude, et lui dit en souriant: 'Est-ce que nous n'aurons pas quelque chose de vous, aujourd'hui?'—Et cette prédication il la lit ou la récite—ou, s'il ne juge pas à propos 'd'officier' lui-même, s'il s'agit d'un mort de plus, il envoie pour la psalmodier M. Meurice ou tout autre 'prêtre' ou 'enfant de cœur' du 'Dieu,'—A défaut de M. Hugo, s'il s'agit d'un citoyen obscur, on se contente d'une homélie improvisée pour la dixième fois par n'importe quel député intransigeant—et le Miserere est remplacé par les cris de 'Vive la République!' poussés dans le cimetière.

"On n'entre plus dans les églises, mais on fréquente les brasseries et les cabarets; on y officie, on y célèbre les mystères, on y chante les louanges d'une prétendue république sacro-sainte, une, indivisible, démocratique, sociale, athénienne, intransigeante, despotique, invisible quoique étant partout. On y communie sous différentes espèces; le matin (matines) on 'tue le ver' avec le vin blanc,—il [Pg 24] y a plus tard les vêpres de l'absinthe, auxquelles on se ferait un crime de manquer d'assiduité.

"On ne croit plus en Dieu, mais on croit pieusement en M. Gambetta, en MM. Marcou, Naquet, Barodet, Tartempion, etc., et en toute une longue litanie de saints et de dii minores tels que Goutte-Noire, Polosse, Boriasse et Silibat, le héros lyonnais.

"On croit à 'l'immuabilité' de M. Thiers, qui a dit avec aplomb 'Je ne change jamais,' et qui aujourd'hui est à la fois le protecteur et le protégé de ceux qu'il a passé une partie de sa vie à fusilier, et qu'il fusillait encore hier.

'On croit au républicanisme 'immaculé' de l'avocat de Cahors qui a jeté par-dessus bord tous les principes républicains,—qui est à la fois de son côté le protecteur et le protégé de M. Thiers, qui hier l'appelait 'fou furieux,' déportait et fusillait ses amis.

"Tous deux, il est vrai, en même temps protecteurs hypocrites, et protégés dupés.

"On ne croit plus aux miracles anciens, mais on croit à des miracles nouveaux.

"On croit à une république sans le respect religieux et presque fanatique des lois.

"On croit qu'on peut s'enrichir en restant imprévoyants, insouciants et paresseux, et autrement que par le travail et l'économie.

"On se croit libre en obéissant aveuglément et bêtement à deux ou trois coteries.

"On se croit indépendant parce qu'on a tué ou chassé un lion et qu'on l'a remplacé par deux douzaines de caniches teints en jaune.

"On croit avoir conquis le 'suffrage universel' en votant par des mots d'ordre qui en font le contraire du suffrage universel,—mené au vote comme on mène un troupeau au pâturage, avec cette différence que ça ne nourrit pas.—D'ailleurs, par ce suffrage universel qu'on croit avoir et qu'on n'a pas,—il faudrait croire que les soldats doivent commander au général, les chevaux mener le cocher;—croire que deux radis valent mieux qu'une truffe, deux cailloux mieux qu'un diamant, deux crottins mieux qu'une rose.

"On se croit en République, parce que quelques demi-quarterons de farceurs occupent les mêmes places, émargent les mêmes appointements, pratiquent les mêmes abus, que ceux qu'on a renversés a leur bénéfice.

"On se croit un peuple opprimé, heroïque, que brise ses fers, et n'est qu'un domestique capricieux qui aime à changer de maîtres.

"On croit au génie d'avocats de sixième ordre, qui ne se sont jetés dans la politique et n'aspirent au gouvernement despotique de la France que faute d'avoir pu gagner honnêtement, sans grand travail, dans l'exercice d'un profession correcte, une vie obscure humectée de chopes.

"On croit que des hommes dévoyés, déclassés, décavés, fruits secs, etc., qui n'ont étudié que le 'domino à quatre' et le 'bezigue en quinze cents' se réveillent un matin,—après un sommeil alourdi par le tabac et la bière—possédant la science de la politique, et l'art de la guerre; et aptes à être dictateurs, généraux, ministres, préfets, sous-préfets, etc. [Pg 25] "Et les soi-disant conservateurs eux-mêmes croient que la France peut se relever et vivre tant qu'on n'aura pas fait justice de ce prétendu suffrage universel qui est le contraire du suffrage universel.

"Les croyances out subi le sort de ce serpent de la fable—coupé, haché par morceaux, dont chaque tronçon devenait un serpent.

"Les croyances se sont changées en monnaie—en billon de crédulités.

"Et pour finir la liste bien incomplète des croyances et des crédulités—vous croyez, vous, qu'on ne croit à rien!"

[Transcriber's Note: In fact, the author was somewhat chaotic in the way he identified footnotes. From this point onwards, all footnotes have been numbered, and moved to the end of chapters.]

CHAPTER II.

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UNDER THE DRACHENFELS.

1. Without ignobly trusting the devices of artificial memory—far less slighting the pleasure and power of resolute and thoughtful memory—my younger readers will find it extremely useful to note any coincidences or links of number which may serve to secure in their minds what may be called Dates of Anchorage, round which others, less important, may swing at various cables' lengths.

Thus, it will be found primarily a most simple and convenient arrangement of the years since the birth of Christ, to divide them by fives of centuries,—that is to say, by the marked periods of the fifth, tenth, fifteenth, and, now fast nearing us, twentieth centuries.

And this—at first seemingly formal and arithmetical—division, will be found, as we use it, very singularly emphasized by signs of most notable change in the knowledge, disciplines, and morals of the human race.

2. All dates, it must farther be remembered, falling within the fifth century, begin with the number 4 (401, 402, etc.); and all dates in the tenth century with the number 9 (901, 902, etc.); and all dates in the fifteenth century with the number 14 (1401, 1402, etc.)

In our immediate subject of study, we are concerned with the first of these marked centuries—the fifth—of which I will therefore ask you to observe two very interesting divisions.

All dates of years in that century, we said, must begin with the number 4.

If you halve it for the second figure, you get 42.

And if you double it for the second figure, you get 48.

Plate II.—The Bible of Amiens. Northern Porch before Restoration.

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Add 1, for the third figure, to each of these numbers, and you get 421 and 481, which two dates you will please fasten well down, and let there be no drifting about of them in your heads.

For the first is the date of the birth of Venice herself, and her dukedom, (see 'St. Mark's Rest,' Part I., p. 30); and the second is the date of birth of the French Venice, and her kingdom; Clovis being in that year crowned in Amiens.

3. These are the great Birthdays—Birthdates—in the fifth century, of Nations. Its Deathdays we will count, at another time.

Since, not for dark Rialto's dukedom, nor for fair France's kingdom, only, are these two years to be remembered above all others in the wild fifth century; but because they are also the birth-years of a great Lady, and greater Lord, of all future Christendom—St. Genevieve, and St. Benedict.

Genevieve, the 'white wave' (Laughing water)—the purest of all the maids that have been named from the sea-foam or the rivulet's ripple, unsullied,—not the troubled and troubling Aphrodite, but the Leuchothea of Ulysses, the guiding wave of deliverance.

White wave on the blue—whether of pure lake or sunny sea—(thenceforth the colours of France, blue field with white lilies), she is always the type of purity, in active brightness of the entire soul and life—(so distinguished from the quieter and restricted innocence of St. Agnes),—and all the traditions of sorrow in the trial or failure of noble womanhood are connected with her name; Ginevra, in Italian, passing into Shakespeare's Imogen; and Guinevere, the torrent wave of the British mountain streams, of whose pollution your modern sentimental minstrels chant and moan to you, lugubriously useless;—but none tell you, that I hear, of the victory and might of this white wave of France.

4. A shepherd maid she was—a tiny thing, barefooted, bareheaded— such as you may see running wild and innocent, less cared for now than their sheep, over many a hillside of France and Italy. Tiny enough;—seven years old, all told, when first one hears of her: [Pg 28] "Seven times one are seven, (I am old, you may trust me, linnet, linnet [2-1])," and all around her—fierce as the Furies, and wild as the winds of heaven—the thunder of the Gothic armies, reverberate over the ruins of the world.

5. Two leagues from Paris, (Roman Paris, soon to pass away with Rome herself,) the little thing keeps her flock, not even her own, nor her father's flock, like David; she is the hired servant of a richer farmer of Nanterre. Who can tell me anything about Nanterre?—which of our pilgrims of this omni-speculant, omni-nescient age has thought of visiting what shrine may be there? I don't know even on what side of Paris it lies, [2-2] nor under which heap of railway cinders and iron one is to conceive the sheep-walks and blossomed fields of fairy St. Phyllis. There were such left, even in my time, between Paris and St. Denis, (see the prettiest chapter in all the "Mysteries of Paris," where Fleur de Marie runs wild in them for the first time), but now, I suppose, St. Phyllis's native earth is all thrown up into bastion and glacis, (profitable and blessed of all saints, and her, as these have since proved themselves!) or else are covered with manufactories and cabarets. Seven years old she was, then, when on his way to England from Auxerre, St. Germain passed a night in her village, and among the children who brought him on his way in the morning in more kindly manner than Elisha's convoy, noticed this one—wider-eyed in reverence than the rest; drew her to him, questioned her, and was sweetly answered: That she would fain be Christ's handmaid. And he hung round her neck a small copper coin, marked with the cross. Thencefoward Genevieve held herself as "separated from the world."

6. It did not turn out so, however. Far the contrary. You must think of her, instead, as the first of Parisiennes. Queen of Vanity Fair, that was to be, sedately poor St. Phyllis, with her copper-crossed [Pg 29] farthing about her neck! More than Nitocris was to Egypt, more than Semiramis to Nineveh, more than Zenobia to the city of palm trees—this seven-years-old shepherd maiden became to Paris and her France. You have not heard of her in that kind?—No: how should you?—for she did not lead armies, but stayed them, and all her power was in peace.

7. There are, however, some seven or eight and twenty lives of her, I believe; into the literature of which I cannot enter, nor need, all having been ineffective in producing any clear picture of her to the modern French or English mind; and leaving one's own poor sagacities and fancy to gather and shape the sanctity of her into an intelligible, I do not say a credible, form; for there is no question here about belief,—the creature is as real as Joan of Arc, and far more powerful;—she is separated, just as St. Martin is, by his patience, from too provocative prelates—by her quietness of force, from the pitiable crowd of feminine martyr saints.

There are thousands of religious girls who have never got themselves into any calendars, but have wasted and wearied away their lives—heaven knows why, for we cannot; but here is one, at any rate, who neither scolds herself to martyrdom, nor frets herself into consumption, but becomes a tower of the Flock, and builder of folds for them all her days.

8. The first thing, then, you have to note of her, is that she is a pure native Gaul. She does not come as a missionary out of Hungary, or Illyria, or Egypt, or ineffable space; but grows at Nanterre, like a marguerite in the dew, the first "Reine Blanche" of Gaul.

I have not used this ugly word 'Gaul' before, and we must be quite sure what it means, at once, though it will cost us a long parenthesis.

9. During all the years of the rising power of Rome, her people called everybody a Gaul who lived north of the sources of Tiber. If you are not content with that general statement, you may read the article "Gallia" in Smith's dictionary, which consists of seventy-one columns [Pg 30] of close print, containing each as much as three of my pages; and tells you at the end of it, that "though long, it is not complete." You may however, gather from it, after an attentive perusal, as much as I have above told you.

But, as early as the second century after Christ, and much more distinctly in the time with which we are ourselves concerned—the fifth—the wild nations opposed to Rome, and partially subdued, or held at bay by her, had resolved themselves into two distinct masses, belonging to two distinct latitudes. One, fixed in habitation of the pleasant temperate zone of Europe—England with her western mountains, the healthy limestone plateaux and granite mounts of France, the German labyrinths of woody hill and winding thal, from the Tyrol to the Hartz, and all the vast enclosed basin and branching valleys of the Carpathians. Think of these four districts, briefly and clearly, as 'Britain,' 'Gaul,' 'Germany,' and 'Dacia.'

10. North of these rudely but patiently resident races, possessing fields and orchards, quiet herds, homes of a sort, moralities and memories not ignoble, dwelt, or rather drifted, and shook, a shattered chain of gloomier tribes, piratical mainly, and predatory, nomad essentially; homeless, of necessity, finding no stay nor comfort in earth, or bitter sky: desperately wandering along the waste sands and drenched morasses of the flat country stretching from the mouths of the Rhine to those of the Vistula, and beyond Vistula nobody knows where, nor needs to know. Waste sands and rootless bogs their portion, ice-fastened and cloud-shadowed, for many a day of the rigorous year: shallow pools and oozings and windings of retarded streams, black decay of neglected woods, scarcely habitable, never loveable; to this day the inner mainlands little changed for good [2-3]—and their inhabitants now fallen even on sadder times.

11. For in the fifth century they had herds of cattle [2-4] to drive and kill, unpreserved hunting-grounds full of game and wild deer, tameable reindeer also then, even so far in the south; spirited hogs, good for practice of fight as in Meleager's time, and afterwards for bacon; furry creatures innumerable, all good for meat or skin. Fish of the infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black lake of Colchos on the south.

12. And they were, to all outward aspect, and in all felt force, the living powers of the world, in that long hour of its transfiguration. All else known once for awful, had become formalism, folly, or shame:—the Roman armies, a mere sworded mechanism, fast falling confused, every sword against its fellow;—the Roman civil multitude, mixed of slaves, slave-masters, and harlots; the East, cut off from Europe by the intervening weakness of the Greek. These starving troops of the Black forests and White seas, themselves half wolf, half drift-wood, (as we once called ourselves Lion-hearts, and Oak-hearts, so they), merciless as the herded hound, enduring as the wild birch-tree and pine. You will hear of few beside them for five centuries yet to come: Visigoths, west of Vistula;—Ostrogoths, east of Vistula; radiant round little Holy Island (Heligoland), our own Saxons, and Hamlet the Dane, and his foe the sledded Polack on the ice,—all these south of Baltic; and pouring across Baltic, constantly, her mountain-ministered strength, Scandinavia, until at last she for a time rules all, and the Norman name is of disputeless dominion, from the North Cape to Jerusalem.

13. This is the apparent, this the only recognised world history, as I have said, for five centuries to come. And yet the real history is underneath all this. The wandering armies are, in the heart of them, only living hail, and thunder, and fire along the ground. But the Suffering Life, the rooted heart of native humanity, growing up in eternal gentleness, howsoever wasted, forgotten, or spoiled,—itself neither wasting, nor wandering, nor slaying, but unconquerable by grief or death, became the seed ground of all love, that was to be born in due time; giving, then, to mortality, what hope, joy, or genius it could receive; and—if there be immortality—rendering out of the grave to the Church her fostering Saints, and to Heaven her helpful Angels.

14. Of this low-nestling, speechless, harmless, infinitely submissive, infinitely serviceable order of being, no Historian ever takes the smallest notice, except when it is robbed or slain. I can give you no picture of it, bring to your ears no murmur of it, nor cry. I can only show you the absolute 'must have been' of its unrewarded past, and the way in which all we have thought of, or been told, is founded on the deeper facts in its history, unthought of, and untold.

15. The main mass of this innocent and invincible peasant life is, as I have above told you, grouped in the fruitful and temperate districts of (relatively) mountainous Europe,—reaching, west to east, from the Cornish Land's End to the mouth of the Danube. Already, in the times we are now dealing with, it was full of native passion—generosity—and intelligence capable of all things. Dacia gave to Rome the four last of her great Emperors, [2-5]—Britain to Christianity the first deeds, and the final legends, of her [Pg 33] chivalry,—Germany, to all manhood, the truth and the fire of the Frank,—Gaul, to all womanhood, the patience and strength of St. Genevieve.

16. The truth, and the fire, of the Frank,—I must repeat with insistence,—for my younger readers have probably been in the habit of thinking that the French were more polite than true. They will find, if they examine into the matter, that only Truth can be polished: and that all we recognize of beautiful, subtle, or constructive, in the manners, the language, or the architecture of the French, comes of a pure veracity in their nature, which you will soon feel in the living creatures themselves if you love them: if you understand even their worst rightly, their very Revolution was a revolt against lies; and against the betrayal of Love. No people had ever been so loyal in vain.

17. That they were originally Germans, they themselves I suppose would now gladly forget; but how they shook the dust of Germany off their feet—and gave themselves a new name—is the first of the phenomena which we have now attentively to observe respecting them.

"The most rational critics," says Mr. Gibbon in his tenth chapter, "suppose that about the year 240" (suppose then, we, for our greater comfort, say about the year 250, half-way to end of fifth century, where we are,—ten years less or more, in cases of 'supposing about,' do not much matter, but some floating buoy of a date will be handy here.)

'About' A.D. 250, then, "a new confederacy was formed, under the name of Franks, by the old inhabitants of the lower Rhine and the Weser."

18. My own impression, concerning the old inhabitants of the lower Rhine and the Weser, would have been that they consisted mostly of fish, with superficial frogs and ducks; but Mr. Gibbon's note on the passage informs us that the new confederation composed itself of human creatures, in these items following.

All this I believe you will be rather easier in your minds if you forget than if you remember; but if it please you to read, or re-read, (or best of all, get read to you by some real Miss Isabella Wardour,) the story of Martin Waldeck in the 'Antiquary,' you will gain from it a sufficient notion of the central character of "the Principality of Waldeck" connected securely with that important German word; 'woody'—or 'woodish,' I suppose?—descriptive of rock and half-grown forest; together with some wholesome reverence for Scott's instinctively deep foundations of nomenclature.

19. But for our present purpose we must also take seriously to our maps again, and get things within linear limits of space.

All the maps of Germany which I have myself the privilege of possessing, diffuse themselves, just north of Frankfort, into the likeness of a painted window broken small by Puritan malice, and put together again by ingenious churchwardens with every bit of it wrong side upwards;—this curious vitrerie purporting to represent the sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety dukedoms, marquisates, counties, baronies, electorates, and the like, into which hereditary Alemannia cracked itself in that latitude. But under the mottling colours, and through the jotted and jumbled alphabets of distracted dignities—besides a chain-mail of black railroads over all, the chains of it not in links, but bristling with legs, like centipedes,—a hard forenoon's work with good magnifying-glass enables one approximately to make out the course of the Weser, and the names of certain towns near its sources, deservedly memorable.

20. In case you have not a forenoon to spare, nor eyesight to waste, this much of merely necessary abstract must serve you,—that from the [Pg 35] Drachenfels and its six brother felsen, eastward, trending to the north, there runs and spreads a straggling company of gnarled and mysterious craglets, jutting and scowling above glens fringed by coppice, and fretful or musical with stream; the crags, in pious ages, mostly castled, for distantly or fancifully Christian purposes;—the glens, resonant of woodmen, or burrowed at the sides by miners, and invisibly tenanted farther, underground, by gnomes, and above by forest and other demons. The entire district, clasping crag to crag, and guiding dell to dell, some hundred and fifty miles (with intervals) between the Dragon mountain above Rhine, and the Rosin mountain, 'Hartz' shadowy still to the south of the riding grounds of Black Brunswickers of indisputable bodily presence;—shadowy anciently with 'Hercynian' (hedge, or fence) forest, corrupted or coinciding into Hartz, or Rosin forest, haunted by obscurely apparent foresters of at least resinous, not to say sulphurous, extraction.

21. A hundred and fifty miles east to west, say half as much north to south—about a thousand square miles in whole—of metalliferous, coniferous, and Ghostiferous mountain, fluent, and diffluent for us, both in mediæval and recent times, with the most Essential oil of Turpentine, and Myrrh or Frankincense of temper and imagination, which may be typified by it, producible in Germany; especially if we think how the more delicate uses of Rosin, as indispensable to the Fiddle-bow, have developed themselves, from the days of St. Elizabeth of Marburg to those of St. Mephistopheles of Weimar.

22. As far as I know, this cluster of wayward cliff and dingle has no common name as a group of hills; and it is quite impossible to make out the diverse branching of it in any maps I can lay hand on: but we may remember easily, and usefully, that it is all north of the Maine,—that it rests on the Drachenfels at one end, and tosses itself away to the morning light with a concave swoop, up to the Hartz, (Brocken summit, 3700 feet above sea, nothing higher): with one notable interval for Weser stream, of which presently.

23. We will call this, in future, the chain, or company, of the [Pg 36] Enchanted mountains; and then we shall all the more easily join on the Giant mountains, Riesen-Gebirge, when we want them; but these are altogether higher, sterner, and not yet to be invaded; the nearer ones, through which our road lies, we might perhaps more aptly call the Goblin mountains; but that would be scarcely reverent to St. Elizabeth, nor to the numberless pretty chatelaines of towers, and princesses of park and glen, who have made German domestic manners sweet and exemplary, and have led their lightly rippling and translucent lives down the glens of ages, until enchantment becomes, perhaps, too canonical in the Almanach de Gotha.

We will call them therefore the Enchanted Mountains, not the Goblin; perceiving gratefully also that the Rock spirits of them have really much more of the temper of fairy physicians than of gnomes: each—as it were with sensitive hazel wand instead of smiting rod—beckoning, out of sparry caves, effervescent Brunnen, beneficently salt and warm.

24. At the very heart of this Enchanted chain, then—(and the beneficentest, if one use it and guide it rightly, of all the Brunnen there,) sprang the fountain of the earliest Frank race; "in the principality of Waldeck,"—you can trace their current to no farther source; there it rises out of the earth.

'Frankenberg' (Burg), on right bank of the Eder, nineteen miles north of Marburg, you may find marked clearly in the map No. 18 of Black's General Atlas, wherein the cluster of surrounding bewitched mountains, and the valley of Eder-stream otherwise (as the village higher up the dell still calls itself) "Engel-Bach," "Angel Brook," joining that of the Fulda, just above Cassel, are also delineated in a way intelligible to attentive mortal eyes. I should be plagued with the names in trying a woodcut; but a few careful pen-strokes, or wriggles, of your own off-hand touching, would give you the concurrence of the actual sources of Weser in a comfortably extricated form, with the memorable towns on them, or just south of them, on the other slope of the watershed, towards Maine. Frankenberg and Waldeck on Eder, Fulda and Cassel on Fulda, Eisenach on Werra, who accentuates himself into Weser after taking Fulda for bride, as Tees the Greta, beyond [Pg 37] Eisenach, under the Wartzburg, (of which you have heard as a castle employed on Christian mission and Bible Society purposes), town-streets below hard paved with basalt—name of it, Iron-ach, significant of Thuringian armouries in the old time,—it is active with mills for many things yet.

25. The rocks all the way from Rhine, thus far, are jets and spurts of basalt through irony sandstone, with a strip of coal or two northward, by the grace of God not worth digging for; at Frankenberg even a gold mine; also, by Heaven's mercy, poor of its ore; but wood and iron always to be had for the due trouble; and, of softer wealth above ground,—game, corn, fruit, flax, wine, wool, and hemp! Monastic care over all, in Fulda's and Walter's houses—which I find marked by a cross as built by some pious Walter, Knight of Meiningen on the Boden wasser, Bottom water, as of water having found its way well down at last: so "Boden-See," of Rhine well got down out of Via Mala.

26. And thus, having got your springs of Weser clear from the rock; and, as it were, gathered up the reins of your river, you can draw for yourself, easily enough, the course of its farther stream, flowing virtually straight north, to the North Sea. And mark it strongly on your sketched map of Europe, next to the border Vistula, leaving out Elbe yet for a time. For now, you may take the whole space between Weser and Vistula (north of the mountains), as wild barbarian (Saxon or Goth); but, piercing the source of the Franks at Waldeck, you will find them gradually, but swiftly, filling all the space between Weser and the mouths of Rhine, passing from mountain foam into calmer diffusion over the Netherland, where their straying forest and pastoral life has at last to embank itself into muddy agriculture, and in bleak-flying sea mist, forget the sunshine on its basalt crags.

27. Whereupon, we must also pause, to embank ourselves somewhat; and before other things, try what we can understand in this name of Frank, concerning which Gibbon tells us, in his sweetest tones of satisfied moral serenity—"The love of liberty was the ruling passion of these [Pg 38] Germans. They deserved, they assumed, they maintained, the honourable epithet of Franks, or Freemen." He does not, however, tell us in what language of the time—Chaucian, Sicambrian, Chamavian, or Cattian,—'Frank' ever meant Free: nor can I find out myself what tongue of any time it first belongs to; but I doubt not that Miss Yonge ('History of Christian Names,' Articles on Frey and Frank), gives the true root, in what she calls the High German "Frang," Free Lord. Not by any means a Free Commoner, or anything of the sort! but a person whose nature and name implied the existence around him, and beneath, of a considerable number of other persons who were by no means 'Frang,' nor Frangs. His title is one of the proudest then maintainable;—ratified at last by the dignity of age added to that of valour, into the Seigneur, or Monseigneur, not even yet in the last cockney form of it, 'Mossoo,' wholly understood as a republican term!

28. So that, accurately thought of, the quality of Frankness glances only with the flat side of it into any meaning of 'Libre,' but with all its cutting edge, determinedly, and to all time, it signifies Brave, strong, and honest, above other men. [2-6] The old woodland race were never in any wolfish sense 'free,' but in a most human sense [Pg 39] Frank, outspoken, meaning what they had said, and standing to it, when they had got it out. Quick and clear in word and act, fearless utterly and restless always;—but idly lawless, or weakly lavish, neither in deed nor word. Their frankness, if you read it as a scholar and a Christian, and not like a modern half-bred, half-brained infidel, knowing no tongue of all the world but in the slang of it, is really opposed, not to Servitude,—but to Shyness! [2-7] It is to this day the note of the sweetest and Frenchiest of French character, that it makes simply perfect Servants. Unwearied in protective friendship, in meekly dextrous omnificence, in latent tutorship; the lovingly availablest of valets,—the mentally and personally bonniest of bonnes. But in no capacity shy of you! Though you be the Duke or Duchess of Montaltissimo, you will not find them abashed at your altitude. They will speak 'up' to you, when they have a mind.

29. Best of servants: best of subjects, also, when they have an [Pg 40] equally frank King, or Count, or Captal, to lead them; of which we shall see proof enough in due time;—but, instantly, note this farther, that, whatever side-gleam of the thing they afterwards called Liberty may be meant by the Frank name, you must at once now, and always in future, guard yourself from confusing their Liberties with their Activities. What the temper of the army may be towards its chief, is one question—whether either chief or army can be kept six months quiet,—another, and a totally different one. That they must either be fighting somebody or going somewhere, else, their life isn't worth living to them; the activity and mercurial flashing and flickering hither and thither, which in the soul of it is set neither on war nor rapine, but only on change of place, mood—tense, and tension;—which never needs to see its spurs in the dish, but has them always bright, and on, and would ever choose rather to ride fasting than sit feasting,—this childlike dread of being put in a corner, and continual want of something to do, is to be watched by us with wondering sympathy in all its sometimes splendid, but too often unlucky or disastrous consequences to the nation itself as well as to its neighbours.

30. And this activity, which we stolid beef-eaters, before we had been taught by modern science that we were no better than baboons ourselves, were wont discourteously to liken to that of the livelier tribes of Monkey, did in fact so much impress the Hollanders, when first the irriguous Franks gave motion and current to their marshes, that the earliest heraldry in which we find the Frank power blazoned seems to be founded on a Dutch endeavour to give some distantly satirical presentment of it. "For," says a most ingenious historian, Mons. André Favine,—'Parisian, and Advocate in the High Court of the French Parliament in the year 1620'—"those people who bordered on the river Sala, called 'Salts,' by the Allemaignes, were on their descent into Dutch lands called by the Romans 'Franci Salici'" (whence 'Salique' law to come, you observe) "and by abridgment 'Salii,' as if of the verb 'salire,' that is to say 'saulter,' to leap"—(and in [Pg 41] future therefore—duly also to dance—in an incomparable manner) "to be quicke and nimble of foot, to leap and mount well, a quality most notably requisite for such as dwell in watrie and marshy places; So that while such of the French as dwelt on the great course of the river" (Rhine) "were called 'Nageurs,' Swimmers, they of the marshes were called 'Saulteurs,' Leapers, so that it was a nickname given to the French in regard both of their natural disposition and of their dwelling; as, yet to this day, their enemies call them French Toades, (or Frogs, more properly) from whence grew the fable that their ancient Kings carried such creatures in their Armes."

31. Without entering at present into debate whether fable or not, you will easily remember the epithet 'Salian' of these fosse-leaping and river-swimming folk (so that, as aforesaid, all the length of Rhine must be refortified against them)—epithet however, it appears, in its origin delicately Saline, so that we may with good discretion, as we call our seasoned Mariners, 'old Salts,' think of these more brightly sparkling Franks as 'Young Salts,'—but this equivocated presently by the Romans, with natural respect to their martial fire and 'elan,' into 'Salii'—exsultantes, [2-8]—such as their own armed priests of war: and by us now with some little farther, but slight equivocation, into useful meaning, to be thought of as here first [Pg 42] Salient, as a beaked promontory, towards the France we know of; and evermore, in brilliant elasticities of temper, a salient or out-sallying nation; lending to us English presently—for this much of heraldry we may at once glance on to—their 'Leopard,' not as a spotted or blotted creature, but as an inevitably springing and pouncing one, for our own kingly and princely shields.

Thus much, of their 'Salian' epithet may be enough; but from the interpretation of the Frankish one we are still as far as ever, and must be content, in the meantime, to stay so, noting however two ideas afterwards entangled with the name, which are of much descriptive importance to us.

32. "The French poet in the first book of his Franciades" (says Mons. Favine; but what poet I know not, nor can enquire) "encounters" (in the sense of en-quarters, or depicts as a herald) certain fables on the name of the French by the adoption and composure of two Gaulish words joyned together, Phere-Encos which signifieth 'Beare-Launce,' (—Shake-Lance, we might perhaps venture to translate,) a lighter weapon than the Spear beginning here to quiver in the hand of its chivalry—and Fere-encos then passing swiftly on the tongue into Francos;"—a derivation not to be adopted, but the idea of the weapon most carefully,—together with this following—that "among the arms of the ancient French, over and beside the Launce, was the Battaile-Axe, which they called Anchon, and moreover, yet to this day, in many Provinces of France, it is termed an Achon, wherewith they served themselves in warre, by throwing it a farre off at joyning with the enemy, onely to discover the man and to cleave his shield. Because this Achon was darted with such violence, as it would cleave the Shield, and compell the Maister thereof to hold down his arm, and being so discovered, as naked or unarmed; it made way for the sooner surprizing of him. It seemeth, that this weapon was proper and particuler to the French Souldior, as well him on foote, as on horsebacke. For this cause they called it Franciscus. Francisca, securis oblonga, quam Franci librabant in Hostes. For the Horseman, beside his shield and Francisca (Armes common, as wee have said, to [Pg 43] the Footman), had also the Lance, which being broken, and serving to no further effect, he laid hand on his Francisca, as we learn the use of that weapon in the Archbishop of Tours, his second book, and twenty-seventh chapter."

33. It is satisfactory to find how respectfully these lessons of the Archbishop of Tours were received by the French knights; and curious to see the preferred use of the Francisca by all the best of them—down, not only to Cœur de Lion's time, but even to the day of Poitiers. In the last wrestle of the battle at Poitiers gate, "Là, fit le Roy Jehan de sa main, merveilles d'armes, et tenoit une hache de guerre dont bien se deffendoit et combattoit,—si la quartre partie de ses gens luy eussent ressemblé, la journée eust été pour eux." Still more notably, in the episode of fight which Froissart stops to tell just before, between the Sire de Verclef, (on Severn) and the Picard squire Jean de Helennes: the Englishman, losing his sword, dismounts to recover it, on which Helennes casts his own at him with such aim and force "qu'il acconsuit l'Anglois es cuisses, tellement que l'espée entra dedans et le cousit tout parmi, jusqu'au hans."

On this the knight rendering himself, the squire binds his wound, and nurses him, staying fifteen days 'pour l'amour de lui' at Chasteleraut, while his life was in danger; and afterwards carrying him in a litter all the way to his own chastel in Picardy. His ransom however is 6000 nobles—I suppose about 25,000 pounds, of our present estimate; and you may set down for one of the fatallest signs that the days of chivalry are near their darkening, how "devint celuy Escuyer, Chevalier, pour le grand profit qu'il eut du Seigneur de Verclef."

I return gladly to the dawn of chivalry, when, every hour and year, men were becoming more gentle and more wise; while, even through their worst cruelty and error, native qualities of noblest cast may be seen asserting themselves for primal motive, and submitting themselves for future training.

34. We have hitherto got no farther in our notion of a Salian Frank than a glimpse of his two principal weapons,—the shadow of him, [Pg 44] however, begins to shape itself to us on the mist of the Brocken, bearing the lance light, passing into the javelin,—but the axe, his woodman's weapon, heavy;—for economical reasons, in scarcity of iron, preferablest of all weapons, giving the fullest swing and weight of blow with least quantity of actual metal, and roughest forging. Gibbon gives them also a 'weighty' sword, suspended from a 'broad' belt: but Gibbon's epithets are always gratis, and the belted sword, whatever its measure, was probably for the leaders only; the belt, itself of gold, the distinction of the Roman Counts, and doubtless adopted from them by the allied Frank leaders, afterwards taking the Pauline mythic meaning of the girdle of Truth—and so finally; the chief mark of Belted Knighthood.

35. The Shield, for all, was round, wielded like a Highlander's target:—armour, presumably, nothing but hard-tanned leather, or patiently close knitted hemp; "Their close apparel," says Mr. Gibbon, "accurately expressed the figure of their limbs," but 'apparel' is only Miltonic-Gibbonian for 'nobody knows what.' He is more intelligible of their persons. "The lofty stature of the Franks, and their blue eyes, denoted a Germanic origin; the warlike barbarians were trained from their earliest youth to run, to leap, to swim, to dart the javelin and battle-axe with unerring aim, to advance without hesitation against a superior enemy, and to maintain either in life or death, the invincible reputation of their ancestors" (vi. 95). For the first time, in 358, appalled by the Emperor Julian's victory at Strasburg, and besieged by him upon the Meuse, a body of six hundred Franks "dispensed with the ancient law which commanded them to conquer or die." "Although they were strongly actuated by the allurements of rapine, they professed a disinterested love of war, which they considered as the supreme honour and felicity of human nature; and their minds and bodies were so hardened by perpetual action that, according to the lively expression of an orator, the snows of winter were as pleasant to them as the flowers of spring" (iii. 220).

36. These mental and bodily virtues, or indurations, were probably universal in the military rank of the nation: but we learn presently, with surprise, of so remarkably 'free' a people, that nobody but the King and royal family might wear their hair to their own liking. The kings wore theirs in flowing ringlets on the back and shoulders,—the Queens, in tresses rippling to their feet,—but all the rest of the nation "were obliged, either by law or custom, to shave the hinder part of their head, to comb their short hair over their forehead, and to content themselves with the ornament of two small whiskers."

37. Moustaches,—Mr. Gibbon means, I imagine: and I take leave also to suppose that the nobles, and noble ladies, might wear such tress and ringlet as became them. But again, we receive unexpectedly embarrassing light on the democratic institutions of the Franks, in being told that "the various trades, the labours of agriculture, and the arts of hunting and fishing, were exercised by servile hands for the emolument of the Sovereign."

'Servile' and 'Emolument,' however, though at first they sound very dreadful and very wrong, are only Miltonic-Gibbonian expressions of the general fact that the Frankish Kings had ploughmen in their fields, employed weavers and smiths to make their robes and swords, hunted with huntsmen, hawked with falconers, and were in other respects tyrannical to the ordinary extent that an English Master of Hounds may be. "The mansion of the long-haired Kings was surrounded with convenient yards and stables for poultry and cattle; the garden was planted with useful vegetables; the magazines filled with corn and wine either for sale or consumption; and the whole administration conducted by the strictest rules of private economy."

38. I have collected these imperfect, and not always extremely consistent, notices of the aspect and temper of the Franks out of Mr. Gibbon's casual references to them during a period of more than two centuries,—and the last passage quoted, which he accompanies with the statement that "one hundred and sixty of these rural palaces were [Pg 46] scattered through the provinces of their kingdom," without telling us what kingdom, or at what period, must I think be held descriptive of the general manner and system of their monarchy after the victories of Clovis. But, from the first hour you hear of him, the Frank, closely considered, is always an extremely ingenious, well meaning, and industrious personage;—if eagerly acquisitive, also intelligently conservative and constructive; an element of order and crystalline edification, which is to consummate itself one day, in the aisles of Amiens; and things generally insuperable and impregnable, if the inhabitants of them had been as sound-hearted as their builders, for many a day beyond.

39. But for the present, we must retrace our ground a little; for indeed I have lately observed with compunction, in rereading some of my books for revised issue, that if ever I promise, in one number or chapter, careful consideration of any particular point in the next, the next never does touch upon the promised point at all, but is sure to fix itself passionately on some antithetic, antipathic, or antipodic, point in the opposite hemisphere. This manner of conducting a treatise I find indeed extremely conducive to impartiality and largeness of view; but can conceive it to be—to the general reader—not only disappointing, (if indeed I may flatter myself that I ever interest enough to disappoint), but even liable to confirm in his mind some of the fallacious and extremely absurd insinuations of adverse critics respecting my inconsistency, vacillation, and liability to be affected by changes of the weather in my principles or opinions. I purpose, therefore, in these historical sketches, at least to watch, and I hope partly to correct myself in this fault of promise breaking, and at whatever sacrifice of my variously fluent or re-fluent humour, to tell in each successive chapter in some measure what the reader justifiably expects to be told.

40. I left, merely glanced at, in my opening chapter, the story of the vase of Soissons. It may be found (and it is very nearly the only thing that is to be found respecting the personal life or character [Pg 47] of the first Louis) in every cheap popular history of France; with cheap popular moralities engrafted thereon. Had I time to trace it to its first sources, perhaps it might take another aspect. But I give it as you may anywhere find it—asking you only to consider whether even as so read—it may not properly bear a somewhat different moral.

41. The story is, then, that after the battle of Soissons, in the division of Roman, or Gallic spoil, the king wished to have a beautifully wrought silver vase for—'himself,' I was going to write—and in my last chapter did mistakenly infer that he wanted it for his better self,—his Queen. But he wanted it for neither;—it was to restore to St. Remy, that it might remain among the consecrated treasures of Rheims. That is the first point on which the popular histories do not insist, and which one of his warriors claiming equal division of treasure, chose also to ignore. The vase was asked by the King in addition to his own portion, and the Frank knights, while they rendered true obedience to their king as a leader, had not the smallest notion of allowing him what more recent kings call 'Royalties'—taxes on everything they touch. And one of these Frank knights or Counts—a little franker than the rest—and as incredulous of St. Remy's saintship as a Protestant Bishop, or Positivist Philosopher—took upon him to dispute the King's and the Church's claim, in the manner, suppose, of a Liberal opposition in the House of Commons; and disputed it with such security of support by the public opinion of the fifth century, that—the king persisting in his request—the fearless soldier dashed the vase to pieces with his war-axe, exclaiming "Thou shalt have no more than thy portion by lot."

42. It is the first clear assertion of French 'Liberté, Fraternité and Egalité,' supported, then, as now, by the destruction, which is the only possible active operation of "free" personages, on the art they cannot produce.

The king did not continue the quarrel. Cowards will think that he paused in cowardice, and malicious persons, that he paused in malignity. He did pause in anger assuredly; but biding its time, [Pg 48] which the anger of a strong man always can, and burn hotter for the waiting, which is one of the chief reasons for Christians being told not to let the sun go down upon it. Precept which Christians now-a-days are perfectly ready to obey, if it is somebody else who has been injured; and indeed, the difficulty in such cases is usually to get them to think of the injury even while the Sun rises on their wrath. [2-9]

43. The sequel is very shocking indeed—to modern sensibility. I give it in the, if not polished, at least delicately varnished, language of the Pictorial History.

"About a year afterwards, on reviewing his troops, he went to the man who had struck the vase, and examining his arms, complained that they were in bad condition!" (Italics mine) "and threw them" (What? shield and sword?) on the ground. The soldier stooped to recover them; and at that moment the King struck him on the head with his battle-axe, crying 'Thus didst thou to the vase at Soissons.' The Moral modern historian proceeds to reflect that "this—as an evidence of the condition of the Franks, and of the ties by which they were united, gives but the idea of a band of Robbers and their chief." Which is, indeed, so far as I can myself look into and decipher the nature of things, the Primary idea to be entertained respecting most of the kingly and military organizations in this world, down to our own day; and, (unless perchance it be the Afghans and Zulus who are stealing our lands in England—instead of we theirs, in their several countries.) But concerning the manner of this piece of military execution, I must for the present leave the reader to consider with himself, whether indeed it be less Kingly, or more savage, to strike an uncivil soldier on the head with one's own battle-axe, than, for instance, to strike a person like Sir Thomas More on the neck with an executioner's,—using for the mechanism, and as it were guillotine bar and rope to the blow—the manageable forms of National Law, and the gracefully twined intervention of a polite group of noblemen and bishops.

44. Far darker things have to be told of him than this, as his proud life draws towards the close,—things which, if any of us could see clear through darkness, you should be told in all the truth of them. But we never can know the truth of Sin; for its nature is to deceive alike on the one side the Sinner, on the other the Judge. Diabolic—betraying whether we yield to it, or condemn: Here is Gibbon's sneer—if you care for it; but I gather first from the confused paragraphs which conduct to it, the sentences of praise, less niggard than the Sage of Lausanne usually grants to any hero who has confessed the influence of Christianity.

45. "Clovis, when he was no more than fifteen years of age, succeeded, by his father's death, to the command of the Salian tribe. The narrow limits of his kingdom were confined to the island of the Batavians, with the ancient dioceses of Tournay and Arras; and at the baptism of Clovis, the number of his warriors could not exceed five thousand. The kindred tribes of the Franks who had seated themselves along the Scheldt, the Meuse, the Moselle, and the Rhine, were governed by their independent kings, of the Merovingian race, the equals, the allies, and sometimes the enemies of the Salic Prince. When he first took the field he had neither gold nor silver in his coffers, nor wine and corn in his magazines; but he imitated the example of Cæsar, who in the same country had acquired wealth by the sword, and purchased soldiers with the fruits of conquest. The untamed spirit of the Barbarians was taught to acknowledge the advantages of regular discipline. At the annual review of the month of March, their arms were diligently inspected; and when they traversed a peaceful territory they were prohibited from touching a blade of grass. The justice of Clovis was inexorable; and his careless or disobedient soldiers were punished with instant death. It would be superfluous to praise the valour of a Frank; but the valour of Clovis was directed by cool and consummate prudence. In all his transactions with mankind he calculated the weight of interest, of passion, and of opinion; and his measures were sometimes adapted to the sanguinary manners of the Germans, and sometimes moderated by the milder genius of Rome, and Christianity."

46. "But the savage conqueror of Gaul was incapable of examining the proofs of a religion, which depends on the laborious investigation of historic evidence, and speculative theology. He was still more incapable of feeling the mild influence of the Gospel, which persuades and purifies the heart of a genuine convert. His ambitious reign was a perpetual violation of moral and Christian duties: his hands were stained with blood, in peace as well as in war; and, as soon as Clovis had dismissed a synod of the Gallican Church, he calmly assassinated all the princes of the Merovingian race."

47. It is too true; but rhetorically put, in the first place—for we ought to be told how many 'all' the princes were;—in the second place, we must note that, supposing Clovis had in any degree "searched the Scriptures" as presented to the Western world by St. Jerome, he was likely, as a soldier-king, to have thought more of the mission of Joshua [2-10] and Jehu than of the patience of Christ, whose sufferings he thought rather of avenging than imitating: and the question whether the other Kings of the Franks should either succeed him, or, in envy of his enlarged kingdom, attack and dethrone, was easily in his mind convertible from a personal danger into the chance of the return of the whole nation to idolatry. And, in the last place, his faith in the Divine protection of his cause had been shaken by his defeat before Aries by the Ostrogoths; and the Frank leopard had not so wholly changed his spots as to surrender to an enemy the opportunity of a first spring.

48. Finally, and beyond all these personal questions, the forms of cruelty and subtlety—the former, observe, arising much out of a [Pg 51] scorn of pain which was a condition of honour in their women as well as men, are in these savage races all founded on their love of glory in war, which can only be understood by comparing what remains of the same temper in the higher castes of the North American Indians; and, before tracing in final clearness the actual events of the reign of Clovis to their end, the reader will do well to learn this list of the personages of the great Drama, taking to heart the meaning of the name of each, both in its probable effect on the mind of its bearer, and in its fateful expression of the course of their acts, and the consequences of it to future generations.

49. I will now follow straight, through their light and shadow, the course of Clovis' reign and deeds. [Pg 52] A.D. 481. Crowned, when he was only fifteen. Five years afterwards, he challenges, "in the spirit, and almost in the language of chivalry," the Roman governor Syagrius, holding the district of Rheims and Soissons. "Campum sibi præparari jussit—he commanded his antagonist to prepare him a battlefield"—see Gibbon's note and reference, chap. xxxviii. (6, 297). The Benedictine abbey of Nogent was afterwards built on the field, marked by a circle of Pagan sepulchres. "Clovis bestowed the adjacent lands of Leuilly and Coucy on the church of Rheims." [2-11]

A.D. 485. The Battle of Soissons. Not dated by Gibbon: the subsequent death of Syagrius at the court of (the younger) Alaric, was in 486—take 485 for the battle.

50. A.D. 493. I cannot find any account of the relations between Clovis and the King of Burgundy, the uncle of Clotilde, which preceded his betrothal to the orphan princess. Her uncle, according to the common history, had killed both her father and mother, and compelled her sister to take the veil—motives none assigned, nor authorities. Clotilde herself was pursued on her way to France, [2-12] and the litter in which she travelled captured, with part of her marriage portion. [Pg 53] But the princess herself mounted on horseback, and rode with part of her escort, forward into France, "ordering her attendants to set fire to everything that pertained to her uncle and his subjects which they might meet with on the way."

51. The fact is not chronicled, usually, among the sayings or doings of the Saints: but the punishment of Kings by destroying the property of their subjects, is too well recognized a method of modern Christian warfare to allow our indignation to burn hot against Clotilde; driven, as she was, hard by grief and wrath. The years of her youth are not counted to us; Clovis was already twenty-seven, and for three years maintained the faith of his ancestral religion against all the influence of his queen.

52. A.D. 496. I did not in the opening chapter attach nearly enough importance to the battle of Tolbiac, thinking of it as merely compelling the Alemanni to recross the Rhine, and establishing the Frank power on its western bank. But infinitely wider results are indicated in the short sentence with which Gibbon closes his account of the battle. "After the conquest of the western provinces, the Franks alone retained their ancient possessions beyond the Rhine. They gradually subdued and civilized the exhausted countries as far as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia; and the peace of Europe was secured by the obedience of Germany."

53. For, in the south, Theodoric had already "sheathed the sword in the pride of victory and the vigour of his age—and his farther reign of three and thirty years was consecrated to the duties of civil government." Even when his son-in-law, Alaric, fell by Clovis' hand in the battle of Poitiers, Theodoric was content to check the Frank power at Arles, without pursuing his success, and to protect his infant grandchild, correcting at the same time some abuses in the civil government of Spain. So that the healing sovereignty of the great Goth was established from Sicily to the Danube—and from Sirmium to the Atlantic ocean.

54. Thus, then, at the close of the fifth century, you have Europe divided simply by her watershed; and two Christian kings reigning, with entirely beneficent and healthy power—one in the north—one in the south—the mightiest and worthiest of them married to the other's youngest sister: a saint queen in the north—and a devoted and earnest Catholic woman, queen mother in the south. It is a conjunction of things memorable enough in the Earth's history,—much to be thought of, O fast whirling reader, if ever, out of the crowd of pent up cattle driven across Rhine, or Adige, you can extricate yourself for an hour, to walk peacefully out of the south gate of Cologne, or across Fra Giocondo's bridge at Verona—and so pausing look through the clear air across the battlefield of Tolbiac to the blue Drachenfels, or across the plain of St. Ambrogio to the mountains of Garda. For there were fought—if you will think closely—the two victor-battles of the Christian world. Constantine's only gave changed form and dying colour to the falling walls of Rome; but the Frank and Gothic races, thus conquering and thus ruled, founded the arts and established the laws which gave to all future Europe her joy, and her virtue. And it is lovely to see how, even thus early, the Feudal chivalry depended for its life on the nobleness of its womanhood. There was no vision seen, or alleged, at Tolbiac. The King prayed simply to the God of Clotilde. On the morning of the battle of Verona, Theodoric visited the tent of his mother and his sister, "and [Pg 55] requested that on the most illustrious festival of his life, they would adorn him with the rich garments which they had worked with their own hands."

55. But over Clovis, there was extended yet another influence—greater than his queen's. When his kingdom was first extended to the Loire, the shepherdess of Nanterre was already aged,—no torch-bearing maid of battle, like Clotilde, no knightly leader of deliverance like Jeanne, but grey in meekness of wisdom, and now "filling more and more with crystal light." Clovis's father had known her; he himself made her his friend, and when he left Paris on the campaign of Poitiers, vowed that if victorious, he would build a Christian church on the hills of Seine. He returned in victory, and with St. Genevieve at his side, stood on the site of the ruined Roman Thermæ, just above the "Isle" of Paris, to fulfil his vow: and to design the limits of the foundations of the first metropolitan church of Frankish Christendom.

The King "gave his battle-axe the swing," and tossed it with his full force.

Measuring with its flight also, the place of his own grave, and of Clotilde's, and St. Genevieve's.

There they rested, and rest,—in soul,—together. "La Colline tout entière porte encore le nom de la patronne de Paris; une petite rue obscure a gardé celui du Roi Conquerant."

"OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US."

ADVICE.

The three chapters [2-13] of "Our Fathers have told us," now submitted to the public, are enough to show the proposed character and tendencies of the work, to which, contrary to my usual custom, I now invite subscription, because the degree in which I can increase its usefulness by engraved illustration must greatly depend on the known number of its supporters.

I do not recognize, in the present state of my health, any reason to fear more loss of general power, whether in conception or industry, than is the proper and appointed check of an old man's enthusiasm: of which, however, enough remains in me, to warrant my readers against the abandonment of a purpose entertained already for twenty years.

The work, if I live to complete it, will consist of ten parts, each taking up some local division of Christian history, and gathering, towards their close, into united illustration of the power of the Church in the Thirteenth Century.

The next chapter, which I hope to issue soon after Christmas, completes the first part, descriptive of the early Frank power, and of its final skill, in the Cathedral of Amiens.

The second part, "Ponte della Pietra," will, I hope, do more for Theodoric and Verona than I have been able to do for Clovis and the first capital of France.

The third, "Ara Celi," will trace the foundations of the Papal power.

The fourth, "Ponte-a-Mare," and fifth, "Ponte Vecchio," will only with much difficulty gather into brief form what I have by me of scattered materials respecting Pisa and Florence.

The sixth, "Valle Crucis," will be occupied with the monastic architecture of England and Wales.

The seventh, "The Springs of Eure," will be wholly given to the cathedral of Chartres.

The eighth, "Domrémy," to that of Rouen and the schools of architecture which it represents.

The ninth, "The Bay of Uri," to the pastoral forms of Catholicism, reaching to our own times. [Pg 57] And the tenth, "The Bells of Cluse," to the pastoral Protestantism of Savoy, Geneva, and the Scottish Border.

Each part will consist of four sections only; and one of them, the fourth, will usually be descriptive of some monumental city or cathedral, the resultant and remnant of the religious power examined in the preparatory chapters.

One illustration at least will be given with each chapter, [2-14] and drawings made for others, which will be placed at once in the Sheffield museum for public reference, and engraved as I find support, or opportunity for binding with the completed work.

As in the instance of Chapter IV. of this first part, a smaller edition of the descriptive chapters will commonly be printed in reduced form for travellers and non-subscribers; but otherwise, I intend this work to be furnished to subscribers only.

Notes to Chapter II

CHAPTER III.

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THE LION TAMER.

1. It has been often of late announced as a new discovery, that man is a creature of circumstances; and the fact has been pressed upon our notice, in the hope, which appears to some people so pleasing, of being able at last to resolve into a succession of splashes in mud, or whirlwinds in air, the circumstances answerable for his creation. But the more important fact, that his nature is not levelled, like a mosquito's, to the mists of a marsh, nor reduced, like a mole's, beneath the crumblings of a burrow, but has been endowed with sense to discern, and instinct to adopt, the conditions which will make of it the best that can be, is very necessarily ignored by philosophers who propose, as a beautiful fulfilment of human destinies, a life entertained by scientific gossip, in a cellar lighted by electric sparks, warmed by tubular inflation, drained by buried rivers, and fed, by the ministry of less learned and better provisioned races, with extract of beef, and potted crocodile.

2. From these chemically analytic conceptions of a Paradise in catacombs, undisturbed in its alkaline or acid virtues by the dread of Deity, or hope of futurity, I know not how far the modern reader may willingly withdraw himself for a little time, to hear of men who, in their darkest and most foolish day, sought by their labour to make the desert as the garden of the Lord, and by their love to become worthy of permission to live with Him for ever. It has nevertheless been only by such toil, and in such hope, that, hitherto, the happiness, skill, or virtue of man have been possible: and even on the verge of the new dispensation, and promised Canaan, rich in beatitudes of iron, steam, and fire, there are some of us, here and there, who may pause in filial piety to look back towards that wilderness of Sinai in which their fathers worshipped and died.

Plate III.—Amiens. Jour des Trépassés, 1880.

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3. Admitting then, for the moment, that the main streets of Manchester, the district immediately surrounding the Bank in London, and the Bourse and Boulevards of Paris, are already part of the future kingdom of Heaven, when Earth shall be all Bourse and Boulevard,—the world of which our fathers tell us was divided to them, as you already know, partly by climates, partly by races, partly by times; and the 'circumstances' under which a man's soul was given to him, had to be considered under these three heads:—In what climate is he? Of what race? At what time?

He can only be what these conditions permit. With appeal to these, he is to be heard;—understood, if it may be;—judged, by our love, first—by our pity, if he need it—by our humility, finally and always.

4. To this end, it is needful evidently that we should have truthful maps of the world to begin with, and truthful maps of our own hearts to end with; neither of these maps being easily drawn at any time, and perhaps least of all now—when the use of a map is chiefly to exhibit hotels and railroads; and humility is held the disagreeablest and meanest of the Seven mortal Sins.

5. Thus, in the beginning of Sir Edward Creasy's History of England, you find a map purporting to exhibit the possessions of the British Nation—illustrating the extremely wise and courteous behaviour of Mr. Fox to a Frenchman of Napoleon's suite, in "advancing to a terrestrial globe of unusual magnitude and distinctness, spreading his arms round it, over both the oceans and both the Indies," and observing, in this impressive attitude, that "while Englishmen live, they overspread the whole world, and clasp it in the circle of their power."

6. Fired by Mr. Fox's enthusiasm,—the otherwise seldom fiery—Sir Edward proceeds to tell us that "our island home is the favourite [Pg 60] domicile of freedom, empire and glory," without troubling himself, or his readers, to consider how long the nations over whom our freedom is imperious, and in whose shame is our glory, may be satisfied in that arrangement of the globe and its affairs; or may be even at present convinced of their degraded position in it by his method of its delineation.

For, the map being drawn on Mercator's projection, represents therefore the British dominions in North America as twice the size of the States, and considerably larger than all South America put together: while the brilliant crimson with which all our landed property is coloured cannot but impress the innocent reader with the idea of a universal flush of freedom and glory throughout all those acres and latitudes. So that he is scarcely likely to cavil at results so marvellous by inquiring into the nature and completeness of our government at any particular place,—for instance in Ireland, in the Hebrides, or at the Cape.

7. In the closing chapter of the first volume of 'The Laws of Fésole' I have laid down the mathematical principles of rightly drawing maps;—principles which for many reasons it is well that my young readers should learn; the fundamental one being that you cannot flatten the skin of an orange without splitting it, and must not, if you draw countries on the unsplit skin, stretch them afterwards to fill the gaps.

The British pride of wealth which does not deny itself the magnificent convenience of penny Walter Scotts and penny Shakespeares, may assuredly, in its future greatness, possess itself also of penny universes, conveniently spinnable on their axes. I shall therefore assume that my readers can look at a round globe, while I am talking of the world; and at a properly reduced drawing of its surfaces, when I am talking of a country.

8. Which, if my reader can at present do—or at least refer to a fairly drawn double-circle map of the globe with converging meridians—I will pray him next to observe, that, although the old division of the world into four quarters is now nearly effaced by [Pg 61] emigration and Atlantic cable, yet the great historic question about the globe is not how it is divided, here and there, by ins and outs of land or sea; but how it is divided into zones all round, by irresistible laws of light and air. It is often a matter of very minor interest to know whether a man is an American or African, a European or an Asiatic. But it is a matter of extreme and final interest to know if he be a Brazilian or a Patagonian, a Japanese or a Samoyede.

9. In the course of the last chapter, I asked the reader to hold firmly the conception of the great division of climate, which separated the wandering races of Norway and Siberia from the calmly resident nations of Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia.

Fasten now that division well home in your mind, by drawing, however rudely, the course of the two rivers, little thought of by common geographers, but of quite unspeakable importance in human history, the Vistula and the Dniester.

10. They rise within thirty miles of each other, [3-1] and each runs, not counting ins and outs, its clear three hundred miles,—the Vistula to the north-east, the Dniester to the south-west: the two of them together cut Europe straight across, at the broad neck of it,—and, more deeply looking at the thing, they divide Europe, properly so called—Europa's own, and Jove's,—the small educationable, civilizable, and more or less mentally rational fragment of the globe, from the great Siberian wilderness, Cis-Ural and Trans-Ural; the inconceivable chaotic space, occupied datelessly by Scythians, Tartars, Huns, Cossacks, Bears, Ermines, and Mammoths, in various thickness of hide, frost of brain, and woe of abode—or of unabiding. Nobody's history worth making out, has anything to do with them; for the force of Scandinavia never came round by Finland at all, but always sailed or paddled itself across the Baltic, or down the rocky west coast; and the Siberian and Russian ice-pressure merely drives the really memorable races into greater concentration, and kneads them up in fiercer and more necessitous exploring masses. But by those [Pg 62] exploring masses, of true European birth, our own history was fashioned for ever; and, therefore, these two truncating and guarding rivers are to be marked on your map of Europe with supreme clearness: the Vistula, with Warsaw astride of it half way down, and embouchure in Baltic,—the Dniester, in Euxine, flowing each of them, measured arrow-straight, as far as from Edinburgh to London, with windings, [3-2] the Vistula six hundred miles, and the Dniester five—count them together for a thousand miles of moat, between Europe and the Desert, reaching from Dantzic to Odessa.

11. Having got your Europe moated off into this manageable and comprehensible space, you are next to fix the limits which divide the four Gothic countries, Britain, Gaul, Germany, and Dacia, from the four Classic countries, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Lydia.

There is no other generally opponent term to 'Gothic' but 'Classic': and I am content to use it, for the sake of practical breadth and clearness, though its precise meaning for a little while remains unascertained. Only get the geography well into your mind, and the nomenclature will settle itself at its leisure.

12. Broadly, then, you have sea between Britain and Spain—Pyrenees between Gaul and Spain—Alps between Germany and Italy—Danube between Dacia and Greece. You must consider everything south of the Danube as Greek, variously influenced from Athens on one side, Byzantium on the other: then, across the Ægean, you have the great country absurdly called Asia Minor, (for we might just as well call Greece, Europe Minor, or Cornwall, England Minor,) but which is properly to be remembered as 'Lydia,' the country which infects with passion, and tempts with wealth; which taught the Lydian measure in music and softened the Greek language on its border into Ionic; which gave to ancient history the tale of Troy, and to Christian history, the glow, [Pg 63] and the decline, of the Seven Churches.

13. Opposite to these four countries in the south, but separated from them either by sea or desert, are other four, as easily remembered—Morocco, Libya, Egypt, and Arabia.

Morocco, virtually consisting of the chain of Atlas and the coasts depending on it, may be most conveniently thought of as including the modern Morocco and Algeria, with the Canaries as a dependent group of islands.

Libya, in like manner, will include the modern Tunis and Tripoli: it will begin on the west with St. Augustine's town of Hippo; and its coast is colonized from Tyre and Greece, dividing it into the two districts of Carthage and Cyrene. Egypt, the country of the River, and Arabia, the country of no River, are to be thought of as the two great southern powers of separate Religion.

14. You have thus, easily and clearly memorable, twelve countries, distinct evermore by natural laws, and forming three zones from north to south, all healthily habitable—but the races of the northernmost, disciplined in endurance of cold; those of the central zone, perfected by the enjoyable suns alike of summer and winter; those of the southern zone, trained to endurance of heat. Writing them now in tabular view,

you have the ground of all useful profane history mapped out in the simplest terms; and then, as the fount of inspiration, for all these countries, with the strength which every soul that has possessed, has held sacred and supernatural, you have last to conceive perfectly the small hill district of the Holy Land, with Philistia and Syria on its flanks, both of them chastising forces; but Syria, in the beginning, herself the origin of the chosen race—"A Syrian ready to perish was my father"—and the Syrian Rachel being thought of always as the true mother of Israel.

15. And remember, in all future study of the relations of these countries, you must never allow your mind to be disturbed by the accidental changes of political limit. No matter who rules a country, no matter what it is officially called, or how it is formally divided, eternal bars and doors are set to it by the mountains and seas, eternal laws enforced over it by the clouds and stars. The people that are born on it are its people, be they a thousand times again and again conquered, exiled, or captive. The stranger cannot be its king, the invader cannot be its possessor; and, although just laws, maintained whether by the people or their conquerors, have always the appointed good and strength of justice, nothing is permanently helpful to any race or condition of men but the spirit that is in their own hearts, kindled by the love of their native land.

16. Of course, in saying that the invader cannot be the possessor of any country, I speak only of invasion such as that by the Vandals of Libya, or by ourselves of India; where the conquering race does not become permanently inhabitant. You are not to call Libya Vandalia, nor India England, because these countries are temporarily under the rule of Vandals and English; neither Italy Gothland under Ostrogoths, nor England Denmark under Canute. National character varies as it fades under invasion or in corruption; but if ever it glows again into a new life, that life must be tempered by the earth and sky of the country itself. Of the twelve names of countries now given in their order, only one will be changed as we advance in our history;—Gaul will properly become France when the Franks become her abiding inhabitants. The other eleven primary names will serve us to the end.

17. With a moment's more patience, therefore, glancing to the far East, we shall have laid the foundations of all our own needful geography. As the northern kingdoms are moated from the Scythian desert by the Vistula, so the southern are moated from the dynasties properly called 'Oriental' by the Euphrates; which, "partly sunk beneath the Persian Gulf, reaches from the shores of Beloochistan and Oman to the mountains of Armenia, and forms a huge hot-air funnel, [Pg 65] the base" (or mouth) "of which is on the tropics, while its extremity reaches thirty-seven degrees of northern latitude. Hence it comes that the Semoom itself (the specific and gaseous Semoom) pays occasional visits to Mosoul and Djezeerat Omer, while the thermometer at Bagdad attains in summer an elevation capable of staggering the belief of even an old Indian." [3-3]

18. This valley in ancient days formed the kingdom of Assyria, as the valley of the Nile formed that of Egypt. In the work now before us, we have nothing to do with its people, who were to the Jews merely a hostile power of captivity, inexorable as the clay of their walls, or the stones of their statues; and, after the birth of Christ, the marshy valley is no more than a field of battle between West and East. Beyond the great river,—Persia, India, and China, form the southern 'Oriens.' Persia is properly to be conceived as reaching from the Persian Gulf to the mountain chains which flank and feed the Indus; and is the true vital power of the East in the days of Marathon: but it has no influence on Christian history except through Arabia; while, of the northern Asiatic tribes, Mede, Bactrian, Parthian, and Scythian, changing into Turk and Tartar, we need take no heed until they invade us in our own historic territory.

19. Using therefore the terms 'Gothic' and 'Classic' for broad distinction of the northern and central zones of this our own territory, we may conveniently also use the word 'Arab' [3-4] for the whole southern zone. The influence of Egypt vanishes soon after the fourth century, while that of Arabia, powerful from the beginning, [Pg 66] rises in the sixth into an empire whose end we have not seen. And you may most rightly conceive the religious principle which is the base of that empire, by remembering, that while the Jews forfeited their prophetic power by taking up the profession of usury over the whole earth, the Arabs returned to the simplicity of prophecy in its beginning by the well of Hagar, and are not opponents to Christianity; but only to the faults or follies of Christians. They keep still their faith in the one God who spoke to Abraham their father; and are His children in that simplicity, far more truly than the nominal Christians who lived, and live, only to dispute in vociferous council, or in frantic schism, the relations of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

20. Trusting my reader then in future to retain in his mind without confusion the idea of the three zones, Gothic, Classic, and Arab, each divided into four countries, clearly recognizable through all ages of remote or recent history;—I must farther, at once, simplify for him the idea of the Roman Empire (see note to last paragraph,) in the manner of its affecting them. Its nominal extent, temporary conquests, civil dissensions, or internal vices, are scarcely of any historical moment at all; the real Empire is effectual only as an exponent of just law, military order, and mechanical art, to untrained races, and as a translation of Greek thought into less diffused and more tenable scheme for them. The Classic zone, from the beginning to the end of its visible authority, is composed of these two elements—Greek imagination, with Roman order: and the divisions or dislocations of the third and fourth century are merely the natural apparitions of their differences, when the political system which concealed them was tested by Christianity. It seems almost wholly lost sight of by ordinary historians, that, in the wars of the last Romans with the Goths, the great Gothic captains were all Christians; and that the vigorous and naïve form which the dawning faith took in their minds is a more important subject of investigation, by far, than the inevitable wars which followed the retirement of Diocletian, or the confused schisms and crimes of the lascivious court of Constantine. I am [Pg 67] compelled, however, to notice the terms in which the last arbitrary dissolutions of the empire took place, that they may illustrate, instead of confusing, the arrangement of the nations which I would fasten in your memory.

21. In the middle of the fourth century you have, politically, what Gibbon calls "the final division of the Eastern and Western Empires." This really means only that the Emperor Valentinian, yielding, though not without hesitation, to the feeling now confirmed in the legions that the Empire was too vast to be held by a single person, takes his brother for his colleague, and divides, not, truly speaking, their authority, but their attention, between the east and the west. To his brother Valens he assigns the extremely vague "Præfecture of the East, from the lower Danube to the confines of Persia," while for his own immediate government he reserves the "warlike præfectures of Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul, from the extremity of Greece to the Caledonian rampart, and from the rampart of Caledonia to the foot of Mount Atlas." That is to say, in less poetical cadence, (Gibbon had better have put his history into hexameters at once,) Valentinian kept under his own watch the whole of Roman Europe and Africa, and left Lydia and Caucasus to his brother. Lydia and Caucasus never did, and never could, form an Eastern Empire,—they were merely outside dependencies, useful for taxation in peace, dangerous by their multitudes in war. There never was, from the seventh century before Christ to the seventh after Christ, but one Roman Empire, which meant, the power over humanity of such men as Cincinnatus and Agricola; it expires as the race and temper of these expire; the nominal extent of it, or brilliancy at any moment, is no more than the reflection, farther or nearer upon the clouds, of the flames of an altar whose fuel was of noble souls. There is no true date for its division; there is none for its destruction. Whether Dacian Probus or Noric Odoacer be on the throne of it, the force of its living principle alone is to be watched—remaining, in arts, in laws, and in habits of thought, dominant still in Europe down to the twelfth [Pg 68] century;—in language and example, dominant over all educated men to this hour.

22. But in the nominal division of it by Valentinian, let us note Gibbon's definition (I assume it to be his, not the Emperor's) of European Roman Empire into Illyricum, Italy, and Gaul. I have already said you must hold everything south of the Danube for Greek. The two chief districts immediately south of the stream are upper and lower Mœsia, consisting of the slope of the Thracian mountains northward to the river, with the plains between it and them. This district you must notice for its importance in forming the Mœso-Gothic alphabet, in which "the Greek is by far the principal element, [3-5] giving sixteen letters out of the twenty-four". The Gothic invasion under the reign of Valens is the first that establishes a Teutonic nation within the frontier of the empire; but they only thereby bring themselves more directly under its spiritual power. Their bishop, Ulphilas, adopts this Mœsian alphabet, two-thirds Greek, for his translation of the Bible, and it is universally disseminated and perpetuated by that translation, until the extinction or absorption of the Gothic race.

23. South of the Thracian mountains you have Thrace herself, and the countries confusedly called Dalmatia and Illyria, forming the coast of the Adriatic, and reaching inwards and eastwards to the mountain watershed. I have never been able to form a clear notion myself of the real character of the people of these districts, in any given period; but they are all to be massed together as northern Greek, having more or less of Greek blood and dialect according to their nearness to Greece proper; though neither sharing in her philosophy, nor submitting to her discipline. But it is of course far more accurate, in broad terms, to speak of these Illyrian, Mœsian, and Macedonian districts as all Greek, than with Gibbon or Valentinian to speak of Greece and Macedonia as all Illyrian. [3-6]

24. In the same imperial or poetical generalization, we find England massed with France under the term Gaul, and bounded by the "Caledonian rampart." Whereas in our own division, Caledonia, Hibernia, and Wales, are from the first considered as essential parts of Britain, [3-7] and the link with the continent is to be conceived as formed by the settlement of Britons in Brittany, and not at all by Roman authority beyond the Humber.

25. Thus, then, once more reviewing our order of countries, and noting only that the British Islands, though for the most part thrown by measured degree much north of the rest of the north zone, are brought by the influence of the Gulf stream into the same climate;—you have, at the time when our history of Christianity begins, the Gothic zone yet unconverted, and having not yet even heard of the new faith. You have the Classic zone variously and increasingly conscious of it, disputing with it, striving to extinguish it—and your Arab zone, the ground and sustenance of it, encompassing the Holy Land with the warmth of its own wings, and cherishing there—embers of phœnix fire over all the earth,—the hope of Resurrection.

26. What would have been the course, or issue, of Christianity, had it been orally preached only, and unsupported by its poetical literature, might be the subject of deeply instructive speculation—if a historian's duty were to reflect instead of record. The power of the Christian faith was however, in the fact of it, always founded on the written prophecies and histories of the Bible; and on the interpretations of their meaning, given by the example, far more than by the precept, of the great monastic orders. The poetry and history of the Syrian Testaments were put within their reach by St. Jerome, while the virtue and efficiency of monastic life are all expressed, and for the most part summed, in the rule of St. Benedict. To understand the relation of the work of these two men to the general order of the Church, is quite the first requirement for its farther intelligible history.

Gibbon's thirty-seventh chapter professes to give an account of the 'Institution of the Monastic Life' in the third century. But the monastic life had been instituted somewhat earlier, and by many prophets and kings. By Jacob, when he laid the stone for his pillow; by Moses, when he drew aside to see the burning bush; by David, before he had left "those few sheep in the wilderness"; and by the prophet who "was in the deserts till the time of his showing unto Israel." Its primary "institution," for Europe, was Numa's, in that of the Vestal Virgins, and College of Augurs; founded on the originally Etrurian and derived Roman conception of pure life dedicate to the service of God, and practical wisdom dependent on His guidance. [3-8]

The form which the monastic spirit took in later times depended far more on the corruption of the common world, from which it was forced to recoil either in indignation or terror, than on any change brought [Pg 71] about by Christianity in the ideal of human virtue and happiness.

27. "Egypt" (Mr. Gibbon thus begins to account for the new Institution!), "the fruitful parent of superstition, afforded the first example of monastic life." Egypt had her superstitions, like other countries; but was so little the parent of superstition that perhaps no faith among the imaginative races of the world has been so feebly missionary as hers. She never prevailed on even the nearest of her neighbours to worship cats or cobras with her; and I am alone, to my belief, among recent scholars, in maintaining Herodotus' statement of her influence on the archaic theology of Greece. But that influence, if any, was formative and delineative: not ritual: so that in no case, and in no country, was Egypt the parent of Superstition: while she was beyond all dispute, for all people and to all time, the parent of Geometry, Astronomy, Architecture, and Chivalry. She was, in its material and technic elements, the mistress of Literature, showing authors who before could only scratch on wax and wood, how to weave paper and engrave porphyry. She was the first exponent of the law of Judgment after Death for Sin. She was the Tutress of Moses; and the Hostess of Christ.

28. It is both probable and natural that, in such a country, the disciples of any new spiritual doctrine should bring it to closer trial than was possible among the illiterate warriors, or in the storm-vexed solitudes of the North; yet it is a thoughtless error to deduce the subsequent power of cloistered fraternity from the lonely passions of Egyptian monachism. The anchorites of the first three centuries vanish like feverish spectres, when the rational, merciful, and laborious laws of Christian societies are established; and the clearly recognizable rewards of heavenly solitude are granted to those only who seek the Desert for its redemption.

29. 'The clearly recognizable rewards,' I repeat, and with cautious emphasis. No man has any data for estimating, far less right of judging, the results of a life of resolute self-denial, until he has had the courage to try it himself, at least for a time: but I believe [Pg 72] no reasonable person will wish, and no honest person dare, to deny the benefits he has occasionally felt both in mind and body, during periods of accidental privation from luxury, or exposure to danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hôte, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the passion, in which the mountain anchorites of Arabia and Palestine condemned themselves to lives of seclusion and suffering, which were comforted only by supernatural vision, or celestial hope. That phases of mental disease are the necessary consequence of exaggerated and independent emotion of any kind must, of course, be remembered in reading the legends of the wilderness; but neither physicians nor moralists have yet attempted to distinguish the morbid states of intellect [3-9] which are extremities of noble passion, from those which are the punishments of ambition, avarice, or lasciviousness.

30. Setting all questions of this nature aside for the moment, my younger readers need only hold the broad fact that during the whole of the fourth century, multitudes of self-devoted men led lives of extreme misery and poverty in the effort to obtain some closer knowledge of the Being and Will of God. We know, in any available clearness, neither what they suffered, nor what they learned. We cannot estimate the solemnizing or reproving power of their examples on the less zealous Christian world; and only God knows how far their prayers for it were heard, or their persons accepted. This only we may observe with reverence, that among all their numbers, none seemed to have repented their chosen manner of existence; none perish by melancholy or suicide; their self-adjudged sufferings are never inflicted in the hope of shortening the lives they embitter or purify; and the hours of dream or meditation, on mountain or in cave, appear seldom to have dragged so heavily as those which, without either vision or reflection, we pass ourselves, on the embankment and in the tunnel.

31. But whatever may be alleged, after ultimate and honest scrutiny, of the follies or virtues of anchorite life, we are unjust to Jerome if we think of him as its introducer into the West of Europe. He passed through it himself as a phase of spiritual discipline; but he represents, in his total nature and final work, not the vexed inactivity of the Eremite, but the eager industry of a benevolent tutor and pastor. His heart is in continual fervour of admiration or of hope—remaining to the last as impetuous as a child's, but as affectionate; and the discrepancies of Protestant objection by which his character has been confused, or concealed, may be gathered into some dim picture of his real self when once we comprehend the simplicity of his faith, and sympathise a little with the eager charity which can so easily be wounded into indignation, and is never repressed by policy.

32. The slight trust which can be placed in modern readings of him, as they now stand, may be at once proved by comparing the two passages in which Milman has variously guessed at the leading principles of his [Pg 74] political conduct. "Jerome began (!) and ended his career as a monk of Palestine; he attained, he aspired to, no dignity in the Church. Though ordained a presbyter against his will, he escaped the episcopal dignity which was forced upon his distinguished contemporaries." ('History of Christianity,' Book III.)

"Jerome cherished the secret hope, if it was not the avowed object of his ambition, to succeed Damasus as Bishop of Rome. Is the rejection of an aspirant so singularly unfit for the station, from his violent passions, his insolent treatment of his adversaries, his utter want of self-command, his almost unrivalled faculty of awakening hatred, to be attributed to the sagacious and intuitive wisdom of Rome?" ('History of Latin Christianity,' Book I., chap. ii.)

33. You may observe, as an almost unexceptional character in the "sagacious wisdom" of the Protestant clerical mind, that it instinctively assumes the desire of power and place not only to be universal in Priesthood, but to be always purely selfish in the ground of it. The idea that power might possibly be desired for the sake of its benevolent use, so far as I remember, does not once occur in the pages of any ecclesiastical historian of recent date. In our own reading of past ages we will, with the reader's permission, very calmly put out of court all accounts of "hopes cherished in secret"; and pay very small attention to the reasons for mediæval conduct which appear logical to the rationalist, and probable to the politician. [3-10] We concern ourselves only with what these singular and fantastic [Pg 75] Christians of the past really said, and assuredly did.

34. Jerome's life by no means "began as a monk of Palestine." Dean Milman has not explained to us how any man's could; but Jerome's childhood, at any rate, was extremely other than recluse, or precociously religious. He was born of rich parents living on their own estate, the name of his native town in North Illyria, Stridon, perhaps now softened into Strigi, near Aquileia. In Venetian climate, at all events, and in sight of Alps and sea. He had a brother and sister, a kind grandfather, and a disagreeable private tutor, and was a youth still studying grammar at Julian's death in 363.

35. A youth of eighteen, and well begun in all institutes of the classic schools; but, so far from being a monk, not yet a Christian;—nor at all disposed towards the severer offices even of Roman life! or contemplating with aversion the splendours, either worldly or sacred, which shone on him in the college days spent in its Capital city.

For the "power and majesty of Paganism were still concentrated at Rome; the deities of the ancient faith found their last refuge in the capital of the empire. To the stranger, Rome still offered the appearance of a Pagan city. It contained one hundred and fifty-two temples, and one hundred and eighty smaller chapels or shrines, still sacred to their tutelary God, and used for public worship. Christianity had neither ventured to usurp those few buildings which might be converted to her use, still less had she the power to destroy them. The religious edifices were under the protection of the præfect of the city, and the præfect was usually a Pagan; at all events he would not permit any breach of the public peace, or violation of public property. Above all still towered the Capitol, in its unassailed and awful majesty, with its fifty temples or shrines, bearing the most sacred names in the religious and civil annals of Rome, those of Jove, of Mars, of Janus, of Romulus, of Cæsar, of Victory. Some years after the accession of Theodosius to the Eastern Empire, the sacrifices were still performed as national rites at the [Pg 76] public cost,—the pontiffs made their offerings in the name of the whole human race. The Pagan orator ventures to assert that the Emperor dared not to endanger the safety of the empire by their abolition. The Emperor still bore the title and insignia of the Supreme Pontiff; the Consuls, before they entered upon their functions, ascended the Capitol; the religious processions passed along the crowded streets, and the people thronged to the festivals and theatres which still formed part of the Pagan worship." [3-11]

36. Here, Jerome must have heard of what by all the Christian sects was held the judgment of God, between them and their chief enemy—the death of the Emperor Julian. But I have no means of tracing, and will not conjecture, the course of his own thoughts, until the tenor of all his life was changed at his baptism. The candour which lies at the basis of his character has given us one sentence of his own, respecting that change, which is worth some volumes of ordinary confessions. "I left, not only parents and kindred, but the accustomed luxuries of delicate life." The words throw full light on what, to our less courageous temper, seems the exaggerated reading by the early converts of Christ's words to them—"He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me." We are content to leave, for much lower interests, either father or mother, and do not see the necessity of any farther sacrifice: we should know more of ourselves and of Christianity if we oftener sustained what St. Jerome found the more searching trial. I find scattered indications of contempt among his biographers, because he could not resign one indulgence—that of scholarship; and the usual sneers at monkish ignorance and indolence are in his case transferred to the weakness of a pilgrim who carried his library in his wallet. It is a singular question (putting, as it is the modern fashion to do, the idea of Providence wholly aside), whether, but for the literary enthusiasm, which was partly a weakness, of this old man's character, the Bible would ever have become the library of Europe.

37. For that, observe, is the real meaning, in its first power, of the word Bible. Not book, merely; but 'Bibliotheca,' Treasury of Books: and it is, I repeat, a singular question, how far, if Jerome, at the very moment when Rome, his tutress, ceased from her material power, had not made her language the oracle of Hebrew prophecy, a literature of their own, and a religion unshadowed by the terrors of the Mosaic law, might have developed itself in the hearts of the Goth, the Frank, and the Saxon, under Theodoric, Clovis, and Alfred.

38. Fate had otherwise determined, and Jerome was so passive an instrument in her hands that he began the study of Hebrew as a discipline only, and without any conception of the task he was to fulfil, still less of the scope of its fulfilment. I could joyfully believe that the words of Christ, "If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead," had haunted the spirit of the recluse, until he resolved that the voices of immortal appeal should be made audible to the Churches of all the earth. But so far as we have evidence, there was no such will or hope to exalt the quiet instincts of his natural industry; and partly as a scholar's exercise, partly as an old man's recreation, the severity of the Latin language was softened, like Venetian crystal, by the variable fire of Hebrew thought, and the "Book of Books" took the abiding form of which all the future art of the Western nations was to be an hourly expanding interpretation.

39. And in this matter you have to note that the gist of it lies, not in the translation of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures into an easier and a common language, but in their presentation to the Church as of common authority. The earlier Gentile Christians had naturally a tendency to carry out in various oral exaggeration or corruption, the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles, until their freedom from the bondage of the Jewish law passed into doubt of its inspiration; and, after the fall of Jerusalem, even into horror-stricken interdiction of its observance. So that, only a few years after the remnant of exiled Jews in Pella had elected the Gentile Marcus for their Bishop, and [Pg 78] obtained leave to return to the Ælia Capitolina built by Hadrian on Mount Zion, "it became a matter of doubt and controversy whether a man who sincerely acknowledged Jesus as the Messiah, but who still continued to observe the law of Moses, could possibly hope for salvation!" [3-12] While, on the other hand, the most learned and the most wealthy of the Christian name, under the generally recognised title of "knowing" (Gnostic), had more insidiously effaced the authority of the Evangelists by dividing themselves, during the course of the third century, "into more than fifty numerably distinct sects, and producing a multitude of histories, in which the actions and discourses of Christ and His Apostles were adapted to their several tenets." [3-13]

40. It would be a task of great, and in nowise profitable difficulty to determine in what measure the consent of the general Church, and in what measure the act and authority of Jerome, contributed to fix in their ever since undisturbed harmony and majesty, the canons of Mosaic and Apostolic Scripture. All that the young reader need know is, that when Jerome died at Bethlehem, this great deed was virtually accomplished: and the series of historic and didactic books which form our present Bible, (including the Apocrypha) were established in and above the nascent thought of the noblest races of men living on the terrestrial globe, as a direct message to them from its Maker, containing whatever it was necessary for them to learn of His purposes towards them, and commanding, or advising, with divine authority and infallible wisdom, all that was best for them to do, and happiest to desire.

41. And it is only for those who have obeyed the law sincerely, to [Pg 79] say how far the hope held out to them by the law-giver has been fulfilled. The worst "children of disobedience" are those who accept, of the Word, what they like, and refuse what they hate: nor is this perversity in them always conscious, for the greater part of the sins of the Church have been brought on it by enthusiasm which, in passionate contemplation and advocacy of parts of the Scripture easily grasped, neglected the study, and at last betrayed the balance, of the rest. What forms and methods of self-will are concerned in the wresting of the Scriptures to a man's destruction, is for the keepers of consciences to examine, not for us. The history we have to learn must be wholly cleared of such debate, and the influence of the Bible watched exclusively on the persons who receive the Word with joy, and obey it in truth.

42. There has, however, been always a farther difficulty in examining the power of the Bible, than that of distinguishing honest from dishonest readers. The hold of Christianity on the souls of men must be examined, when we come to close dealing with it, under these three several heads: there is first, the power of the Cross itself, and of the theory of salvation, upon the heart,—then, the operation of the Jewish and Greek Scriptures on the intellect,—then, the influence on morals of the teaching and example of the living hierarchy. And in the comparison of men as they are and as they might have been, there are these three questions to be separately kept in mind,—first, what would have been the temper of Europe without the charity and labour meant by 'bearing the cross'; then, secondly, what would the intellect of Europe have become without Biblical literature; and lastly, what would the social order of Europe have become without its hierarchy.

43. You see I have connected the words 'charity' and 'labour' under the general term of 'bearing the cross.' "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, (for charity) and take up his cross (of pain) and follow me."

The idea has been exactly reversed by modern Protestantism, which sees, in the cross, not a furca to which it is to be nailed; but a [Pg 80] raft on which it, and all its valuable properties, [3-14] are to be floated into Paradise.

44. Only, therefore, in days when the Cross was received with courage, the Scripture searched with honesty, and the Pastor heard in faith, can the pure word of God, and the bright sword of the Spirit, be recognised in the heart and hand of Christianity. The effect of Biblical poetry and legend on its intellect, must be traced farther, through decadent ages, and in unfenced fields;—producing 'Paradise Lost' for us, no less than the 'Divina Commedia';—Goethe's 'Faust,' and Byron's 'Cain,' no less than the 'Imitatio Christi.'

45. Much more, must the scholar, who would comprehend in any degree approaching to completeness, the influence of the Bible on mankind, be able to read the interpretations of it which rose into the great arts of Europe at their culmination. In every province of Christendom, according to the degree of art-power it possessed, a series of illustrations of the Bible were produced as time went on; beginning with vignetted illustrations of manuscript, advancing into life-size sculpture, and concluding in perfect power of realistic painting. These teachings and preachings of the Church, by means of art, are not only a most important part of the general Apostolic Acts of Christianity; but their study is a necessary part of Biblical scholarship, so that no man can in any large sense understand the Bible itself until he has learned also to read these national commentaries upon it, and been made aware of their collective weight. The Protestant reader, who most imagines himself independent in his thought, and private in his study, of Scripture, is nevertheless usually at the mercy of the nearest preacher who has a pleasant voice and ingenious fancy; receiving from him thankfully, and often reverently, whatever interpretation of texts the agreeable voice or ready wit may recommend: while, in the meantime, he remains entirely ignorant of, and if left to his own will, invariably destroys as [Pg 81] injurious, the deeply meditated interpretations of Scripture which, in their matter, have been sanctioned by the consent of all the Christian Church for a thousand years; and in their treatment, have been exalted by the trained skill and inspired imagination of the noblest souls ever enclosed in mortal clay.

46. There are few of the fathers of the Christian Church whose commentaries on the Bible, or personal theories of its gospel, have not been, to the constant exultation of the enemies of the Church, fretted and disgraced by angers of controversy, or weakened and distracted by irreconcilable heresy. On the contrary, the scriptural teaching, through their art, of such men as Orcagna, Giotto, Angelico, Luca della Robbia, and Luini, is, literally, free from all earthly taint of momentary passion; its patience, meekness, and quietness are incapable of error through either fear or anger; they are able, without offence, to say all that they wish; they are bound by tradition into a brotherhood which represents unperverted doctrines by unchanging scenes; and they are compelled by the nature of their work to a deliberation and order of method which result in the purest state and frankest use of all intellectual power.

47. I may at once, and without need of returning to this question, illustrate the difference in dignity and safety between the mental actions of literature and art, by referring to a passage, otherwise beautifully illustrative of St. Jerome's sweetness and simplicity of character, though quoted, in the place where we find it, with no such favouring intention,—namely, in the pretty letter of Queen Sophie Charlotte, (father's mother of Frederick the Great,) to the Jesuit Vota, given in part by Carlyle in his first volume, ch. iv.

"'How can St. Jerome, for example, be a key to Scripture?' she insinuates; citing from Jerome this remarkable avowal of his method of composing books;—especially of his method in that book, Commentary on the Galatians, where he accuses both Peter and Paul of simulation, and even of hypocrisy. The great St. Augustine has been charging him with this sad fact, (says her Majesty, who gives chapter and verse,) and Jerome answers, 'I followed the commentaries of Origen, of'—five [Pg 82] or six different persons, who turned out mostly to be heretics before Jerome had quite done with them, in coming years, 'And to confess the honest truth to you,' continues Jerome, 'I read all that, and after having crammed my head with a great many things, I sent for my amanuensis, and dictated to him, now my own thoughts, now those of others, without much recollecting the order, nor sometimes the words, nor even the sense'! In another place, (in the book itself further on [3-15]) he says, 'I do not myself write; I have an amanuensis, and I dictate to him what comes into my mouth. If I wish to reflect a little, or to say the thing better, or a better thing, he knits his brows, and the whole look of him tells me sufficiently that he cannot endure to wait.' Here is a sacred old gentleman whom it is not safe to depend upon for interpreting the Scriptures,—thinks her Majesty, but does not say so,—leaving Father Vota to his reflections." Alas, no, Queen Sophie, neither old St. Jerome's, nor any other human lips nor mind, may be depended upon in that function; but only the Eternal Sophia, the Power of God and the Wisdom of God: yet this you may see of your old interpreter, that he is wholly open, innocent, and true, and that, through such a person, whether forgetful of his author, or hurried by his scribe, it is more than probable you may hear what Heaven knows to be best for you; and extremely improbable you should take the least harm,—while by a careful and cunning master in the literary art, reticent of his doubts, and dexterous in his sayings, any number of prejudices or errors might be proposed to you acceptably, or even fastened in you fatally, though all the while you were not the least required to confide in his inspiration.

48. For indeed, the only confidence, and the only safety which in such matters we can either hold or hope, are in our own desire to be rightly guided, and willingness to follow in simplicity the guidance granted. But all our conceptions and reasonings on the subject of inspiration have been disordered by our habit, first of [Pg 83] distinguishing falsely—or at least needlessly—between inspiration of words and of acts; and secondly by our attribution of inspired strength or wisdom to some persons or some writers only, instead of to the whole body of believers, in so far as they are partakers of the Grace of Christ, the Love of God, and the Fellowship of the Holy Ghost. In the degree in which every Christian receives, or refuses, the several gifts expressed by that general benediction, he enters or is cast out from the inheritance of the saints,—in the exact degree in which he denies the Christ, angers the Father, and grieves the Holy Spirit, he becomes uninspired or unholy,—and in the measure in which he trusts Christ, obeys the Father, and consents with the Spirit, he becomes inspired in feeling, act, word, and reception of word, according to the capacities of his nature. He is not gifted with higher ability, nor called into new offices, but enabled to use his granted natural powers, in their appointed place, to the best purpose. A child is inspired as a child, and a maiden as a maiden; the weak, even in their weakness, and the wise, only in their hour.

That is the simply determinable theory of the inspiration of all true members of the Church; its truth can only be known by proving it in trial: but I believe there is no record of any man's having tried and declared it vain. [3-16] [Pg 84]

49. Beyond this theory of general inspiration, there is that of special call and command, with actual dictation of the deeds to be done or words to be said. I will enter at present into no examination of the evidences of such separating influence; it is not claimed by the Fathers of the Church, either for themselves, or even for the entire body of the Sacred writers, but only ascribed to certain passages dictated at certain times for special needs: and there is no possibility of attaching the idea of infallible truth to any form of human language in which even these exceptional passages have been delivered to us. But this is demonstrably true of the entire volume of them as we have it, and read,—each of us as it may be rendered in his native tongue; that, however mingled with mystery which we are not required to unravel, or difficulties which we should be insolent in desiring to solve, it contains plain teaching for men of every rank of soul and state of life, which so far as they honestly and implicitly obey, they will be happy and innocent to the utmost powers of their nature, and capable of victory over all adversities, whether of temptation or pain.

50. Indeed, the Psalter alone, which practically was the service book of the Church for many ages, contains merely in the first half of it the sum of personal and social wisdom. [Pg 85] The 1st, 8th, 12th, 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, and 24th psalms, well learned and believed, are enough for all personal guidance; the 48th, 72nd, and 75th, have in them the law and the prophecy of all righteous government; and every real triumph of natural science is anticipated in the 104th.

51. For the contents of the entire volume, consider what other group of historic and didactic literature has a range comparable with it. There are—

I. The stories of the Fall and of the Flood, the grandest human traditions founded on a true horror of sin.

II. The story of the Patriarchs, of which the effective truth is visible to this day in the polity of the Jewish and Arab races.

III. The story of Moses, with the results of that tradition in the moral law of all the civilized world.

IV. The story of the Kings—virtually that of all Kinghood, in David, and of all Philosophy, in Solomon: culminating in the Psalms and Proverbs, with the still more close and practical wisdom of Ecclesiasticus and the Son of Sirach.

V. The story of the Prophets—virtually that of the deepest mystery, tragedy, and permanent fate, of national existence.

VI. The story of Christ.

VII. The moral law of St. John, and his closing Apocalypse of its fulfilment.

Think, if you can match that table of contents in any other—I do not say 'book' but 'literature.' Think, so far as it is possible for any of us—either adversary or defender of the faith—to extricate his intelligence from the habit and the association of moral sentiment based upon the Bible, what literature could have taken its place, or fulfilled its function, though every library in the world had remained unravaged, and every teacher's truest words had been written down?

52. I am no despiser of profane literature. So far from it that I believe no interpretations of Greek religion have ever been so affectionate, none of Roman religion so reverent, as those which will be found at the base of my art teaching, and current through the entire body of my works. But it was from the Bible that I learned the [Pg 86] symbols of Homer, and the faith of Horace; the duty enforced upon me in early youth of reading every word of the gospels and prophecies as if written by the hand of God, gave me the habit of awed attention which afterwards made many passages of the profane writers, frivolous to an irreligious reader, deeply grave to me. How far my mind has been paralysed by the faults and sorrow of life,—how far short its knowledge may be of what I might have known, had I more faithfully walked in the light I had, is beyond my conjecture or confession: but as I never wrote for my own pleasure or self-proclaiming, I have been guarded, as men who so write always will be, from errors dangerous to others; and the fragmentary expressions of feeling or statements of doctrine, which from time to time I have been able to give, will be found now by an attentive reader to bind themselves together into a general system of interpretation of Sacred literature,—both classic and Christian, which will enable him without injustice to sympathize in the faiths of candid and generous souls, of every age and every clime.

53. That there is a Sacred classic literature, running parallel with that of the Hebrews, and coalescing in the symbolic legends of mediæval Christendom, is shown in the most tender and impressive way by the independent, yet similar, influence of Virgil upon Dante, and upon Bishop Gawaine Douglas. At earlier dates, the teaching of every master trained in the Eastern schools was necessarily grafted on the wisdom of the Greek mythology; and thus the story of the Nemean Lion, with the aid of Athena in its conquest, is the real root-stock of the legend of St. Jerome's companion, conquered by the healing gentleness of the Spirit of Life.

54. I call it a legend only. Whether Heracles ever slew, or St. Jerome ever cherished, the wild or wounded creature, is of no moment to us in learning what the Greeks meant by their vase-outlines of the great contest, or the Christian painters by their fond insistence on the constancy of the Lion-friend. Former tradition, in the story of Samson,—of the disobedient prophet,—of David's first inspired victory, and finally of the miracle wrought in the defence of the [Pg 87] most favoured and most faithful of the greater Prophets, runs always parallel in symbolism with the Dorian fable: but the legend of St. Jerome takes up the prophecy of the Millennium, and foretells, with the Cumæan Sibyl, and with Isaiah, a day when the Fear of Man shall be laid in benediction, not enmity, on inferior beings,—when they shall not hurt nor destroy in all the holy Mountain, and the Peace of the Earth shall be as far removed from its present sorrow, as the present gloriously animate universe from the nascent desert, whose deeps were the place of dragons, and its mountains, domes of fire.

Of that day knoweth no man; but the Kingdom of God is already come to those who have tamed in their own hearts what was rampant of the lower nature, and have learned to cherish what is lovely and human, in the wandering children of the clouds and fields.

Avallon, 28th August, 1882.

Notes to Chapter III:

CHAPTER IV.

[Go to Table of Contents]

INTERPRETATIONS.

1. It is the admitted privilege of a custode who loves his cathedral to depreciate, in its comparison, all the other cathedrals of his country that resemble, and all the edifices on the globe that differ from it. But I love too many cathedrals—though I have never had the happiness of becoming the custode of even one—to permit myself the easy and faithful exercise of the privilege in question; and I must vindicate my candour, and my judgment, in the outset, by confessing that the cathedral of Amiens has nothing to boast of in the way of towers,—that its central flèche is merely the pretty caprice of a village carpenter,—that the total structure is in dignity inferior to Chartres, in sublimity to Beauvais, in decorative splendour to Rheims, and in loveliness of figure-sculpture to Bourges. It has nothing like the artful pointing and moulding of the arcades of Salisbury—nothing of the might of Durham;—no Dædalian inlaying like Florence, no glow of mythic fantasy like Verona. And yet, in all, and more than these, ways, outshone or overpowered, the cathedral of Amiens deserves the name given it by M. Viollet le Duc—

2. Of Gothic, mind you; Gothic clear of Roman tradition, and of Arabian taint; Gothic pure, authoritative, unsurpassable, and unaccusable;—its proper principles of structure being once understood and admitted. [Pg 89] No well-educated traveller is now without some consciousness of the meaning of what is commonly and rightly called "purity of style," in the modes of art which have been practised by civilized nations; and few are unaware of the distinctive aims and character of Gothic. The purpose of a good Gothic builder was to raise, with the native stone of the place he had to build in, an edifice as high and as spacious as he could, with calculable and visible security, in no protracted and wearisome time, and with no monstrous or oppressive compulsion of human labour.

He did not wish to exhaust in the pride of a single city the energies of a generation, or the resources of a kingdom; he built for Amiens with the strength and the exchequer of Amiens; with chalk from the cliffs of the Somme, [4-2] and under the orders of two successive bishops, one of whom directed the foundations of the edifice, and the other gave thanks in it for its completion. His object, as a designer, in common with all the sacred builders of his time in the North, was to admit as much light into the building as was consistent with the comfort of it; to make its structure intelligibly admirable, but not curious or confusing; and to enrich and enforce the understood structure with ornament sufficient for its beauty, yet yielding to no wanton enthusiasm in expenditure, nor insolent in giddy or selfish ostentation of skill; and finally, to make the external sculpture of its walls and gates at once an alphabet and epitome of the religion, by the knowledge and inspiration of which an acceptable worship might be rendered, within those gates, to the Lord whose Fear was in His [Pg 90] Holy Temple, and whose seat was in Heaven.

3. It is not easy for the citizen of the modern aggregate of bad building, and ill-living held in check by constables, which we call a town,—of which the widest streets are devoted by consent to the encouragement of vice, and the narrow ones to the concealment of misery,—not easy, I say, for the citizen of any such mean city to understand the feeling of a burgher of the Christian ages to his cathedral. For him, the quite simply and frankly-believed text, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I in the midst of them," was expanded into the wider promise to many honest and industrious persons gathered in His name—"They shall be my people and I will be their God";—deepened in his reading of it, by some lovely local and simply affectionate faith that Christ, as he was a Jew among Jews, and a Galilean among Galileans, was also, in His nearness to any—even the poorest—group of disciples, as one of their nation; and that their own "Beau Christ d'Amiens" was as true a compatriot to them as if He had been born of a Picard maiden.

4. It is to be remembered, however—and this is a theological point on which depended much of the structural development of the northern basilicas—that the part of the building in which the Divine presence was believed to be constant, as in the Jewish Holy of Holies, was only the enclosed choir; in front of which the aisles and transepts might become the King's Hall of Justice, as in the presence-chamber of Christ; and whose high altar was guarded always from the surrounding eastern aisles by a screen of the most finished workmanship; while from those surrounding aisles branched off a series of radiating chapels or cells, each dedicated to some separate saint. This conception of the company of Christ with His saints, (the eastern chapel of all being the Virgin's,) was at the root of the entire disposition of the apse with its supporting and dividing buttresses and piers; and the architectural form can never be well delighted in, unless in some sympathy with the spiritual imagination out of which it rose. We talk foolishly and feebly of symbols and types: in old [Pg 91] Christian architecture, every part is literal: the cathedral is for its builders the House of God;—it is surrounded, like an earthly king's, with minor lodgings for the servants; and the glorious carvings of the exterior walls and interior wood of the choir, which an English rector would almost instinctively think of as done for the glorification of the canons, was indeed the Amienois carpenter's way of making his Master-carpenter comfortable, [4-3]—nor less of showing his own native and insuperable virtue of carpenter, before God and man.

5. Whatever you wish to see, or are forced to leave unseen, at Amiens, if the overwhelming responsibilities of your existence, and the inevitable necessities of precipitate locomotion in their fulfilment, have left you so much as one quarter of an hour, not out of breath—for the contemplation of the capital of Picardy, give it wholly to the cathedral choir. Aisles and porches, lancet windows and roses, you can see elsewhere as well as here—but such carpenter's work, you cannot. It is late,—fully developed flamboyant just past the fifteenth century—and has some Flemish stolidity mixed with the playing French fire of it; but wood-carving was the Picard's joy from his youth up, and, so far as I know, there is nothing else so beautiful cut out of the goodly trees of the world.

Sweet and young-grained wood it is: oak, trained and chosen for such work, sound now as four hundred years since. Under the carver's hand it seems to cut like clay, to fold like silk, to grow like living branches, to leap like living flame. Canopy crowning canopy, pinnacle piercing pinnacle—it shoots and wreathes itself into an enchanted glade, inextricable, imperishable, fuller of leafage than any forest, [Pg 92] and fuller of story than any book. [4-4]

6. I have never been able to make up my mind which was really the best way of approaching the cathedral for the first time. If you have plenty of leisure, and the day is fine, and you are not afraid of an [Pg 93] hour's walk, the really right thing to do is to walk down the main street of the old town, and across the river, and quite out to the chalk hill [4-5] out of which the citadel is half quarried—half walled;—and walk to the top of that, and look down into the citadel's dry 'ditch,'—or, more truly, dry valley of death, which is about as deep as a glen in Derbyshire, (or, more precisely, the upper part of the 'Happy Valley' at Oxford, above Lower Hincksey,) and thence across [Pg 94] to the cathedral and ascending slopes of the city; so, you will understand the real height and relation of tower and town:—then, returning, find your way to the Mount Zion of it by any narrow cross streets and chance bridges you can—the more winding and dirty the streets, the better; and whether you come first on west front or apse, you will think them worth all the trouble you have had to reach them.

7. But if the day be dismal, as it may sometimes be, even in France, of late years,—or if you cannot or will not walk, which may also chance, for all our athletics and lawn-tennis,—or if you must really go to Paris this afternoon, and only mean to see all you can in an hour or two,—then, supposing that, notwithstanding these weaknesses, you are still a nice sort of person, for whom it is of some consequence which way you come at a pretty thing, or begin to look at it—I think the best way is to walk from the Hotel de France or the Place de Perigord, up the Street of Three Pebbles, towards the railway station—stopping a little as you go, so as to get into a cheerful temper, and buying some bonbons or tarts for the children in one of the charming patissiers' shops on the left. Just past them, ask for the theatre; and just past that, you will find, also on the left, three open arches, through which you can turn, passing the Palais de Justice, and go straight up to the south transept, which has really something about it to please everybody. It is simple and severe at the bottom, and daintily traceried and pinnacled at the top, and yet seems all of a piece—though it isn't—and everybody must like the taper and transparent fretwork of the flèche above, which seems to bend to the west wind,—though it doesn't—at least, the bending is a long habit, gradually yielded into, with gaining grace and submissiveness, during the last three hundred years. And, coming quite up to the porch, everybody must like the pretty French Madonna in the middle of it, with her head a little aside, and her nimbus switched a little aside too, like a becoming bonnet. A Madonna in decadence she is, though, for all, or rather by reason of all, her prettiness, and her [Pg 95] gay soubrette's smile; and she has no business there, neither, for this is St. Honoré's porch, not hers; and grim and grey St. Honoré used to stand there to receive you,—he is banished now to the north porch, where nobody ever goes in. This was done long ago, in the fourteenth-century days, when the people first began to find Christianity too serious, and devised a merrier faith for France, and would have bright-glancing, soubrette Madonnas everywhere—letting their own dark-eyed Joan of Arc be burned for a witch. And thenceforward, things went their merry way, straight on, 'ça allait, ça ira,' to the merriest days of the guillotine.

But they could still carve, in the fourteenth century, and the Madonna and her hawthorn-blossom lintel are worth your looking at,—much more the field above, of sculpture as delicate and more calm, which tells St. Honoré's own story, little talked of now in his Parisian faubourg.

8. I will not keep you just now to tell St. Honoré's story—(only too glad to leave you a little curious about it, if it were possible) [4-6] —for certainly you will be impatient to go into the church; and cannot enter it to better advantage than by this door. For all cathedrals of any mark have nearly the same effect when you enter at the west door; but I know no other which shows so much of its nobleness from the south interior transept; the opposite rose being of exquisite fineness in tracery, and lovely in lustre; and the shafts of the transept aisles forming wonderful groups with those of the choir and nave; also, the apse shows its height better, as it opens to you when you advance from the transept into the mid-nave, than when it is seen at once from the west end of the nave; where it is just possible for an irreverent person rather to think the nave narrow, than the apse high. Therefore, if you let me guide you, go in at this south transept door, (and put a sou into every beggar's box who asks it there,—it is none of your business whether they should be there or not, nor whether they deserve to have the sou,—be sure only that you [Pg 96] yourself deserve to have it to give; and give it prettily, and not as if it burnt your fingers). Then, being once inside, take what first sensation and general glimpse of it pleases you—promising the custode to come back to see it properly; (only then mind you keep the promise;) and in this first quarter of an hour, seeing only what fancy bid you—but at least, as I said, the apse from mid-nave, and all the traverses of the building, from its centre. Then you will know, when you go outside again, what the architect was working for, and what his buttresses and traceries mean. For the outside of a French cathedral, except for its sculpture, is always to be thought of as the wrong side of the stuff, in which you find how the threads go that produce the inside or right-side pattern. And if you have no wonder in you for that choir and its encompassing circlet of light, when you look up into it from the cross-centre, you need not travel farther in search of cathedrals, for the waiting-room of any station is a better place for you;—but, if it amaze you and delight you at first, then, the more you know of it, the more it will amaze. For it is not possible for imagination and mathematics together, to do anything nobler or stronger than that procession of window, with material of glass and stone—nor anything which shall look loftier, with so temperate and prudent measure of actual loftiness.

9. From the pavement to the keystone of its vault is but 132 French feet—about 150 English. Think only—you who have been in Switzerland,—the Staubbach falls nine hundred! Nay, Dover cliff under the castle, just at the end of the Marine Parade, is twice as high; and the little cockneys parading to military polka on the asphalt below, think themselves about as tall as it, I suppose,—nay, what with their little lodgings and stodgings and podgings about it, they have managed to make it look no bigger than a moderate-sized limekiln. Yet it is twice the height of Amiens' apse!—and it takes good building, with only such bits of chalk as one can quarry beside Somme, to make your work stand half that height, for six hundred years.

10. It takes good building, I say, and you may even aver the best—that ever was, or is again likely for many a day to be, on the unquaking and fruitful earth, where one could calculate on a pillar's standing fast, once well set up; and where aisles of aspen, and orchards of apple, and clusters of vine, gave type of what might be most beautifully made sacred in the constancy of sculptured stone. From the unhewn block set on end in the Druid's Bethel, to this Lord's House and blue-vitrailed gate of Heaven, you have the entire course and consummation of the Northern Religious Builder's passion and art.

11. But, note further—and earnestly,—this apse of Amiens is not only the best, but the very first thing done perfectly in its manner, by Northern Christendom. In pages 323 and 327 of the sixth volume of M. Viollet le Duc, you will find the exact history of the development of these traceries through which the eastern light shines on you as you stand, from the less perfect and tentative forms of Rheims: and so momentary was the culmination of the exact rightness, that here, from nave to transept—built only ten years later,—there is a little change, not towards decline, but to a not quite necessary precision. Where decline begins, one cannot, among the lovely fantasies that succeeded, exactly say—but exactly, and indisputably, we know that this apse of Amiens is the first virgin perfect work,—Parthenon also in that sense,—of Gothic Architecture.

12. Who built it, shall we ask? God, and Man,—is the first and most true answer. The stars in their courses built it, and the Nations. Greek Athena labours here—and Roman Father Jove, and Guardian Mars. The Gaul labours here, and the Frank: knightly Norman,—mighty Ostrogoth,—and wasted anchorite of Idumea.

The actual Man who built it scarcely cared to tell you he did so; nor do the historians brag of him. Any quantity of heraldries of knaves and fainéants you may find in what they call their 'history': but this is probably the first time you ever read the name of Robert of Luzarches. I say he 'scarcely cared'—we are not sure that he cared [Pg 98] at all. He signed his name nowhere, that I can hear of. You may perhaps find some recent initials cut by English remarkable visitors desirous of immortality, here and there about the edifice, but Robert the builder—or at least the Master of building, cut his on no stone of it. Only when, after his death, the headstone had been brought forth with shouting, Grace unto it, this following legend was written, recording all who had part or lot in the labour, within the middle of the labyrinth then inlaid in the pavement of the nave. You must read it trippingly on the tongue: it was rhymed gaily for you by pure French gaiety, not the least like that of the Théâtre de Folies.

13. I have written the numerals in letters, else the metre would not have come clear: they were really in figures thus, "II C. et XX," "XIII C. moins XII". I quote the inscription from M. l'Abbé Rozé's admirable little book, "Visite à la Cathédrale d'Amiens,"—Sup. Lib. de Mgr l'Evêque d'Amiens, 1877,—which every grateful traveller should buy, for I am only going to steal a little bit of it here and there. I only wish there had been a translation of the legend to steal, too; for there are one or two points, both of idea and chronology, in it, that I should have liked the Abbé's opinion of. [Pg 99] The main purport of the rhyme, however, we perceive to be, line for line, as follows:—

In which legend, while you stand where once it was written (it was removed—to make the old pavement more polite—in the year, I sorrowfully observe, of my own earliest tour on the Continent, 1825, when I had not yet turned my attention to Ecclesiastical Architecture), these points are noticeable—if you have still a little patience.

14. 'The work'—i.e., the Work of Amiens in especial, her cathedral, was 'déchéant,' falling to ruin, for the—I cannot at once say—fourth, fifth, or what time,—in the year 1220. For it was a wonderfully difficult matter for little Amiens to get this piece of business fairly done, so hard did the Devil pull against her. She built her first Bishop's church (scarcely more than St. Firmin's tomb-chapel) about the year 350, just outside the railway station on the road to Paris; [4-7] then, after being nearly herself destroyed, chapel and all, by the Frank invasion, having recovered, and converted her Franks, she built another and a properly called cathedral, where this one stands now, under Bishop St. Save (St. Sauve, or Salve). But [Pg 100] even this proper cathedral was only of wood, and the Normans burnt it in 881. Rebuilt, it stood for 200 years; but was in great part destroyed by lightning in 1019. Rebuilt again, it and the town were more or less burnt together by lightning, in 1107,—my authority says calmly, "un incendie provoqué par la même cause détruisit la ville, et une partie de la cathédrale." The 'partie' being rebuilt once more, the whole was again reduced to ashes, "réduite en cendre par le feu de ciel en 1218, ainsi que tous les titres, les martyrologies, les calendriers, et les Archives de l'Evêché et du Chapitre."

15. It was the fifth cathedral, I count, then, that lay in 'ashes,' according to Mons. Gilbert—in ruin certainly—déchéant;— and ruin of a very discouraging completeness it would have been, to less lively townspeople—in 1218. But it was rather of a stimulating completeness to Bishop Everard and his people—the ground well cleared for them, as it were: and lightning (feu de l'enfer, not du ciel, recognized for a diabolic plague, as in Egypt), was to be defied to the pit. They only took two years, you see, to pull themselves together; and to work they went, in 1220, they, and their bishop, and their king, and their Robert of Luzarches. And this, that roofs you, was what their hands found to do with their might.

16. Their king was 'à-donc,' 'at that time,' Louis VIII., who is especially further called the son of Philip of August, or Philip the Wise, because his father was not dead in 1220; but must have resigned the practical kingdom to his son, as his own father had done to him; the old and wise king retiring to his chamber, and thence silently guiding his son's hands, very gloriously, yet for three years.

But, farther—and this is the point on which chiefly I would have desired the Abbé's judgment—Louis VIII. died of fever at Montpensier in 1226. And the entire conduct of the main labour of the cathedral, and the chief glory of its service, as we shall hear presently, was Saint Louis's; for a time of forty-four years. And the inscription [Pg 101] was put "à ce point ci" by the last architect, six years after St. Louis's death. How is it that the great and holy king is not named?

17. I must not, in this traveller's brief, lose time in conjectural answers to the questions which every step here will raise from the ravaged shrine. But this is a very solemn one; and must be kept in our hearts, till we may perhaps get clue to it. One thing only we are sure of,—that at least the due honour—alike by the sons of Kings and sons of Craftsmen—is given always to their fathers; and that apparently the chief honour of all is given here to Philip the Wise. From whose house, not of parliament but of peace, came, in the years when this temple was first in building, an edict indeed of peace-making: "That it should be criminal for any man to take vengeance for an insult or injury till forty days after the commission of the offence—and then only with the approbation of the Bishop of the Diocese." Which was perhaps a wiser effort to end the Feudal system in its Saxon sense, [4-8] than any of our recent projects for ending it in the Norman one.

18. "A ce point ci." The point, namely, of the labyrinth inlaid in the cathedral floor; a recognized emblem of many things to the people, who knew that the ground they stood on was holy, as the roof over their head. Chiefly, to them, it was an emblem of noble human life—strait-gated, narrow-walled, with infinite darknesses and the "inextricabilis error" on either hand—and in the depth of it, the brutal nature to be conquered.

19. This meaning, from the proudest heroic, and purest legislative, days of Greece, the symbol had borne for all men skilled in her traditions: to the schools of craftsmen the sign meant further their craft's noblesse, and pure descent from the divinely-terrestrial skill of Dædalus, the labyrinth-builder, and the first sculptor of imagery [Pg 102] pathetic [4-9] with human life and death.

20. Quite the most beautiful sign of the power of true Christian-Catholic faith is this continual acknowledgment by it of the brotherhood—nay, more, the fatherhood, of the elder nations who had not seen Christ; but had been filled with the Spirit of God; and obeyed, according to their knowledge, His unwritten law. The pure charity and humility of this temper are seen in all Christian art, according to its strength and purity of race; but best, to the full, seen and interpreted by the three great Christian-Heathen poets, Dante, Douglas of Dunkeld, [4-10] and George Chapman. The prayer with which the last ends his life's work is, so far as I know, the perfectest and deepest expression of Natural Religion given us in literature; and if you can, pray it here—standing on the spot where the builder once wrote the history of the Parthenon of Christianity.

21. "I pray thee, Lord, the Father, and the Guide of our reason, that we may remember the nobleness with which Thou hast adorned us; and that Thou wouldst be always on our right hand and on our left, [4-11] in the motion of our own Wills: that so we may be purged from the contagion of the Body and the Affections of the Brute, and overcome them and rule; and use, as it becomes men to use them, for instruments. And then, that Thou wouldst be in Fellowship with us for the careful correction of our reason, and for its conjunction by the light of truth with the things that truly are. [Pg 103] "And in the third place, I pray to Thee the Saviour, that Thou wouldst utterly cleanse away the closing gloom from the eyes of our souls, that we may know well who is to be held for God, and who for mortal. Amen." [4-12]

22. And having prayed this prayer, or at least, read it with honest wishing, (which if you cannot, there is no hope of your at present taking pleasure in any human work of large faculty, whether poetry, painting, or sculpture,) we may walk a little farther westwards down the nave, where, in the middle of it, but only a few yards from its end, two flat stones (the custode will show you them), one a little farther back than the other, are laid over the graves of the two great bishops, all whose strength of life was given, with the builder's, to raise this temple. Their actual graves have not been disturbed; but the tombs raised over them, once and again removed, are now set on your right and left hand as you look back to the apse, under the third arch between the nave and aisles.

23. Both are of bronze, cast at one flow—and with insuperable, in some respects inimitable, skill in the caster's art.

"Chefs-d'œuvre de fonte,—le tout fondu d'un seul jet, et admirablement." [4-13] There are only two other such tombs left in France, those of the children of St. Louis. All others of their kind—and they were many in every great cathedral of France—were [Pg 104] first torn from the graves they covered, to destroy the memory of France's dead; and then melted down into sous and centimes, to buy gunpowder and absinthe with for her living,—by the Progressive Mind of Civilization in her first blaze of enthusiasm and new light, from 1789 to 1800.

The children's tombs, one on each side of the altar of St. Denis, are much smaller than these, though wrought more beautifully. These beside you are the only two Bronze tombs of her Men of the great ages, left in France!

24. And they are the tombs of the pastors of her people, who built for her the first perfect temple to her God. The Bishop Everard's is on your right, and has engraved round the border of it this inscription: [4-14]—

English, at its best, in Elizabethan days, is a nobler language than ever Latin was; but its virtue is in colour and tone, not in what may be called metallic or crystalline condensation. And it is impossible to translate the last line of this inscription in as few English words. Note in it first that the Bishop's friends and enemies are spoken of as in word, not act; because the swelling, or mocking, or flattering, words of men are indeed what the meek of the earth must know how to bear and to welcome;—their deeds, it is for kings and knights to deal with: not but that the Bishops often took deeds in hand also; and in actual battle they were permitted to strike with the mace, but not with sword or lance—i.e., not to "shed blood"! For it was supposed that a man might always recover from a mace-blow; (which, however, would much depend on the bishop's mind who gave it). The battle of Bouvines, quite one of the most important in mediæval history, was won against the English, and against odds besides of Germans, under their Emperor Otho, by two French bishops (Senlis and Bayeux)—who both generalled the French King's line, and led its charges. Our Earl of Salisbury surrendered to the Bishop of Bayeux in person.

25. Note farther, that quite one of the deadliest and most diabolic powers of evil words, or, rightly so called, blasphemy, has been developed in modern days in the effect of sometimes quite innocently meant and enjoyed 'slang.' There are two kinds of slang, in the [Pg 106] essence of it: one 'Thieves' Latin'—the special language of rascals, used for concealment; the other, one might perhaps best call Louts' Latin!—the lowering or insulting words invented by vile persons to bring good things, in their own estimates, to their own level, or beneath it. The really worst power of this kind of blasphemy is in its often making it impossible to use plain words without a degrading or ludicrous attached sense:—thus I could not end my translation of this epitaph, as the old Latinist could, with the exactly accurate image "to the proud, a file"—because of the abuse of the word in lower English, retaining, however, quite shrewdly, the thirteenth-century idea. But the exact force of the symbol here is in its allusion to jewellers' work, filing down facets. A proud man is often also a precious one: and may be made brighter in surface, and the purity of his inner self shown, by good filing.

26. Take it all in all, the perfect duty of a Bishop is expressed in these six Latin lines,—au mieux mieux—beginning with his pastoral office—Feed my sheep—qui pavit populum. And be assured, good reader, these ages never could have told you what a Bishop's, or any other man's, duty was, unless they had each man in his place both done it well—and seen it well done. The Bishop Geoffroy's tomb is on your left, and its inscription is:

And now at last—this reverence done and thanks paid—we will turn from these tombs, and go out at one of the western doors—and so see gradually rising above us the immensity of the three porches, and of the thoughts engraved in them.

27. What disgrace or change has come upon them, I will not tell you to-day—except only the 'immeasurable' loss of the great old [Pg 107] foundation-steps, open, sweeping broad from side to side for all who came; unwalled, undivided, sunned all along by the westering day, lighted only by the moon and the stars at night; falling steep and many down the hillside—ceasing one by one, at last wide and few towards the level—and worn by pilgrim feet, for six hundred years. So I once saw them, and twice,—such things can now be never seen more.

Nor even of the west front itself, above, is much of the old masonry left: but in the porches nearly all,—except the actual outside facing, with its rose moulding, of which only a few flowers have been spared here and there. [4-15] But the sculpture has been carefully and honourably kept and restored to its place—pedestals or niches restored here and there with clay; or some which you see white and crude, re-carved entirely; nevertheless the impression you may receive from the whole is still what the builder meant; and I will tell you the order of its theology without further notices of its decay.

28. You will find it always well, in looking at any cathedral, to make your quarters of the compass sure, in the beginning; and to remember that, as you enter it, you are looking and advancing eastward; and that if it has three entrance porches, that on your left in entering is the northern, that on your right the southern. I shall endeavour in all my future writing of architecture, to observe the simple law of always calling the door of the north transept the north door; and that on the same side of the west front, the northern door, and so of their opposites. This will save, in the end, much printing and much confusion, for a Gothic cathedral has, almost always, these five great entrances; which may be easily, if at first attentively, recognized under the titles of the Central door (or porch), the Northern door, the Southern door, the North door, and the South door.

But when we use the terms right and left, we ought always to use them [Pg 108] as in going out of the cathedral, or walking down the nave,—the entire north side and aisles of the building being its right side, and the south, its left,—these terms being only used well and authoritatively, when they have reference either to the image of Christ in the apse or on the rood, or else to the central statue, whether of Christ, the Virgin, or a saint, in the west front. At Amiens, this central statue, on the 'trumeau' or supporting and dividing pillar of the central porch, is of Christ Immanuel,—God with us. On His right hand and His left, occupying the entire walls of the central porch, are the apostles and the four greater prophets. The twelve minor prophets stand side by side on the front, three on each of its great piers. [4-16]

The northern porch is dedicated to St. Firmin, the first Christian missionary to Amiens.

The southern porch, to the Virgin.

But these are both treated as withdrawn behind the great foundation of Christ and the Prophets; and their narrow recesses partly conceal their sculpture, until you enter them. What you have first to think of, and read, is the scripture of the great central porch, and the façade itself.

29. You have then in the centre of the front, the image of Christ Himself, receiving you: "I am the Way, the truth and the life." And the order of the attendant powers may be best understood by thinking of them as placed on Christ's right and left hand: this being also the order which the builder adopts in his Scripture history on the façade—so that it is to be read from left to right—i.e. from Christ's left to Christ's right, as He sees it. Thus, therefore, following the order of the great statues: first in the central porch, there are six apostles on Christ's right hand, and six on His left. On His left hand, next to Him, Peter; then in receding order, Andrew, James, John, Matthew, Simon; on His right hand, next Him, Paul; and in receding order, James the Bishop, Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas and Jude. These opposite ranks of the Apostles occupy what may be called [Pg 109] the apse or curved bay of the porch, and form a nearly semicircular group, clearly visible as we approach. But on the sides of the porch, outside the lines of apostles, and not seen clearly till we enter the porch, are the four greater prophets. On Christ's left, Isaiah and Jeremiah, on His right, Ezekiel and Daniel.

30. Then in front, along the whole façade—read in order from Christ's left to His right—come the series of the twelve minor prophets, three to each of the four piers of the temple, beginning at the south angle with Hosea, and ending with Malachi.

As you look full at the façade in front, the statues which fill the minor porches are either obscured in their narrower recesses or withdrawn behind each other so as to be unseen. And the entire mass of the front is seen, literally, as built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief corner-stone. Literally that; for the receding Porch is a deep 'angulus,' and its mid-pillar is the 'Head of the Corner.'

Built on the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, that is to say of the Prophets who foretold Christ, and the Apostles who declared Him. Though Moses was an Apostle, of God, he is not here—though Elijah was a Prophet, of God, he is not here. The voice of the entire building is that of the Heaven at the Transfiguration, "This is my beloved Son, hear ye Him."

31. There is yet another and a greater prophet still, who, as it seems at first, is not here. Shall the people enter the gates of the temple, singing "Hosanna to the Son of David"; and see no image of His father, then?—Christ Himself declare, "I am the root and the offspring of David"; and yet the Root have no sign near it of its Earth?

Not so. David and his Son are together. David is the pedestal of the Christ.

32. We will begin our examination of the Temple front, therefore, with this its goodly pedestal stone. The statue of David is only two-thirds life-size, occupying the niche in front of the pedestal. He holds his [Pg 110] sceptre in his right hand, the scroll in his left. King and Prophet, type of all Divinely right doing, and right claiming, and right proclaiming, kinghood, for ever.

The pedestal of which this statue forms the fronting or Western sculpture, is square, and on the two sides of it are two flowers in vases, on its north side the lily, and on its south the rose. And the entire monolith is one of the noblest pieces of Christian sculpture in the world.

Above this pedestal comes a minor one, bearing in front of it a tendril of vine which completes the floral symbolism of the whole. The plant which I have called a lily is not the Fleur de Lys, nor the Madonna's, but an ideal one with bells like the crown Imperial (Shakespeare's type of 'lilies of all kinds'), representing the mode of growth of the lily of the valley, which could not be sculptured so large in its literal form without appearing monstrous, and is exactly expressed in this tablet—as it fulfils, together with the rose and vine, its companions, the triple saying of Christ, "I am the Rose of Sharon, and the Lily of the Valley." "I am the true Vine."

33. On the side of the upper stone are supporters of a different character. Supporters,—not captives nor victims; the Cockatrice and Adder. Representing the most active evil principles of the earth, as in their utmost malignity; still, Pedestals of Christ, and even in their deadly life, accomplishing His final will.

Both creatures are represented accurately in the mediæval traditional form, the cockatrice half dragon, half cock; the deaf adder laying one ear against the ground and stopping the other with her tail.

The first represents the infidelity of Pride. The cockatrice—king serpent or highest serpent—saying that he is God, and will be God.

The second, the infidelity of Death. The adder (nieder or nether snake) saying that he is mud, and will be mud.

34. Lastly, and above all, set under the feet of the statue of Christ [Pg 111] Himself, are the lion and dragon; the images of Carnal sin, or Human sin, as distinguished from the Spiritual and Intellectual sin of Pride, by which the angels also fell.

To desire kingship rather than servantship—the Cockatrice's sin, or deaf Death rather than hearkening Life—the Adder's sin,—these are both possible to all the intelligences of the universe. But the distinctively Human sins, anger and lust, seeds in our race of their perpetual sorrow—Christ in His own humanity, conquered; and conquers in His disciples. Therefore His foot is on the heads of these; and the prophecy, "Inculcabis super Leonem et Aspidem," is recognized always as fulfilled in Him, and in all His true servants, according to the height of their authority, and the truth of their power.

35. In this mystic sense, Alexander III. used the words, in restoring peace to Italy, and giving forgiveness to her deadliest enemy, under the porch of St. Mark's. [4-17] But the meaning of every act, as of every art, of the Christian ages, lost now for three hundred years, cannot but be in our own times read reversed, if at all, through the counter-spirit which we now have reached; glorifying Pride and Avarice as the virtues by which all things move and have their being—walking after our own lusts as our sole guides to salvation, and foaming out our own shame for the sole earthly product of our hands and lips.

36. Of the statue of Christ, itself, I will not speak here at any length, as no sculpture would satisfy, or ought to satisfy, the hope of any loving soul that has learned to trust in Him; but at the time, it was beyond what till then had been reached in sculptured tenderness; and was known far and near as the "Beau Dieu d'Amiens." [4-18] Yet understood, observe, just as clearly to be no more than a symbol of the Heavenly Presence, as the poor coiling worms below were no more than symbols of the demoniac ones. No idol, in our sense of the word—only a letter, or sign of the Living [Pg 112] Spirit,—which, however, was indeed conceived by every worshipper as here meeting him at the temple gate: the Word of Life, the King of Glory, and the Lord of Hosts.

"Dominus Virtutum," "Lord of Virtues," [4-19] is the best single rendering of the idea conveyed to a well-taught disciple in the thirteenth century by the words of the twenty-fourth Psalm.

37. Under the feet of His apostles, therefore, in the quatrefoil medallions of the foundation, are represented the virtues which each Apostle taught, or in his life manifested;—it may have been, sore tried, and failing in the very strength of the character which he afterwards perfected. Thus St. Peter, denying in fear, is afterwards the Apostle of courage; and St. John, who, with his brother, would have burnt the inhospitable village, is afterwards the Apostle of love. Understanding this, you see that in the sides of the porch, the apostles with their special virtues stand thus in opposite ranks.

Now you see how these virtues answer to each other in their opposite ranks. Remember the left-hand side is always the first, and see how the left-hand virtues lead to the right hand:—

38. Note farther that the Apostles are all tranquil, nearly all with books, some with crosses, but all with the same message, [Pg 113]

—"Peace be to this house. And if the Son of Peace be there," etc. [4-20]

But the Prophets—all seeking, or wistful, or tormented, or wondering, or praying, except only Daniel. The most tormented is Isaiah; spiritually sawn asunder. No scene of his martyrdom below, but his seeing the Lord in His temple, and yet feeling he had unclean lips. Jeremiah also carries his cross—but more serenely.

39. And now, I give in clear succession, the order of the statues of the whole front, with the subjects of the quatrefoils beneath each of them, marking the upper quatrefoil A, the lower B. The six prophets who stand at the angles of the porches, Amos, Obadiah, Micah, Nahum, Zephaniah, and Haggai, have each of them four quatrefoils, marked, A and C the upper ones, B and D the lower.

Beginning, then, on the left-hand side of the central porch, and reading outwards, you have—

41. Having thus put the sequence of the statues and their quatrefoils briefly before the spectator—(in case the railway time presses, it may be a kindness to him to note that if he walks from the east end of the cathedral down the street to the south, Rue St. Denis, it takes him by the shortest line to the station)—I will begin again with St. Peter, and interpret the sculptures in the quatrefoils a little more fully. Keeping the fixed numerals for indication of the statues, St. Peter's quatrefoils will be 1 A and 1 B, and Malachi's 28 A and 28 B.

1, B. Cowardice, a man frightened at an animal darting out
of a thicket, while a bird sings on. The coward has
not the heart of a thrush.
[Pg 118]

2, A. Patience, holding a shield with a bull on it (never giving
back). [4-23]

2, B. Anger, a woman stabbing a man with a sword. Anger
is essentially a feminine vice—a man, worth calling so,
may be driven to fury or insanity by indignation,
(compare the Black Prince at Limoges,) but not by
anger. Fiendish enough, often so—"Incensed with
indignation, Satan stood, unterrified—" but in that last
word is the difference, there is as much fear in Anger,
as there is in Hatred.

3, A. Gentillesse, bearing shield with a lamb.

3, B. Churlishness, again a woman, kicking over her cup-bearer.
The final forms of ultimate French churlishness
being in the feminine gestures of the Cancan.
See the favourite prints in shops of Paris.

4, A. Love; the Divine, not human love: "I in them, and
Thou in me." Her shield bears a tree with many
branches grafted into its cut-off stem: "In those days
shall Messiah be cut off, but not for Himself."

4, B. Discord, a wife and husband quarrelling. She has
dropped her distaff (Amiens wool manufacture, see farther
on—9, A.)

5, A. Obedience, bears shield with camel. Actually the most
disobedient and ill-tempered of all serviceable beasts,—yet
passing his life in the most painful service. I do
not know how far his character was understood by the
northern sculptor; but I believe he is taken as a type
of burden-bearing, without joy or sympathy, such as
[Pg 119] the horse has, and without power of offence, such as the
ox has. His bite is bad enough, (see Mr. Palgrave's
account of him,) but presumably little known of at
Amiens, even by Crusaders, who would always ride
their own war-horses, or nothing.

5, B. Rebellion, a man snapping his fingers at his Bishop.
(As Henry the Eighth at the Pope,—and the modern
French and English cockney at all priests whatever.)

6, A. Perseverance, the grandest spiritual form of the virtue
commonly called 'Fortitude.' Usually, overcoming
or tearing a lion; here, caressing one, and holding
her crown. "Hold fast that which thou hast, that no man
take thy crown."

6, B. Atheism, leaving his shoes at the church door. The infidel
fool is always represented in twelfth and thirteenth
century MS. as barefoot—the Christian having "his
feet shod with the preparation of the Gospel of Peace."
Compare "How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O
Prince's Daughter!"

7, A. Faith, holding cup with cross above it, her accepted
symbol throughout ancient Europe. It is also an enduring
one, for, all differences of Church put aside, the
words, "Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and
Drink His blood, ye have no life in you," remain in
their mystery, to be understood only by those who have
learned the sacredness of food, in all times and places,
and the laws of life and spirit, dependent on its acceptance,
refusal, and distribution.

7, B . Idolatry, kneeling to a monster. The contrary of
Faith—not want of Faith. Idolatry is faith in the
wrong thing, and quite distinct from Faith in No thing
(6, B), the "Dixit Insipiens." Very wise men may be
idolaters, but they cannot be atheists.

8, A. Hope, with Gonfalon Standard and distant crown; as
opposed to the constant crown of Fortitude (6, A).
The Gonfalon (Gund, war, fahr, standard, according
to Poitevin's dictionary), is the pointed ensign of forward
[Pg 120] battle; essentially sacred; hence the constant
name "Gonfaloniere" of the battle standard-bearers of
the Italian republics.

Hope has it, because she fights forward always to her
aim, or at least has the joy of seeing it draw nearer.
Faith and Fortitude wait, as St. John in prison, but unoffended.
Hope is, however, put under St. James,because
of the 7th and 8th verses of his last chapter, ending
"Stablish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord draweth
nigh." It is he who examines Dante on the
nature of Hope. 'Par.,' c. xxv., and compare Cary's notes.

8, B. Despair, stabbing himself. Suicide not thought heroic
or sentimental in the 13th century; and no Gothic
Morgue built beside Somme.

9, A. Charity, bearing shield with woolly ram, and giving a
mantle to a naked beggar. The old wool manufacture
of Amiens having this notion of its purpose—namely,
to clothe the poor first, the rich afterwards. No
nonsense talked in those days about the evil consequences
of indiscriminate charity.

9, B. Avarice, with coffer and money. The modern, alike
English and Amienois, notion of the Divine consummation
of the wool manufacture.

10, A. Chastity, shield with the Phœnix. [4-24]

10, B. Lust, a too violent kiss.

11, A. Wisdom: shield with, I think, an eatable root; meaning
temperance, as the beginning of wisdom.

[Pg 121]

11, B. Folly , the ordinary type used in all early Psalters, of
a glutton, armed with a club. Both this vice and
virtue are the earthly wisdom and folly, completing
the spiritual wisdom and folly opposite under St.
Matthew. Temperance, the complement of Obedience,
and Covetousness, with violence, that of Atheism.

12, A. Humility, shield with dove.

12, B. Pride, falling from his horse.

42. All these quatrefoils are rather symbolic than representative; and, since their purpose was answered enough if their sign was understood, they have been entrusted to a more inferior workman than the one who carved the now sequent series under the Prophets. Most of these subjects represent an historical fact, or a scene spoken of by the prophet as a real vision; and they have in general been executed by the ablest hands at the architect's command.

With the interpretation of these, I have given again the name of the prophet whose life or prophecy they illustrate.

13. Isaiah.

13, A. "I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne" (vi. I).
The vision of the throne "high and lifted up"
between seraphim.

13, B. "Lo, this hath touched thy lips" (vi. 7).
The Angel stands before the prophet, and holds,
or rather held, the coal with tongs, which have been
finely undercut, but are now broken away, only a
fragment remaining in his hand.

14. Jeremiah.

14, A. The burial of the girdle (xiii. 4, 5).
The prophet is digging by the shore of Euphrates,
represented by vertically winding furrows down the
middle of the tablet. Note, the translation should be
"hole in the ground," not "rock."

14, B. The breaking of the yoke (xxviii. 10).
From the prophet Jeremiah's neck; it is here
represented as a doubled and redoubled chain.

15. Ezekiel.

15, A. Wheel within wheel (i. 16).
The prophet sitting; before him two wheels of
equal size, one involved in the ring of the other.

15, B. "Son of man, set thy face toward Jerusalem" (xxi. 2).
The prophet before the gate of Jerusalem.

16. Daniel.

16, A. "He hath shut the lions' mouths" (vi. 22).
Daniel holding a book, the lions treated as heraldic
supporters. The subject is given with more
animation farther on in the series (24, B).

16, B. "In the same hour came forth fingers of a Man's hand" (v. 5).

43. The next subject begins the series of the minor prophets.

17. Hosea.

17, A. "So I bought her to me for fifteen pieces of silver and
an homer of barley" (iii. 2).
The prophet pouring the grain and the silver into
[Pg 123] the lap of the woman, "beloved of her friend." The
carved coins are each wrought with the cross, and, I
believe, legend of the French contemporary coin.

17, B. "So will I also be for thee" (iii. 3).
He puts a ring on her finger.

18. Joel.

18, A. The sun and moon lightless (ii. 10).
The sun and moon as two small flat pellets, up in
the external moulding.

18, B. The barked fig-tree and waste vine (i. 7).
Note the continual insistence on the blight of vegetation
as a Divine punishment, 19 D.

19. Amos.

To the front.

19, A. "The Lord will cry from Zion" (i. 2).
Christ appears with crossletted nimbus.

19, B. "The habitations of the shepherds shall mourn" (i. 2).
Amos with the shepherd's hooked or knotted staff,
and wicker-worked bottle, before his tent. (Architecture
in right-hand foil restored.)

Inside Porch.

19, C. The Lord with the mason's line (vii. 8).
Christ, again here, and henceforward always, with
crosslet nimbus, has a large trowel in His hand, which
He lays on the top of a half-built wall. There seems
a line twisted round the handle.

19, D. The place where it rained not (iv. 7).
Amos is gathering the leaves of the fruitless vine,
to feed the sheep, who find no grass. One of the
finest of the reliefs.

20. Obadiah.

Inside Porch.

20, A. "I hid them in a cave" (1 Kings xviii. 13).
Three prophets at the mouth of a well, to whom
Obadiah brings loaves.

[Pg 124]

20, B. "He fell on his face" (xviii. 7).
He kneels before Elijah, who wears his rough mantle.

To the front.

20, C. The captain of fifty.
Elijah (?) speaking to an armed man under a tree.

20, D. The Messenger.
A messenger on his knees before a king. I cannot
interpret these two scenes (20, C and 20, D).
The uppermost may mean the dialogue of Elijah
with the captains (2 Kings i. 2), and the lower one,
the return of the messengers (2 Kings i. 5).

21. Jonah.

21, A. Escaped from the sea.

21, B. Under the gourd. A small grasshopper-like beast
gnawing the gourd stem. I should like to know
what insects do attack the Amiens gourds. This may
be an entomological study, for aught we know.

22. Micah.

To the front.

22, A. The Tower of the Flock (iv. 8).
The tower is wrapped in clouds, God appearing above it.

22, B. Each shall rest and "none shall make them afraid" (iv. 4).
A man and his wife "under his vine and fig-tree."

Inside Porch.

22, C. "Swords into ploughshares" (iv. 3).
Nevertheless, two hundred years after these medallions
were cut, the sword manufacture had become a
staple in Amiens! Not to her advantage.

22, D. "Spears into pruning-hooks" (iv. 3). [Pg 125]

23. Nahum.

Inside Porch.

23, A. "None shall look back" (ii. 8).

23, B. The Burden of Nineveh (i. I). [4-26]

To the front.

23, C. "Thy Princes and thy great ones" (iii. 17).
23, A, B, and C, are all incapable of sure interpretation. The
prophet in A is pointing down to a little hill, said by
the Père Rozé to be covered with grasshoppers. I can only copy
what he says of them.

23, D. "Untimely figs" (iii. 12).
Three people beneath a fig-tree catch its falling
fruit in their mouths.

24. Habakkuk.

24, A. "I will watch to see what he will say unto me" (ii. 1).
The prophet is writing on his tablet to Christ's dictation.

24, B. The ministry to Daniel.
The traditional visit to Daniel. An angel carries
Habakkuk by the hair of his head; the prophet
has a loaf of bread in each hand. They break
through the roof of the cave. Daniel is stroking one
young lion on the back; the head of another is thrust
carelessly under his arm. Another is gnawing
bones in the bottom of the cave.

[Pg 126]

25. Zephaniah.

To the front.

25, A. The Lord strikes Ethiopia (ii. 12).
Christ striking a city with a sword. Note that all
violent actions are in these bas-reliefs feebly or ludicrously
expressed; quiet ones always right.

25, B. The beasts in Nineveh (ii. 15).
Very fine. All kinds of crawling things among
the tottering walls, and peeping out of their rents
and crannies. A monkey sitting squat, developing
into a demon, reverses the Darwinian theory.

Inside porch.

25, C. The Lord visits Jerusalem (i. 12).
Christ passing through the streets of Jerusalem,
with a lantern in each hand.

25, D. The Hedgehog and Bittern [4-27] (ii. 14).
With a singing bird in a cage in the window.

26. Haggai.

Inside Porch.

26, A. The houses of the princes, ornées de lambris (i. 4).
A perfectly built house of square stones gloomily
strong, the grating (of a prison?) in front of foundation.

26, B. The Heaven is stayed from dew (i. 10).
The heavens as a projecting mass, with stars, sun,
and moon on surface. Underneath, two withered trees.

To the front.

26, C. The Lord's temple desolate (i. 4).
The falling of the temple, "not one stone left on
another," grandly loose. Square stones again. Examine
the text (i. 6).

[Pg 127]

26, D. "Thus saith the Lord of Hosts" (i. 7).
Christ pointing up to His ruined temple.

27. Zechariah.

27, A. The lifting up of Iniquity (v. 6 to 9).
Wickedness in the Ephah.

27, B. "The angel that spake to me" (iv. 1).
The prophet almost reclining, a glorious winged
angel hovering out of cloud.

28. Malachi.

28, A. "Ye have wounded the Lord" (ii. 17).
The priests are thrusting Christ through with a
barbed lance, whose point comes out at His back.

28, B. "This commandment is to you" (ii. 1).
In these panels, the undermost is often introductory
to the one above, an illustration of it. It is perhaps
chapter i. verse 6, that is meant to be spoken here by
the sitting figure of Christ, to the indignant priests.

44. With this bas-relief terminates the series of sculpture in illustration of Apostolic and Prophetic teaching, which constitutes what I mean by the "Bible" of Amiens. But the two lateral porches contain supplementary subjects necessary for completion of the pastoral and traditional teaching addressed to her people in that day.

The Northern Porch, dedicated to her first missionary St. Firmin, has on its central pier his statue; above, on the flat field of the back of the arch, the story of the finding of his body; on the sides of the porch, companion saints and angels in the following order:— [Pg 128]

CENTRAL STATUE.

St. Firmin.

Southern (left) side.

Northern (right) side.

45. Of these saints, excepting St. Firmin and St. Honoré, of whom I have already spoken, [4-28] St. Geoffroy is more real for us than the rest; he was born in the year of the battle of Hastings, at Molincourt in the Soissonais, and was Bishop of Amiens from 1104 to 1150. A man of entirely simple, pure, and right life: one of the severest of ascetics, but without gloom—always gentle and merciful. Many miracles are recorded of him, but all indicating a tenour of life which was chiefly miraculous by its justice and peace. Consecrated at Rheims, and attended by a train of other bishops and nobles to his diocese, he dismounts from his horse at St. Acheul, the place of St. Firmin's first tomb, and walks barefoot to his cathedral, along the causeway now so defaced: at another time he walks barefoot from Amiens to Picquigny to ask from the Vidame of Amiens the freedom of the Chatelain Adam. He maintained the privileges of the citizens, with [Pg 129] the help of Louis le Gros, against the Count of Amiens, defeated him, and razed his castle; nevertheless, the people not enough obeying him in the order of their life, he blames his own weakness, rather than theirs, and retires to the Grande Chartreuse, holding himself unfit to be their bishop. The Carthusian superior questioning him on his reasons for retirement, and asking if he had ever sold the offices of the Church, the Bishop answered, "My father, my hands are pure of simony, but I have a thousand times allowed myself to be seduced by praise."

46. St. Firmin the Confessor was the son of the Roman senator who received St. Firmin himself. He preserved the tomb of the martyr in his father's garden, and at last built a church over it, dedicated to our Lady of martyrs, which was the first episcopal seat of Amiens, at St. Acheul, spoken of above. St. Ulpha was an Amienoise girl, who lived in a chalk cave above the marshes of the Somme;—if ever Mr. Murray provides you with a comic guide to Amiens, no doubt the enlightened composer of it will count much on your enjoyment of the story of her being greatly disturbed at her devotions by the frogs, and praying them silent. You are now, of course, wholly superior to such follies, and are sure that God cannot, or will not, so much as shut a frog's mouth for you. Remember, therefore, that as He also now leaves open the mouth of the liar, blasphemer, and betrayer, you must shut your own ears against their voices as you can.

Of her name, St. Wolf—or Guelph—see again Miss Yonge's Christian names. Our tower of Wolf's stone, Ulverstone, and Kirk of Ulpha, are, I believe, unconscious of Picard relatives.

47. The other saints in this porch are all in like manner provincial, and, as it were, personal friends of the Amienois; and under them, the quatrefoils represent the pleasant order of the guarded and hallowed year—the zodiacal signs above, and labours of the months below; little differing from the constant representations of them—except in the May: see below. The Libra also is a little unusual in the female [Pg 130] figure holding the scales; the lion especially good-tempered—and the 'reaping' one of the most beautiful figures in the whole series of sculptures; several of the others peculiarly refined and far-wrought. In Mr. Kaltenbacher's photographs, as I have arranged them, the bas-reliefs may be studied nearly as well as in the porch itself. Their order is as follows, beginning with December, in the left-hand inner corner of the porch:—

St. Mary.

[Go to Table of Contents]

[Pg 131]

48. And now, last of all, if you care to see it, we will go into the Madonna's porch—only, if you come at all, good Protestant feminine reader—come civilly: and be pleased to recollect, if you have, in known history, material for recollection, this (or if you cannot recollect—be you very solemnly assured of this): that neither Madonna-worship, nor Lady-worship of any sort, whether of dead ladies or living ones, ever did any human creature any harm,—but that Money worship, Wig worship, Cocked-Hat-and-Feather worship, Plate worship, Pot worship and Pipe worship, have done, and are doing, a great deal,—and that any of these, and all, are quite million-fold more offensive to the God of Heaven and Earth and the Stars, than all the absurdest and lovingest mistakes made by any generations of His simple children, about what the Virgin-mother could, or would, or might do, or feel for them.

49. And next, please observe this broad historical fact about the three sorts of Madonnas.

There is first the Madonna Dolorosa; the Byzantine type, and Cimabue's. It is the noblest of all; and the earliest, in distinct popular influence. [4-29]

Secondly. The Madone Reine, who is essentially the Frank and Norman one; crowned, calm, and full of power and gentleness. She is the one represented in this porch.

[Pg 132]

Thirdly. The Madone Nourrice, who is the Raphaelesque and generally late and decadence one. She is seen here in a good French type in the south transept porch, as before noticed. An admirable comparison will be found instituted by M. Viollet le Duc (the article 'Vierge,' in his dictionary, is altogether deserving of the most attentive study) between this statue of the Queen-Madonna of the southern porch and the Nurse-Madonna of the transept. I may perhaps be able to get a photograph made of his two drawings, side by side: but, if I can, the reader will please observe that he has a little flattered the Queen, and a little vulgarized the Nurse, which is not fair. The statue in this porch is in thirteenth-century style, extremely good: but there is no reason for making any fuss about it—the earlier Byzantine types being far grander.

50. The Madonna's story, in its main incidents, is told in the series of statues round the porch, and in the quatrefoils below—several of which refer, however, to a legend about the Magi to which I have not had access, and I am not sure of their interpretation.

The large statues are on the left hand, reading outwards as usual.

On the right hand, reading outward,

51. I am not sure of rightly interpreting the introduction of these two last statues: but I believe the idea of the designer was that virtually the Queen Mary visited Herod when she sent, or had sent for her, the Magi to tell him of her presence at Bethlehem: and the contrast between Solomon's reception of the Queen of Sheba, and Herod's driving out the Madonna into Egypt, is dwelt on throughout this side of the porch, with their several consequences to the two [Pg 133] Kings and to the world.

The quatrefoils underneath the great statues run as follows:

29. Under Gabriel—
A. Daniel seeing the stone cut out without hands.
b. Moses and the burning bush.

30. Under Virgin Annunciate—
A. Gideon and the dew on the fleece.
B. Moses with written law, retiring; Aaron, dominant,
points to his budding rod.

31. Under Virgin Visitant—
A. The message to Zacharias: "Fear not, for thy
prayer is heard."
B. The dream of Joseph: "Fear not to take unto thee
Mary thy wife." (?)

32. Under St. Elizabeth—
A. The silence of Zacharias: "They perceived that he
had seen a vision in the temple."
B. "There is none of thy kindred that is called by this
name." "He wrote saying, His name is John."

33. Under Virgin in Presentation—
A. Flight into Egypt.
B. Christ with the Doctors.

34. Under St. Simeon—
A. Fall of the idols in Egypt.
B. The return to Nazareth.

These two last quatrefoils join the beautiful C and D of Amos.

Then on the opposite side, under the Queen of Sheba, and joining the A and B of Obadiah—

40.   A. Solomon entertains the Queen of Sheba. The Grace cup.
B. Solomon teaches the Queen of Sheba, "God is above."

39. Under Solomon—
A. Solomon on his throne of judgment.
B. Solomon praying before his temple-gate.

[Pg 134]

38. Under Herod—
A. Massacre of Innocents.
B. Herod orders the ship of the Kings to be burned.

37. Under the third King—
A. Herod inquires of the Kings.
B. Burning of the ship.

36. Under the second King—
A. Adoration in Bethlehem ?—not certain.
B. The voyage of the Kings.

35. Under the first King—
A. The Star in the East.
B. "Being warned in a dream that they should not return
to Herod."

I have no doubt of finding out in time the real sequence of these subjects: but it is of little import,—this group of quatrefoils being of less interest than the rest, and that of the Massacre of the Innocents curiously illustrative of the incapability of the sculptor to give strong action or passion.

But into questions respecting the art of these bas-reliefs I do not here attempt to enter. They were never intended to serve as more than signs, or guides to thought. And if the reader follows this guidance quietly, he may create for himself better pictures in his heart; and at all events may recognize these following general truths, as their united message.

52. First, that throughout the Sermon on this Amiens Mount, Christ never appears, or is for a moment thought of, as the Crucified, nor as the Dead: but as the Incarnate Word—as the present Friend—as the Prince of Peace on Earth,—and as the Everlasting King in Heaven. What His life is, what His commands are, and what His judgment will be, are the things here taught: not what He once did, nor what He once suffered, but what He is now doing—and what He requires us to do. That is the pure, joyful, beautiful lesson of Christianity; and the fall from that faith, and all the corruptions of its abortive practice, may be summed briefly as the habitual contemplation of Christ's death instead of His Life, and the substitution of His past suffering for our present duty.

[Pg 135]

53. Then, secondly, though Christ bears not His cross, the mourning prophets,—the persecuted apostles—and the martyred disciples do bear theirs. For just as it is well for you to remember what your undying Creator is doing for you—it is well for you to remember what your dying fellow-creatures have done: the Creator you may at your pleasure deny or defy—the Martyr you can only forget; deny, you cannot. Every stone of this building is cemented with his blood, and there is no furrow of its pillars that was not ploughed by his pain.

54. Keeping, then, these things in your heart, look back now to the central statue of Christ, and hear His message with understanding. He holds the Book of the Eternal Law in His left hand; with His right He blesses,—but blesses on condition. "This do, and thou shalt live"; nay, in stricter and more piercing sense, This be and thou shalt live: to show Mercy is nothing—thy soul must be full of mercy; to be pure in act is nothing—thou shalt be pure in heart also.

And with this further word of the unabolished law—"This if thou do not, this if thou art not, thou shalt die."

55. Die (whatever Death means)—totally and irrevocably. There is no word in thirteenth-century Theology of the pardon (in our modern sense) of sins; and there is none of the Purgatory of them. Above that image of Christ with us, our Friend, is set the image of Christ over us, our Judge. For this present life—here is His helpful Presence. After this life—there is His coming to take account of our deeds, and of our desires in them; and the parting asunder of the Obedient from the Disobedient, of the Loving from the Unkind, with no hope given to the last of recall or reconciliation. I do not know what commenting or softening doctrines were written in frightened minuscule by the Fathers, or hinted in hesitating whispers by the prelates of the early Church. But I know that the language of every graven stone and every glowing window,—of things daily seen and universally understood by the people, was absolutely and alone, this teaching of Moses from Sinai in the beginning, and of St. John from Patmos in the end, of the Revelation of God to Israel. [Pg 136] This it was, simply—sternly—and continually, for the great three hundred years of Christianity in her strength (eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries), and over the whole breadth and depth of her dominion, from Iona to Cyrene,—and from Calpe to Jerusalem. At what time the doctrine of Purgatory was openly accepted by Catholic Doctors, I neither know nor care to know. It was first formalized by Dante, but never accepted for an instant by the sacred artist teachers of his time—or by those of any great school or time whatsoever. [4-30]

56. Neither do I know nor care to know—at what time the notion of Justification by Faith, in the modern sense, first got itself distinctively fixed in the minds of the heretical sects and schools of the North. Practically its strength was founded by its first authors on an asceticism which differed from monastic rule in being only able to destroy, never to build; and in endeavouring to force what severity it thought proper for itself on everybody else also; and so striving to make one artless, letterless, and merciless monastery of all the world. Its virulent effort broke down amidst furies of reactionary dissoluteness and disbelief, and remains now the basest of popular solders and plasters for every condition of broken law and bruised conscience which interest can provoke, or hypocrisy disguise.

57. With the subsequent quarrels between the two great sects of the corrupted church, about prayers for the Dead, Indulgences to the Living, Papal supremacies, or Popular liberties, no man, woman, or child need trouble themselves in studying the history of Christianity: they are nothing but the squabbles of men, and laughter of fiends among its ruins. The Life, and Gospel, and Power of it, are all written in the mighty works of its true believers: in Normandy and Sicily, on river islets of France and in the river glens of England, on the rocks of Orvieto, and by the sands of Arno. But of all, the simplest, completest, and most authoritative in its lessons to the active mind of North Europe, is this on the foundation stones of Amiens.

58. Believe it or not, reader, as you will: understand only how thoroughly it was once believed; and that all beautiful things were made, and all brave deeds done in the strength of it—until what we [Pg 138] may call 'this present time,' in which it is gravely asked whether Religion has any effect on morals, by persons who have essentially no idea whatever of the meaning of either Religion or Morality.

Concerning which dispute, this much perhaps you may have the patience finally to read, as the Flèche of Amiens fades in the distance, and your carriage rushes towards the Isle of France, which now exhibits the most admired patterns of European Art, intelligence, and behaviour.

59. All human creatures, in all ages and places of the world, who have had warm affections, common sense, and self-command, have been, and are, Naturally Moral. Human nature in its fulness is necessarily Moral,—without Love, it is inhuman, without sense, [4-31] inhuman,—without discipline, inhuman.

In the exact proportion in which men are bred capable of these things, and are educated to love, to think, and to endure, they become noble,—live happily—die calmly: are remembered with perpetual honour by their race, and for the perpetual good of it. All wise men know and have known these things, since the form of man was separated from the dust. The knowledge and enforcement of them have nothing to do with religion: a good and wise man differs from a bad and idiotic one, simply as a good dog from a cur, and as any manner of dog from a wolf or a weasel. And if you are to believe in, or preach without half believing in, a spiritual world or law—only in the hope that whatever you do, or anybody else does, that is foolish or beastly, may be in them and by them mended and patched and pardoned and worked up again as good as new—the less you believe in—and most solemnly, the less you talk about—a spiritual world, the better.

60. But if, loving well the creatures that are like yourself, you feel that you would love still more dearly, creatures better than yourself—were they revealed to you;—if striving with all your might [Pg 139] to mend what is evil, near you and around, you would fain look for a day when some Judge of all the Earth shall wholly do right, and the little hills rejoice on every side; if, parting with the companions that have given you all the best joy you had on Earth, you desire ever to meet their eyes again and clasp their hands,—where eyes shall no more be dim, nor hands fail;—if, preparing yourselves to lie down beneath the grass in silence and loneliness, seeing no more beauty, and feeling no more gladness—you would care for the promise to you of a time when you should see God's light again, and know the things you have longed to know, and walk in the peace of everlasting Love—then, the Hope of these things to you is religion, the Substance of them in your life is Faith. And in the power of them, it is promised us, that the kingdoms of this world shall yet become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ.

Notes to Chapter IV:

[Pg 140]

Plan of the West Porches

[Go to Table of Contents]

[Pg 142]

APPENDICES.

I. Chronological List of the Principal Events Referred to in the 'Bible of Amiens.'

II. References Explanatory of the Photographs illustrating Chapter IV.

III. General Plan of 'Our Fathers have told us.'

[Pg 143]

APPENDIX I.

[Go to Table of Contents]

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF THE PRINCIPAL EVENTS REFERRED TO IN THE 'BIBLE OF AMIENS.'

[Pg 144]

APPENDIX II.

[Go to Table of Contents]

REFERENCES EXPLANATORY OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS ILLUSTRATING CHAPTER IV.

The quatrefoils on the foundation of the west front of Amiens Cathedral, described in the course of the fourth chapter, had never been engraved or photographed in any form accessible to the public until last year, when I commissioned M. Kaltenbacher (6, Passage du Commerce), who had photographed them for M. Viollet le Duc, to obtain negatives of the entire series, with the central pedestal of the Christ.

The proofs are entirely satisfactory to me, and extremely honourable to M. Kaltenbacher's skill: and it is impossible to obtain any more instructive and interesting, in exposition of the manner of central thirteenth-century sculpture.

I directed their setting so that the entire succession of the quatrefoils might be included in eighteen plates; the front and two sides of the pedestal raise their number to twenty-one: the whole, unmounted, sold by my agent Mr. Ward (the negatives being my own property) for four guineas; or separately, each five shillings.

Besides these of my own, I have chosen four general views of the cathedral from M. Kaltenbacher's formerly-taken negatives, which, together with the first-named series, (twenty-five altogether,) will form a complete body of illustrations for the fourth chapter of the 'Bible of Amiens'; costing in all five guineas, forwarded free by post from Mr. Ward's (2, Church Terrace, Richmond, Surrey). In addition to these, Mr. Ward will supply the photograph of the four scenes from the life of [Pg 145] St. Firmin, mentioned on page 5 of Chapter I.; price five shillings.

For those who do not care to purchase the whole series, I have marked with an asterisk the plates which are especially desirable.

The two following lists will enable readers who possess the plates to refer without difficulty both from the photographs to the text, and from the text to the photographs, which will be found to fall into the following groups:—

Photographs.

[Pg 146]

Part I.

List of Photographs with reference to the Quatrefoils, etc.

Photographs.

Part II.—List of Quatrefoils With reference to the Photographs.

[Pg 153]

APPENDIX III.

[Go to Table of Contents]

GENERAL PLAN OF 'OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US.'

The first part of 'Our Fathers have told us,' now submitted to the public, is enough to show the proposed character and tendencies of the work, to which, contrary to my usual custom, I now invite subscription, because the degree in which I can increase its usefulness by engraved illustration must greatly depend on the known number of its supporters.

I do not recognize, in the present state of my health, any reason to fear more loss of general power, whether in conception or industry, than is the proper and appointed check of an old man's enthusiasm: of which, however, enough remains in me to warrant my readers against the abandonment of a purpose entertained already for twenty years.

The work, if I live to complete it, will consist of ten parts, each taking up some local division of Christian history, and gathering, towards their close, into united illustration of the power of the Church in the Thirteenth Century.

The present volume completes the first part, descriptive of the early Frank power, and of its final skill, in the Cathedral of Amiens.

The second part, "Ponte della Pietra," will, I hope, do more for Theodoric and Verona than I have been able to do for Clovis and the first capital of France.

The third, "Ara Celi," will trace the foundations of the Papal power.

The fourth, "Ponte-a-Mare," and fifth, "Ponte Vecchio," will only with much difficulty gather into brief form what I have by me of scattered materials respecting Pisa and Florence.

The sixth, "Valle Crucis," will be occupied with the monastic architecture of England and Wales.

The seventh, "The Springs of Eure," will be wholly given to the cathedral of Chartres.

The eighth, "Domrémy," to that of Rouen and the schools of architecture which it represents.

The ninth, "The Bay of Uri," to the Pastoral forms of Catholicism, reaching to our own times.

And the tenth, "The Bells of Cluse," to the pastoral Protestantism of Savoy, Geneva, and the Scottish border.

Each part will consist of four sections only; and one of them, the fourth, will usually be descriptive of some monumental city or cathedral, the resultant and remnant of the religious power examined in the preparatory chapters.

One illustration at least will be given with each chapter, and drawings made for others, which will be placed at once in the Sheffield museum for public reference, and engraved as I find support, or opportunity for binding with the completed work.

As in the instance of Chapter IV. of this first part, a smaller edition of the descriptive chapters will commonly be printed in reduced form for travellers and non-subscribers; but otherwise, I intend this work to be furnished to subscribers only.

[Pg 157]

INDEX.

[Go to Table of Contents]

[Except in the case of Chapter 1., which is not divided into numbered sections, the references in this index are to both page and section. Thus 206. iv. 51 is to page 206, Chapter IV., § 51.]

Aaron's rod, 133. iv. 51.

Adder, the deaf, 110. iv. 33-4.

Admiration, test of, 96. iv. 8.

Afghan war, 48. ii. 43.

Agricola, 67. iii. 21.

Aisles of aspen and of stone, 97. iv. 10.

Alaric (son-in-law of Theodoric), defeated and killed by Clovis at Poitiers, 9; 52. ii. 49.

—— the younger, 52, ii. 49.

Albofleda, sister of Clovis, 51. ii. 48.

Alemannia (Germany) 34. ii. 19.

Alexander III. and Barbarossa, 111. iv. 35.

Alfred, King, of England, religious feeling under, 21.

Algeria, 63. iii. 13.

Alphabet, the, and Mœsia, 68. iii. 22.

Alps, the, and climbing, 72. iii. 29.

[Pg 158]

Amos, figure and quatrefoils, Amiens Cathedral, 123. iv. 43.

Anchorites, early, 72, 73. iii. 29, 30.

Anderson, J. R., on purgatory, 136 n . iv. 55 n.

Angelico, scriptural teaching of, 81. iii. 46.

Anger, bides its time, 48. ii. 42.

[Pg 159]

Angoulême, legend of its walls falling, 50 n. ii. 47.

Aphrodite, 27. ii. 3.

Apocrypha, the, received by the Church, 78. iii. 40.

Apostles, the, and virtues, Amiens Cathedral, 112. iv. 37 sq.

Arab, Gothic and Classic, 63. iii. 13.

Arianism of Visigoths, 9.

Arles, defeat of Clovis by Theodoric at, 50, 54. ii. 47, 53.

Armour, early Frankish, 43. ii. 33.

Asceticism, our power of rightly estimating, 72. iii. 29.

Assyria, ancient kingdom of, and the Jews, 65. iii. 18.

Astronomy from Egypt, 71. iii. 27.

Athena, 86. iii. 53.

Athens, influence of, on Europe, 62. iii. 12.

Atlantic cable, 61. iii. 8.

Attila, defeated at Chalons, 7.

Attuarii, 34, 38 n. ii. 18, 28 n.

Augurs, college of, 70 n. iii. 26 n.

Aurelian, the Emperor, a Dacian, 32 n. ii. 15.

Auroch herds, of Scythia, 31 n. ii. 11.

[Pg 160]

Auvergnats, 10.

Avarice, modern, 111. iv. 35; 120. iv. 41.

Bacteria, the, 13.

Baltic, tribes of the, 31. ii. 11, 12.

Baptism, not essential to salvation, 18.

Barbarossa, in the porch of St. Mark's, 111. iv. 35.

Batavians, 49. ii. 45.

Battle-axe, French, or Achon, 42. ii. 32.

Bayeux, Bishop of, surrender of Lord Salisbury to, 105. iv. 24.

Beauvais, cathedral of, 88. iv. 1.

Beggars, how to give to, 95. iv. 8.

Belshazzar's feast, 122. iv. 42.

"Bible of Amiens," meaning of title, 127. iv. 44

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Bibliotheca, 77. iii. 37.

Bishops, French, in battle, 105. iv. 24. See Everard and S. Geoffrey.

Bittern and hedgehog, 126. iv. 43.

Black's atlas, 36. ii. 24.

Black Prince, the, his leopard coinage, 117. iv. 41.

Blasphemy and slang, 105. iv. 25.

Blight, as a type of punishment, 123. iv. 43.

Boden see, the, 37. ii. 25.

Boulin, Arnold, carves choir of Amiens Cathedral, 92 n. iv. 5.

Bourges, cathedral of, 88. iv. 1.

Bouvines, battle of, 105. iv. 24.

Bretons, in France, 6, 8, 11.

Britain, gives Christianity its first deeds and final legends, 32. ii. 15.

Brocken summit, the, 35. ii. 22.

Bructeri, 34. ii. 18.

Bunyan, John, 16.

Burgundy, and France distinct, 6, 8, 11.

Bussey and Gaspey's History of France, 52 n. ii. 50.

Butler, Colonel, "Far out Rovings retold," pref. iv., 35.

Byron's "Cain," 80. iii. 44.

Byzantine Madonna, 131. iv. 49.

Byzantium, influence of on Europe, 62. iii. 12.

Calais, road from, to Paris, 10

Callousness of modern public opinion, 48. ii. 42.

Camels, disobedient and ill-tempered, 118. iv. 41.

Canary Islands, 63. iii. 13.

Cancan, the, 118. iv. 41.

Canterbury, S. Martin's church at, and S. Augustine, 18.

Canute, 64. iii. 16.

Carlyle, T., description of Poland and Prussia, 30 n. ii. 10.

Carpaccio, draperies in the pictures of, 2.

Carthage, 63. iii. 13.

Cary's Dante, 112 n. iv. 36.

Cassel, 36. ii. 24.

Cathedrals, author's love of, 88. iv. 1.

Catti, the, 34,  38, ii. 18, 27.

Cattle, huge, of nomad tribes, 31 n. ii. 11.

Centuries, division of the, into four periods, 26. ii. 1.

Chalons, defeat of Attila at, 7.

Chamavi, 34. ii. 18.

Chapman, George, his last prayer, 102. iv. 20-21.

Charity, giving to beggars, 95. iv. 8.

Charlemagne, religion under, 21 n.

Chartres cathedral, 88. iv. 1.

Chastity, Amiens Cathedral, 120. iv. 41.

Chaucer, "Romaunt of Rose" quoted on franchise, 39 n. ii. 28.

Chauci, 34, 38. ii. 18, 27.

Childebert (son of Clovis), first Frank king of Paris, 51. ii. 48.

Childeric, son of Merovée, king of Franks, exiled 447 A.D., 7.

Chivalry, its dawn and darkening, 43 ii. 33.

Chlodomir, second son of Clovis, 51. ii. 48.

Chlodowald, son of Chlodomir, 51. ii. 48.

Christ, the Beau Christ d'Amiens, 90. 111. iv. 3, 36.

Christian,"   "The (newspaper), 83. iii. 48.

Christianity and the Bible, 70. iii. 26.

Church, the first French, at Amiens, 5, 6.

Churlishness, figure of, Amiens Cathedral, 118. iv. 41.

Cimabue's Madonna, 131. iv. 49.

Cincinnatus, 67. iii. 21.

Circumstances, man the creature of, 58, 59. iii. 1, 3.

Classic countries of Europe, (Gothic, and Arab,) 62 sq. iii. 11.

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Claudius, the Emperor, a Dacian, 32 n. ii. 15.

Clergymen, modern, 17.

Climate, and nationality, 9.

Cloak, legend of S. Martin's, 7, 15.

Clodion, leads Franks over Rhine and takes Amiens, 445 A.D., 7.

Clotaire, son of Clovis, 51. ii. 48.

Clotilde (wife of Clovis, daughter of Childeric), 6, 21.

——, daughter of Clovis and Clotilde, 51. ii. 48.

Clovis, King of the Franks, 7.

——, son of Childeric, 7.

Cockatrice, sculpture of the, Amiens Cathedral, 110. iv. 33-4.

Cockneyism, history writing and, 13.

Cockneyism, 'Mossoo,' 38. ii. 27.

Coinage, the Black Prince's leopard, 117. iv. 41.

Colchos, tribes of the lake of, 31. ii. 11.

Cologne, battlefield of Tolbiac from, 54. ii. 54.

Commerce and protestantism, 79. iii. 43.

Competition will not produce art, 90 n. iv. 4.

Constantine, Emperor, power of, 54. ii. 54.

Constantius, Emperor, a Dacian, 32 n. ii. 15.

Courage, figure of, Amiens Cathedral, 117. iv. 41.

Covetousness, and atheism, 119. iv. 41.

Cowardice, figure of, Amiens Cathedral, 117. iv. 41.

Creasy, Sir E., "History of England," 59 iii. 5, 6.

Crecy, battle of, Edward II. fords the, 1.

Crime, the history of, its possible lessons, 12.

Cross, the power of the, in history, 79. iii. 42.

Crown, the, of Hope, 119. iv. 41.

Cyrene, 63. iii. 13.

Dacia, contest of, with Rome, 30. ii. 9.

Dædalus, 101, iv. 19.

Dalmatia, 68. iii. 23.

Danes, the, 31. ii. 12.

Dante, as a result of the Bible, 80. iii. 44.

Danube, tribes of the, 31. ii. 1.

Darwinism, 40. ii. 30; 126 . iv. 43.

Dates, recollection of exact, 26, ii. 1, 2, 33. ii. 17.

David and monastic life, 70. iii. 26.

Dead, recognition of the, in a future life, 139. iv. 60.

Denmark, under Canute, 64. iii. 16.

Despair, figure of, Amiens Cathedral, 120. iv. 41.

Devil, St. Martin's answer to the, 17.

Diocletian, retirement of, 66. iii. 20.

Discipline, essential to man, 108. iv. 29.

Dniester, importance of the, 61. iii. 9-10.

Doctor, preaching at Matlock, 83 n. iii. 48 n.

Douglas, Bishop, translation of Virgil, 135; 86. iii. 53; 102. iv. 20.

Dove, the, a type of humility, 120. iv. 41.

Dover cliff and parade, 96. iv. 9.

Drachenfels, district of the, 35. ii. 20, 22.

Dragon, under feet of the Christ, Amiens Cathedral, 111. iv. 34.

Druids, in France, 4.

Durham Cathedral, 89. iv. 1.

Dusevel's history of Amiens, 2 n.

East, geography of the, 64, iii. 17, 65. iii. 18.

Eder, the, 36. ii. 24.

Egypt, 63. iii. 13.

Eisenach, 36. ii. 24.

Elbe, tribes of the, 31. ii. 11.

Elijah, figure of, Amiens Cathedral, 124. iv. 43.

Engel-bach, 36. ii. 24.

England, dominions of (story of C. Fox and Frenchman), 59. iii. 5-6.

English cathedrals, 88. iv. 1.

Ethiopia, the Lord striking, 126. iv. 43.

Europe, condition and history of, 1-500 A.D., 31. ii. 13, 54.