A Year in Europe

Of the palaces that we visited, the one in which the poet Browning lived, and in which his son now lives, is the best preserved, and illustrates better than any other the almost regal state in which the wealthy Venetians lived in the day of their commercial supremacy. One of these old palaces on the Grand Canal is now used as a bank. Some are used as warehouses, and others are put to still meaner uses. The Doge's Palace is, of course, the largest and finest, but it is more like a public building than a residence. Next to this stands the chief architectural glory of Venice, the gorgeous Cathedral of St. Mark, with its unequalled profusion of costly materials, and its ominously uneven stone floor, suggesting the painful possibility that it, too, may some day share the fate of the great Campanile, which till last summer lifted its head three hundred and seventy-five feet in the air from the pavement of the square in front. We found the ruins of this graceful structure, up the winding incline of which Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have ridden his horse to the belfry, lying in a heap on the square surrounded by a temporary unpainted board fence. Workmen within were making preparations for the erection of the new bell tower which is to take the place of the old one. On the first Sunday after our arrival we heard the Rev. Dr. Robertson, at the Presbyterian Church, make felicitous use of the fate of the old Campanile in a sermon on the text, "Other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." Nowhere are foundations of more importance than in Venice. The whole city is built upon piles. The Rialto Bridge, a great marble arch of a single span, rests upon twelve thousand of these piles, which are driven deep into the mud.

The interior of the Church of the Jesuits made more impression upon us than any other Venetian church except St. Marks. It looks at first view like it was lined throughout with chintz, through which runs a green pattern; but on closer inspection you find that it is all white marble—the pulpit and its heavy curtains, the altar steps, the walls from floor to ceiling, are all of white marble, and the green pattern is nothing less than verd antique.

Some of our young people, who had already wearied of the miles of picture galleries in Europe, manifested but little interest in the rich collection of art at Venice, but I think that all brought away an indelible impression of Titian's splendid "Assumption of the Virgin." They felt a much keener interest in the marvellous skill of the Venetian glass-makers at Murano. But their special delight was the gondolas. They soon had their favorites among the gondoliers, and, with Marco and Pedro propelling them, threaded the innumerable canals in every direction, visited the outlying islands, drifted hither and thither on the broad lagoons, and enjoyed the distant views of this strangely beautiful city, sometimes looming through the mist, at other times standing out sharp and clear against the red sky of a flaming sunset.

Nothing in all the strange history of Venice interested us so much as the career of Fra Paolo Sarpi, "the greatest of the Venetians," as Dr. Alexander Robertson well calls him in his striking biography of that illustrious thinker and man of action. An ecclesiastic whom Gibbon calls "the incomparable historian of the Council of Trent"; a mathematician of whom Galileo said, "No man in Europe surpasses Master Paolo Sarpi in his knowledge of the science of mathematics"; an anatomist whom Acquapendente, the famous surgeon of Padua, calls "the oracle of this century"; a metaphysician who, as Lord Macaulay says, anticipated "Locke on the Human Understanding"; and a statesman who saved Venice from the domination of the papacy—it is no wonder that Dr. Bedell, chaplain of the English Ambassador to Venice, should have said that he was "holden for a miracle in all manner of knowledge, divine and human." "As a statesman, the great Republic of Venice committed all its interests to his guidance, and he made its history, while he lived, an unbroken series of triumphs; in an age when the papacy lifted high its head, and rode roughshod over the rights of kings and peoples, he forced Pope Paul V., one of the haughtiest of Rome's Pontiffs, to his knees, and so shattered in his hands the weapon of interdict and excommunication that never again has it served the interest of a wearer of the tiara. Constitutional government everywhere owes something to Fra Paolo; and modern Italian history is the outcome and embodiment of the principles he laid down in his voluminous State papers. He was stronger than the papacy, for, in spite of the hatred, persecution and protest of Pope and Curia, he lived and died within the pale of the church, enjoying the esteem and affection of its clergy, performing all his priestly duties, and receiving, as the Senate wrote in its circular announcing his death to the courts of Europe, 'Li santissimi sagramenti con ogni maggior pieta.' And he was stronger than the Republic, for immediately after his death it began to succumb to papal domination, and to totter to its fall."

We visited the Servite Monastery, where he lived, the bridge where he was set upon and stabbed by the Pope's hired assassins, and where his statue now stands, and the grave in the island cemetery of Venice where his body rests at last after all the strange adventures and removals made necessary by the ghoulish malice of his foes.

December 10, 1902.

The business activity of Bologna is in sharp contrast with the stagnation and decay of Venice. It is a brisk and handsome city, with well-paved streets, flanked by arcades like those along the Rue de Rivoli in Paris. Bologna has an unequalled number of these colonnades. They are so continuous, indeed, and afford such perfect protection from the sun in summer and the rain in winter, that it is more nearly possible to dispense with umbrellas here than in any other city in the world. The greatest of these covered ways is the portico which winds up the mountain just outside the city, by an easy gradation, to the costly church of the Madonna di S. Lucca, which, as its name indicates, possesses an image of the Virgin said to have been the work of Saint Luke. There are no fewer than six hundred and thirty-five arches in this colonnade, and they command lovely views on either side, as one ascends; but the view from the church, at the top of the mountain, caps the climax, combining, as it does, Alps, Appennines, Adriatic, plains and cities. It is from the arches of this long colonnade up the mountain that one gets the best impression of Bologna's towers. They are very numerous, and many of them are out of the perpendicular. In fact, there are more leaning towers here than in any other city in the world. But, unlike "Pisa's leaning miracle," these are not beautiful. They are imposing only in the grouping of a distant view, being nothing but quadrangular masses of ugly brown brick, with no ornaments, no windows, and indeed no known uses, the object for which they were erected being now an insoluble mystery.

Bologna has important manufactures of silk goods, velvet, crape, chemicals, paper, musical instruments, soap and sausages. We made full trial of the last two mentioned commodities, and found them excellent. But Bologna, while vital and modern, is not lacking in the matter of antiquity and literary and historical interest. It boasts the oldest university in the world, founded in 425 A. D. In the thirteenth century it had ten thousand students, and it still has over a thousand. In front of the University stands a statue of Galvani, holding a tablet on which he is exhibiting the famous frog legs. But it is said that "his wife was the real discoverer of galvanism, having laid some frogs, which she was preparing for soup, beside a charged electrical machine; and it was she who observed the convulsion in the frogs which she touched with the scalpel, and communicated the discovery to her husband, who repeated the experiment at the University."

December 15, 1902.

Florence! "City of fair flowers, and flower of fair cities!" Second only to Rome itself in variety and wealth of historical, artistic and literary interest, home of Dante and Boccacio, Machiavelli and the Medici, Galileo and Amerigo Vespucci, Savonarola and Fra Angelico, Cimabue, Giotto, Brunelleschi, Ghiberti, Donatello, Michelangelo and Benvenuto Cellini—what can one do in a letter like this but merely name them and pass on, hoping for a time of larger leisure to say at least a word concerning the most illustrious of them?

In the Uffizi Gallery, which is "a complete exemplification of the progress and development of art," there is an octagonal room, called the Tribune, which contains perhaps the richest aggregation of masterpieces in the world. Sculpture is represented by the Venus de Medici, the Young Apollo, The Wrestlers, The Grinder, and The Dancing Faun; and painting by no less remarkable pictures. In addition to these, the things that stand out in one's memory in connection with Florence are Cellini's "Perseus," Ghiberti's "Doors," Michael Angelo's "David" and his "Lorenzo de Medici," Brunelleschi's "Dome," and last, but not least, Giotto's "Tower," "the model and mirror of perfect architecture," of which John Ruskin says: "The characteristics of Power and Beauty occur more or less in different buildings—some in one and some in another. But all together, all in their highest possible relative degrees, they exist, as far as I know, only in one building in the world—the Campanile of Giotto at Florence." For the proper appreciation of almost any other great production of art some education in art is necessary, but any one can see the transcendant beauty of Giotto's "Tower." Untutored as we are in these matters, we never wearied of looking at it.

In the freshness of its undimmed splendor, there is nothing in Florence to compare with the Medici Chapel. It is still unfinished, but has cost up to the present time three million five hundred thousand dollars. It is probably the most magnificent mausoleum in the world. "The walls are covered with costly marbles, inlaid with precious stones—a gorgeous mosaic of the richest material."

But, after all, the thing that lays deepest hold of us in Florence is the story of Savonarola, Harbinger of the Reformation and Martyr for the Truth. That little cell in the Monastery of San Marco, where he once lived, and where his manuscript sermons, his annotated books and his wooden crucifix are still shown; those fearful dungeons in the Palazzo Vecchio, where the greatest man of his age endured his forty days' imprisonment, and lay during the intervals of torture, and spent his last hours on earth; and the bustling Piazza Della Signoria, which witnessed the triumphant tragedy of May 23, 1498—Florence has nothing else so impressive as these. We visit them with subdued hearts and reverent spirits. "On the 22nd of May, 1498, it was announced to Savonarola and his friends, Domenico and Maruffi, that they were to be executed by five the next morning; our heroic preacher was thoroughly resigned to his share of the doom, saying to Domenico, 'Knowest thou not it is not permitted to a man to choose the mode of his own death?' The three friends partook of the sacrament of the Holy Supper, administered by Savonarola. He said, 'We shall soon be there, where we can sing with David, "Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!"' They were then taken to the tribunal, where they were divested of all their priestly decorations, during which the bishop took Savonarola by the hand, saying, 'Thus I exclude thee from the church militant and triumphant.' 'From the church militant thou mayest,' exclaimed Savonarola, 'but from the church triumphant thou canst not; that does not belong to thee.'... The last that was beheld of him was his hand uplifted as if to bless the people; the last that was heard of him, 'My Saviour, though innocent, willingly died for my sins, and should I not willingly give up this poor body out of love to him?' The cinders of the bodies of the martyred friars were carted away, and thrown into the river Arno." But—

What the principles of Wycliffe have done for England, the principles of Savonarola may yet do for Italy. At any rate, his work for Italy is not done yet.

December 19, 1902.

The four chief objects of interest at Pisa are all in a group at the northern end of the town, and a wonderfully effective group it is: the cloistered cemetery, or Camp Santo, with its fifty-five shiploads of earth from the Holy Land; the Baptistery, with its remarkable echo; the Cathedral, with the pendent lamp in the nave which suggested to Galileo the idea of the pendulum; and that wonder of the world, the white marble Tower, which leans thirteen feet out of the perpendicular. We all tried in vain to stand with heels and back to the inside of the north wall on the ground floor—it cannot be done; one falls forward at once. From the top there is a magnificent view of the city and the surrounding plain, of the mountains on the east and the sea on the west, of the city of Leghorn and the island of Elba.

From the windows of our hotel at Pisa we saw for the first time the red gold of ripe oranges shining amid their dark green leaves in the gardens, and rejoiced to think that at last we had reached a somewhat milder climate, and were now leaving rigorous winter behind us.

The journey from Pisa to Rome is a long one, and the schedule was such that we did not arrive till late at night. From the car windows we had some impressive views of the Mediterranean by moonlight, and of the solemn campagna, and, thus prepared, we crossed the Tiber at midnight, and passed through the breach in the walls which has been made for the railway, feeling, perhaps even more deeply than is usual, the thrill with which all travellers except those who are utterly devoid of imagination first enter the Eternal City.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

Add to this the amount of time required of one who acts as general director of the tour, and has to take account of all manner of business details, and the number of questions to be answered when there are three or four young people in the party who have read just enough general history to make their minds bristle with interrogations at every interesting place, and who have to be read to daily en masse on the spot in order to improve the psychological moment of excited curiosity; add also the physician's injunction to take abundance of exercise in the open air, in order to the full recovery of health and the laying up of strength for future work, and his earnest counsel not to linger much at a writing desk or a study table—and it will be seen that if the continuity of this series of letters suffers an occasional break, it is but the natural result of the conditions of tourist life.

It may interest some of my younger readers to know that the member of our party who receives the most attention is a little blue-eyed girl, just two years old to-day, who is the most extraordinary traveller of her age that I ever saw or ever heard of, accepting all the irregularities, inconveniences and discomforts of this migratory mode of life with the serene indifference of a veteran. We naturally supposed that, being so young, she would give us more or less trouble on so long a journey, and this proved to be true on the cold and rough sea voyage, but, from the day that we landed on this side of the ocean, she has been a delight to our whole party, a maker of friends wherever we have gone, and an immensely interesting object to the populace of the cities through which we have passed. At Leyden, in Holland, as we passed along the streets, we were followed all over town by an admiring throng of Dutch children, just out of school, to whom our baby's bright red coat and cap were no less interesting than their wooden shoes were to us; and so we found out how the elephants and monkeys and musicians and other people who make up the street parade of a circus may be supposed to feel when they pass through a town followed by the motley gang of school boys, ragamuffins, and general miscellanies of humanity.

At Wiesbaden, in Germany, we bought one of those odd little German baby carts with two wheels and two handles, like plow handles, between which the person who pushes it walks, the baby really riding backwards, instead of forwards, as in our American baby carriages. You will see from this description that German baby carriages are like the German language—all turned the wrong way, though it must be said for this arrangement that the baby is not so likely to be lonesome as when riding face forward, since she always has some one to look at. Well, at Venice, which is almost a dead town now, so far as business is concerned, and which has perhaps as large a leisure class—that is, street loafers—as any city of equal size on this terraqueous planet, a lady of our party essayed to take the baby out for an airing in her German cart. It would appear that it was the first time since the foundation of that pile-driven city in the sea that a pair of wheels was ever seen on her streets. At any rate, from the moment that the lady and the baby and the cart emerged from the hotel door they were attended by an ever-increasing throng of unwashed Venetians, whose interest could not have been keener had Santos Dumont's air-ship or a Japanese jinriksha suddenly appeared in their gondola-ridden town, and who commented in shrill Italian on this wheeled apparition. The lady is not easily beaten when she decides to do anything, but, after standing that for half a block or so, she made a hasty retreat to the hotel, and wheels disappeared, probably forever, from the streets of Venice.

Although Venice, with its population of one hundred and sixty-three thousand, is seven miles in circumference, and is divided by one hundred and forty-six canals into one hundred and seventeen islands, yet these are so joined together by means of four hundred bridges that it is possible to walk all over the city. But the bridges are built in steps, and cannot be used by wheeled vehicles. There are no horses or carriages of any kind. The funereal-looking gondola, always painted black, is the only conveyance upon these streets of water, and does duty for cab, omnibus, wagon, cart, wheelbarrow and hearse. It is used for pleasure riding, shopping, church-going, theatre-going, visiting, carrying prisoners to jail, carrying the dead to the cemetery—in short, for everything.

In propelling this black but graceful and easy-going boat, the gondolier does not sit. He stands, on a sort of deck platform towards the stern, and to balance his weight there is affixed to the prow a heavy piece of shining steel, which rears itself at the front almost like a figure-head, only this is always of the same pattern, simply a broad, upright blade of steel, notched deeply on the front edge. The gondolier does not pull the oar, he pushes it—there is only one oar—and he does not change it from side to side, as in paddling a canoe, but makes all the strokes on one side, a thing that looks very easy, but is in fact extremely difficult. The dexterity of these men with their long single oar is wonderful. They glide in and out among scores of gondolas on the crowded canals without collision or jerking, and they turn a corner within an inch.

These remarks upon the skill of the gondoliers, and the ease and safety of the gondolas, remind me, by contrast, of the destructive bungling of a porter in Cologne, who undertook to cart a load of trunks and handbags and shawl-straps down from our hotel to the Rhine steamer, and who, in turning a corner on a down grade, made the turn too short, and hurled the whole lot of our belongings into the muddy street with such violence that many of them were defaced, some permanently damaged, and one valise broken to pieces and utterly ruined.

That German baby carriage had an exciting adventure also on the night of our arrival in Rome. As usual, it was made the apex of the pyramid of trunks and grip-sacks which constitute our sign manual, so to speak, on the top of every omnibus that takes us from the station to the hotel; but in this instance it was carelessly left untied, so that as we went steeply down one of the seven hills of Rome, the cart tumbled from its high perch to the stone-paved street, snapping off one of the handles, and suffering sundry other shattering experiences. A few days after we had the pleasure of paying a fraudulent cabinetmaker more for repairing it than it cost in the first instance. The Italian workmen and shopkeepers uniformly charge you more than their work and goods are worth. I think I have had more counterfeit money passed on me in the short time I have been in Italy than I have had in all the rest of my life before, and the very first swindle of this kind to which I was subjected was in a church, when the sacristan gave me a counterfeit two-franc piece in change as I paid the admission fees to see certain paintings and sculptures behind the high altar.

However, I am wandering from my subject; I may conclude my eulogy on the baby above mentioned by saying that, young as she is, she sits through the seventy or eighty minutes of the customary tedious European dinner almost as circumspectly as a graven image might, but reminding us of one of Raphael's cherubs in her blue-eyed combination of sweetness, archness and dignity.

Next time we will resume our account of matters of more general interest.

CHAPTER XXIX.

I had read repeatedly the story of the bringing of St. Mark's bones from Alexandria, in Egypt, to their present resting-place in St. Mark's Cathedral at Venice—a story which is related as follows in that same lively volume:

"St. Mark died at Alexandria, in Egypt. He was martyred, I think. However, that has nothing to do with my legend. About the founding of the city of Venice—say four hundred and fifty years after Christ—(for Venice is much younger than any other Italian city), a priest dreamed that an angel told him that until the remains of St. Mark were brought to Venice, the city could never rise to high distinction among the nations; that the body must be captured, brought to the city, and a magnificent church built over it; and that if ever the Venetians allowed the Saint to be removed from his new resting-place, in that day Venice would perish from off the face of the earth. The priest proclaimed his dream, and forthwith Venice set about procuring the corpse of St. Mark. One expedition after another tried and failed, but the project was never abandoned during four hundred years. At last it was secured by stratagem, in the year eight hundred and something. The commander of the Venetian expedition disguised himself, stole the bones, separated them, and packed them in vessels filled with lard. The religion of Mahomet causes its devotees to abhor anything in the nature of pork, and so when the Christian was stopped at the gate of the city, they only glanced once into the precious baskets, then turned up their noses at the unholy lard, and let him go. The bones were buried in the vaults of the grand cathedral, which had been waiting long years to receive them, and thus the safety and the greatness of Venice were secured. And to this day there be those in Venice who believe that if those holy ashes were stolen away, the ancient city would vanish like a dream, and its foundation be buried forever in the unremembering sea."

More recently I had read of what has been well called the burlesque enacted at Arundel Castle no longer ago than in July, 1902, in which the Duke of Norfolk, Cardinal Vaughan, and many lesser ornaments and dignitaries of the Romish Church, took part.

"Pope Leo XIII., in order to show his 'good-will to England,' sent from Rome the remains of St. Edmund to garnish the new Roman Catholic cathedral at Westminster. It was an appropriate gift, for such buildings are usually garnished with 'dead men's bones and all uncleanness.' But as the cathedral is not yet finished, as a further token of good-will, the relics were committed to the care of no less a personage than the Earl Marshal of England. They arrived at Arundel on the evening of July 25th, and were placed for the night in Fitzalen Chapel. The next morning the whole castle was astir betimes, for the great event of the day, the transference of the bones to the castle chapel, was to take place. This was accomplished in a solemn and befitting manner. A procession was formed, and, to the measured tread of the Earl Marshal of England, Cardinal Vaughan, several archbishops and bishops, and a mixed company of priests and acolytes and a numerous train of household servants and dependents, carrying banners, crosses, crucifixes, censers, lamps, candles, torches, and other ecclesiastical stage paraphernalia, the remains of St. Edmund were borne to their resting-place. All went off well, and at last the curtain fell on the finished play, to the satisfaction of every one. Unfortunately, however, the Pope and all concerned had to reckon with English common-sense and with English love of truth, and it was not very long before it was proved to the world that the bones, like most relics of the kind, were counterfeit—whoever else's bones they were, they were not those of St. Edmund." [7]

I had read with cordial approval Mark Twain's animadversions upon the fraud which is regularly practiced on the people of Naples by the priests in the Cathedral:

"In this city of Naples they believe in and support one of the wretchedest of all religious impostures one can find in Italy—the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of St. Januarius. Twice a year the priests assemble all the people at the Cathedral, and get out this phial of clotted blood, and let them see it slowly dissolve and become liquid; and every day for eight days this dismal farce is repeated, while the priests go among the crowd and collect money for the exhibition. The first day the blood liquefies in forty-seven minutes—the church is full then, and time must be allowed the collectors to get around; after a while it liquefies a little quicker and a little quicker every day, as the houses grow smaller, till on the eighth day, with only a few dozen present to see the miracle, it liquefies in four minutes. [8]

"And here, also, they used to have a grand procession of priests, citizens, soldiers, sailors, and the high dignitaries of the city government, once a year, to shave the head of a made-up Madonna—a stuffed and painted image, like the milliner's dummy—whose hair miraculously grew and restored itself every twelve months. They still kept up this shaving procession as late as four or five years ago. It was a source of great profit to the church that possessed the remarkable effigy, and the public barbering of her was always carried out with the greatest éclat and display—the more the better, because the more excitement there was about it the larger the crowds it drew and the heavier the revenues it produced—but at last the day came when the Pope and his servants were unpopular in Naples, and the city government stopped the Madonna's annual show.

"There we have two specimens of these Neapolitans—two of the silliest possible frauds, which half the population religiously and faithfully believed, and the other half either believed or else said nothing about, and thus lent themselves to the support of the imposture."

I had read the story of the Casa Santa, or Holy House, the little stone building, thirteen and one-half feet high and twenty-eight feet long, in which the Virgin Mary had lived at Nazareth. In 336 the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, made a pilgrimage to Nazareth and built a church over the Holy House. This church fell into decay when the Saracens again got the upper hand in Palestine, and when the Christians lost Ptolemais the Holy House was carried by angels through the air from Nazareth to the coast of Dalmatia. This miraculous transportation took place in 1291. A few years later it was again removed by angels during the night, and set down in the Province of Ancona, near the eastern coast of Italy, on the ground of a widow named Laureta. Hence the name, Loretto, given to the town which sprang up around it for the accommodation of the thousands of pilgrims who flocked thither, and which is now a place of some six thousand inhabitants, whose principal business is begging and the sale of rosaries, medals and images. In a niche inside the Casa Santa is a small black image of the Virgin and Child, of cedar, attributed, of course, to St. Luke. We did not visit Loretto, but at Bologna we had the satisfaction of seeing a fac-simile of the Casa Santa, with its little window and fireplace, and the replica of St. Luke's handi-work in the niche above. A large number of women, some of them handsomely dressed, were saying their prayers and counting their beads before the altar that had been erected in front of these images and the Holy House, and a few were kneeling in the narrow space behind the altar, close to the fireplace of the house. As we passed, one of these women, in plainer garb, interrupted her devotions long enough to hold out her hand to us, begging for pennies, but without rising from her knees. There was nothing unusual about this, except that this beggar made her appeal to us while actually on her knees to the image of the Virgin, for nothing is more common in Italy than for visitors to a Roman Catholic church to pass through such "an avenue of palms" when leaving it.

I had even seen a few relics, not mere reproductions like that of the Casa Santa at Bologna, but the relics themselves. For instance, three summers ago, when in Quebec, I had made a special trip to the Church of St. Anne Beaupre, some twenty miles below the city, for the purpose of seeing the wonder-working relics of St. Anne, the alleged mother of the Virgin Mary—a bit of her finger bone and a bit of her wrist bone—which are devoutly kissed and adored by thousands of pilgrims to this magnificent church from all the French and Irish portions of Canada, and which are said to have wrought miraculous cures of all manner of maladies, cures which are attested by two immense stacks of canes, crutches, wooden legs, and the like, which rise from the floor almost to the roof on either side of the entrance. In the store in another part of the church I had got a clue to it all by seeing the poor pilgrims buying all sorts of cheap, tawdry, worthless little images and pictures, and especially little vials of oil of remarkable curative virtue because it had stood for a while before the image of St. Anne, and for which they paid probably five times as much as the oil had cost the priests who were selling it.

These, then, are potent bones and images and oils, but by far the most interesting relic I had seen before reaching Rome itself was the Iron Crown of Lombardy, at Monza, a little town in Northern Italy. This is the place where the good King Humbert was assassinated on the 29th of July, 1900, and it is not without interest for other reasons. For instance, it has a cathedral built of black and white marble in horizontal stripes, and containing, besides the tomb of Queen Theodolinda and other interesting objects in the nave and its chapels, a great number of costly articles of gold and silver, set with precious stones, in the treasury, as well as various relics, such as some of the baskets carried by the apostles, a piece of the Virgin Mary's veil, and one of John the Baptist's teeth. But we should never have made a special trip to Monza in such weather as we were having at the time of our visit, last November, had it not been for our intense desire to see its chief treasure, the Iron Crown, the most sacred and most celebrated diadem in the world, a relic possessing real historical interest, not because of any probability whatever in the story of its origin, but because of the extraordinary uses and associations of it within the last thousand years.

So, regardless of the wet, cold, foggy weather that we found in Milan, and the rivers of mud and slush that were then doing duty for streets, and the splotches of snow that lay here and there in the forlorn-looking olive orchards, we took the electric tram, which was comfortably heated, and ran out to Monza, a distance of some ten miles. When we stepped into the chilly cathedral and looked about us, we could not at first see anybody to show us around, though there were a good many poor people saying their prayers there. Evidently the custodians were not expecting tourists at such a season and in such weather. But presently, in an apartment to the left, we found a number of the priests warming their hands over a dish of twig coals covered with a light layer of white ashes, which they kindly stirred a little to make them give forth more heat as they saw us stretch our cold hands also towards the grateful warmth.

When we asked if we could see the Iron Crown, they said we could; but instead of going at once to the chapel in which it is kept, they got a great bag of keys, large keys, thirty-seven in number, as the observant statistician of our party ascertained, and led us into the treasury and unlocked a great number of doors (one of which had seven locks), and showed us the costly objects and precious relics above mentioned. We were only mildly interested in these—even in the apostolic baskets, the Virgin's veil, and John the Baptist's tooth—partly because we were so cold and partly because of our greater interest in the more famous relic which we had come especially to see.

At last one of the priests, attended by an acolyte, took up a censer, placed a little incense on the coals with a teaspoon, and, swinging it in his hand by the chain, led us back into the cathedral, turned to a chapel on the left, unlocked an iron gate in a tall railing which separated this chapel from the body of the building, closed the gate again when our party had come inside, and, while a dozen or so of the people who had been at their devotions crowded up to the railing and peered curiously through, he and his attendant began to kneel repeatedly before the altar and to swing the smoking censer on every side. Above the altar was a strong, square steel box, over which, in plain view, was suspended a fac-simile of the Iron Crown, made of cheaper materials, while the real crown was still concealed within the steel safe.

Handing the censer to his attendant, that it might be kept swinging without intermission, the priest produced another series of keys and proceeded to unlock a succession of small doors in the side of the metal safe, which proved to be a "nest" of caskets, one within another, the last of which was a glass case. Drawing this out, he brought into full view the venerated crown of the Lombard kings, and told us to step up on the stool by the altar so as to see it better. It is made of six plates of gold, joined end to end, richly chased, and set with splendid jewels. But one would see at a glance that neither the material, nor the workmanship, nor the gems, could account for the unique reverence with which it has been regarded for centuries, and an indication of which we had just seen in the service conducted by the priest. Among the regalia in the Tower of London, and at several other places in Europe, we had seen crowns which far surpassed this one in costliness and beauty, but none of which, nor all of which combined, had ever excited a thousandth part of the interest attaching to this old crown in Monza.

The explanation is this: within that ring of jointed plates of gold runs a thin band of iron, which priestly tradition says was made of one of the spikes that fastened the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross. It was this band of iron that we tiptoed to see, hardly noticing the bejewelled rim of gold around it. It was on account of this band of iron that the priest and his attendant swung their censer and performed their ceremony as we entered. It was this band of iron that gave to the crown its sacred place above the altar. It was for the safe keeping of this band of iron that the steel case, with its numerous locks, was made. It was from this band of iron that the diadem received its name, the Iron Crown of Lombardy.

And what were the historical uses of it, referred to above, which made it so much more interesting to us than the many other so-called nails of the true cross elsewhere? Well, this among others: on the last Christmas day of the eighth century, while Charlemagne was kneeling with uncovered head before the high altar of St. Peter's in Rome, the Pope approached him from behind, and, placing the Iron Crown of Lombardy on his head, hailed him as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

A thousand years later on the 26th of May, 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte, "watched by an apparently invincible army which adored him and a world which feared him," standing in the vast marble cathedral at Milan, with fifteen thousand of his soldiers around him, lifted this same Iron Crown of Lombardy into their view, and placed it upon his brow, saying, "God has given it to me, let him touch it who dares!"

That men who, like Charlemagne and Napoleon, had reached the highest pinnacle of human power, should seek to enhance their influence by crowning their heads with one of the nails which, as their followers believed, had pierced the Galilean's foot, is a richly suggestive fact. But we must keep our tempted thoughts to another and less edifying line at present.

When we had examined all the parts of the famous crown to our satisfaction, we stepped to the desk in the ante-room and paid our five francs (one dollar), the regular price for the exhibition of the Iron Crown, then left the cathedral, bought one or two post-card pictures of the crown, and took the tram through the dreary weather back to Milan, well pleased with the results of our first pilgrimage to the shrine of a real Roman Catholic relic in Italy.

But on our arrival at Rome, a month later, we found that, interesting as were the relics which we had seen or read of elsewhere, they were nothing to those in the Eternal City itself. In this, as in everything else except such little matters as cleanliness and morality and truthfulness and honesty, Rome outvies all her rivals. It is only fair to add, however, that, since the overthrow of the papal sovereignty and the establishment of a capable government, Rome has improved immensely in the matter of cleanliness, and even her immorality is not so flaunting as it was. This is attested by the Hon. Guiseppe Zanardelli, the present Premier of Italy, who says:

"The church appears better than it once was. I no longer see in Rome what I used often to see in my young days, ladies driving about its streets with their coachmen and footmen in the liveries of their respective cardinals. Has this improvement come about because the church is really growing better? Nothing of the kind. It is because the strong arm of the law checks the villainy of the priests." That is the testimony of the Prime Minister of Italy.