To Miss Leycester.
“St. Michael’s Mount, Sept. 7, 1889.—I have enjoyed my visit here extremely, and, difficult as it was to manage coming, it is more difficult to get away, from the extreme kindness and genuine hospitality of Lord and Lady St. Levan, who would like one to stay months. I think I never saw such excellent people, or a happier, more united family; and being very well off, their kindnesses to rich and poor cannot be calculated. Then it is indeed the most delightful of homes, so healthy in its pure air of mingled sea and mountain exhilaration, so glorious in its views over land and water, with every atmospheric effect which Nature, never the same, can paint upon both. Looking down from the ramparts into the deep clear chrysoprase water is in itself a delight, and watching the fish rising and leaping with sparkling showers, and the great white seagulls swooping down upon them. No wonder the sons of the house, devoted to sport of every kind, think there is nothing to compare to the fishing excursions round their home. But there is unspeakable grandeur, too, when the sacred Mount is enveloped in sea-fog, shrouding it from all sign of the mainland and everything else, and when nothing is heard but the distant booming of the waves far down below. This is the one great house of England, I suppose, which is approached by no road whatever, for even the pathlet which winds among the cliffs and low wind-blown bushes of the island is lost where it crosses the turfy slopes which intervene here and there. The castle is in seven stories (of which I inhabit the second); many of the rooms are walled with rock, and in one of the narrow passages it is known that a number of skeletons—naughty nuns, I suppose—are walled up. I never saw a place where so much of daily life was in the open air.”
“Holmhurst, Sept. 19.—From the Mount I went to visit the Tremaynes in the Vale of Tavistock. It was an exquisite still evening when I arrived at Sydenham, and it is a beautiful drive through a richly-wooded valley, till a sharp turn brings one to the old bridge over the clear tossing Lyd, on the other side of which rises the noble old manor-house, only separated from the road by ‘the green court’ with a wrought iron gate. By this gate, as I drove up, stood, with her daughter, Mrs. Tremayne, her exquisite profile, quite white, like a Greek gem, relieved against the dark yew foliage: it is a picture that remains with one. We had tea in the old panelled hall, surrounded by four fine Chinese dogs.
“It would be difficult to over-praise the sweet seclusion of the spot, the constant merry ripple of the sparkling river, the deep shade of the tall trees, the old-fashioned gardens of splendid herbaceous flowers, the charming old rooms and staircase, in which—even in this desolate place—the two powdered footmen do not look out of keeping. But the great charm lies in the family itself—in the ever-genial, courteous, sweet-tempered father—the perfectly beautiful and dignified but simple mother—the daughters and the only son.
“A relic in the house is the ‘tongue-token,’ only given during the Civil Wars to the most faithful friends of the King and Queen,—a little gold medal which could be concealed under the tongue. In this case it was given to the Tremayne of the day, because, at imminent risk to himself, he rode to announce to the King at Oxford the birth of the Princess Henrietta at Exeter.
“We went several excursions: to the fine old gateway of Bradstone; to the Kellys of Kelly, who have a most admirable collection of Alpine plants, growing upon little but old mortar; to the Duke of Bedford’s house of Ensleigh, beautiful in hilly woods feathering down to a river; and to Launceston, a dull place, where the castle recalls that of Gisors.
“From Sydenham I went to see the Elphinstones[484] at their beautiful Government House at Plymouth, and on the same evening to Whiteway, where I paid a delightful visit to the dear Dowager Lady Morley, who is still as genially kind and as sharply truth-exacting as ever. It was comically characteristic that when the foolish Bishop of Exeter (Bickersteth) came over to Whiteway, Lady Morley, with innocent pride, showed him the improvements she had made. ‘You should not take a sinful pride in your possessions,’ said the Bishop; ‘all God’s works are beautiful, and all these are the works of God.’—‘That is all very well,’ answered Lady Morley, ‘but I made this walk.’ It was sad to see Lady Katherine, the companion of many happy mountain excursions long ago, laid up as a permanent invalid; but she is indescribably brave and cheerful.
“A child at Whiteway, being asked where the eggs were laid, answered, ‘On an average.’—‘What do you mean? who told you so?’—‘Father; he said the hens laid, on an average, twenty eggs a day.’
“With the Lowthers and Listers we one day met the Halifaxes and their two eldest children at Bovey, and we all went a delightful excursion over Dartmoor to several of the great tors, which rise above the russet wastes of moor, like castles in the south of France, and to Tecket Falls, near which Lord Devon has a cottage. Hence, after ascending through the mazes of a wood, Charlie H. insisted on our being taken blindfold till we reached ‘Exclamation Point,’ where the present Archbishop of Canterbury had fallen on his knees from the beauty of the view. We did not return till eight, when the Halifaxes stayed to dine, and went home at eleven, walking miles over the moors by night in true Charlie Halifax fashion.
“Endless was the amusing talk of Devonshire quaintnesses. ‘How did you break your arm?’ said Lady Katherine to an old woman. ‘Well, ‘twere all along of gathering apples; ‘twere first the apples and then the fall: I were like Eve, I reckon.’ ‘Blow your nose,’ she said to a child. ‘Yes, mum, but her won’t bide blowed.’”
To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.
“Holmhurst, Nov. 1889.—I have been far too long without writing, life ripples by so quickly: it seems every day more different from the years before I was grown up, when all was so long.... My ‘outing’ to the North was very enjoyable. I was nearly a week at Tatton, where the host and hostess were boundlessly kind. The party there had admirable elements—Lord Savile, Lord and Lady Knutsford, Lord and Lady Jersey, Lord and Lady Waldegrave, Lord and Lady Amherst, Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller, Mr. and Mrs. Piers Warburton, Mrs. Percy Mitford, Mrs. Legh of Lyme, Sir Charles Grant, and Dick Bagot. We were all taken to see the Ship Canal in a royal way, with special trains, luncheon sent on, and tea at the mouth of the Canal in ‘Bridgewater House,’ where the old Duke of Bridgewater spent his later years, and where his picture still presides in the seldom-used dining-room.
“I left with Mrs. Legh, whose ponies met us at the Disley station, and took us a wild drive over moor and fen, rock and fell—a drive of glorious views, but no road whatever—before returning to Lyme. Lady Lovelace came in the evening and was most agreeable, especially in her reminiscences of India and Lady Canning. With her and Mrs. Legh I went to draw the old hall at Marple, an interesting house of the Usherwoods, who inherited it from the Bradshaws: the regicide’s chamber has its original furniture and tapestry.
“Next, I went to Ingmire, a fine old place of Mrs. Upton Cottrell-Dormer, beautifully situated amongst the Westmoreland fells, though geographically in Yorkshire. John Way, the vicar of Henbury, was there, who said that when the boys in his school were reading of Jezebel, how she ‘painted her face, tired her head,’ &c., he asked, ‘Why do you suppose she did that?’—‘She wanted to get married,’ promptly answered a boy—true, probably, too. He described how his great-grandfather, Sir Roger Hill, and his son lay dying at Denham at the same time. It was of the most vital importance to the son’s wife to keep her husband alive beyond his father, just sufficient time to enable him to sign a will, and this she did by killing one pigeon after another, keeping his feet immersed in the body of the hot steaming bird, and, as soon as it chilled, changing it for another. The pigeons conquered, and the Hedgeley property was left away to the son’s widow. The Denham property went to the daughter, Mrs. Lockey, whose daughter Abigail married Mr. Way, and was mother of Benjamin Way and Lady Sheffield.
“From Ingmire I went to Muncaster, which I thought even more beautiful and delightful than before. With Lady Muncaster and Lady Kilmarnock I had one lovely day at Wastwater—glorious in the last coruscations of Nature. The Bishop of Carlisle had just been at Muncaster, who said that a boy in a Board-school examination, being asked one of the foolish Catechism questions of ‘Why is a boy baptized when by reason of his tender age?’ &c., wrote, ‘Why indeed?’
“Another child in a higher class, being asked to define faith, said it was ‘the power of believing absolutely what was utterly incredible.’”
“Bramfield House, Hertford, Nov. 27, 1889.—Lady Bloomfield is very comfortably established here in a good house of Abel Smith’s, near a pretty little church and village, and in the midst of the amiable Smith colony. She finds no end of good works to do, and really is beyond measure kind, in addition to a thousand other unostentatious goodnesses, in filling her extra rooms with homeless and feeble gentlefolk needing help, kindness, and temporary home. We went through Panshanger yesterday, but I do not admire this cabbage-tree district, all so prosperously unpicturesque.
“You must buy, you really must, ‘John Smith on Church Reform.’ It is by no means the dull book it sounds. You will delight in it, and will present it to Mr. Neville, as I shall to our little clergyman, who is becoming quite as like naughty Rome as he dares, but is a good little man all the same.”
In quoting so constantly from journal and letters, I do not think I have mentioned how much poverty had been pressing upon me in the last few years. Not only had Messrs. Daldy and Virtue, representing my first publishers, ceased to pay even the interest of their large debt, or paid it most irregularly, but under my second set of publishers I had made nothing whatever during the seven years I had been with them. Their accounts showed that 28,000 of my books had been sold in the time, but the innumerable percentages, &c., had swallowed up the whole of the profits, leaving me nothing but the loss of money expended on woodcuts, &c.
Whilst I was at Muncaster, however, Mrs. Arthur Severn came to the castle, and told me how Mr. Ruskin also had made nothing by his books in the hands of my then publishers, but that they had brought him in a good income since they were removed to the hands of Mr. Allen of Orpington. To his hands, therefore, I soon after removed all my books. I had no complaint of unfairness to make against those I had lately employed; they only acted according to their agreements and their usual method, which I had long hoped against hope might eventually result to my advantage: and they behaved very handsomely about parting with the books, though it must have been both a loss and disappointment to them.
To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.
“Campsea Ashe High House, Dec. 27, 1889.—We have had a very pleasant merry week in this most kindly and happy of family homes, not going out much, but the days full of intellectual interest, the evenings of games, acting, &c. The party has been the two really charming Miss Farquhars, their brother Ernest, pretty, attractive Miss Theresa Lister, Lady Cecily Clifton, Captain Sydney, Kenneth and Miss Matheson, James Lowther, young Brooke—a pleasant clever little county magnate, delightful Jack Cator and his remarkably nice sister, a young Macgregor in the Guards, and to-day the Anstruther Thompsons, the Edmund Fanes, Miss Mullholland, and a young Burroughs have come. Last night we acted a play, ‘The Bilious Husband,’ before a large audience of neighbours. Can you fancy me as Captain Marmaduke Mynch of the Royal Berkshire Plungers? Then there was ‘Barnum’s Show’—Miss Matheson as a mermaid, myself as a dwarf, Miss Lowther as the tattooed woman, Miss Farquhar the fat woman, Brooke a Zulu, Ernest Farquhar an Arab, and Mr. Lowther as ‘The Bearded Lady!’ Another day I dressed up and came in as an old aunt of the family—being the first scene of the word Antidote, for which we made a little story. I have liked my frivolous week very much, but it is enough, and I shall be glad to go back to my solitary work at Holmhurst on Monday.
“Kenneth Matheson very kindly said, ‘I know you will consider it sacrilege my pressing you to come to Highcliffe whilst I am its tenant’—which I allowed to be the case!
“I was very glad to hear of Lady Ossington’s will—just like an echo from the generosity, justice, and beneficence of her life.”
From Christmas 1889-90 people were already beginning to talk a great deal about the “Influenza epidemic” which was spreading over Europe, and was like a malarial fever. I was in London for a few hours on January 11, and bringing it back to Holmhurst with me, was very ill for nearly a month, but with the comfort of being in my own home, and, to me, the great comfort of being alone. In illness I quite feel the extreme blessing of religion—not the religion worried and touzled by a thousand million vagaries of personality, but the simple main facts, in which I believe so fully. I find some lines of Elizabeth Trench which exactly express what I feel myself:—
“When all fails, and to stand firm seems impossible, stand on the wood of the Cross; it will float with you,” said Queen Marie Leczinska.
“The Mercy of God—all is included in that word Mercy,” was a saying of the Mère Angelique.
Yet I find it very difficult to endure any other religious book than the Bible itself: all are so self-asserting, so self-seeking; and hymns, with one or two sublime exceptions, are either abjectly foolish or full of the self, even if it be the religious self, of man.
Journal.
“Feb. 13, 1890.—In December my old servant Joe Cornford died, who had been all my lifetime in the family service. For several years he had been too old and infirm to do any work, but, when he was well enough, he made a pretence of picking up a leaf or two, and received his wages all the same. If it had not been for his grumbling old wife, it would have been a pleasure to see him slowly dragging himself about the walks, but her temper was a trial! He was worse for some time. One day I went in to the lodge to see him after breakfast, and at that moment he suddenly died! Again, as often before, I felt the wonderful power of the great mystery of death, actually seeing life ebb downwards: the forehead become white and waxen, then the cheeks, then the whole being. How I was reminded of the lines of Caroline Bowles (Mrs. Southey):—
“I was at his funeral some days afterwards, the poor old man carried to the grave by our workmen, and followed by seventeen of his descendants, children and grandchildren. He has left me a chair which came out of Hurstmonceaux Castle.”
“Feb. 26, 1890.—Went to see Lady De Ros,[485] aged ninety-five. She brought out for me her greatest treasure, a beautifully printed Church of England Prayer-book in Spanish. It belonged to the great Duke of Ormonde, and descended from him to Lady Eleanor Butler, by whom and Miss Ponsonby—‘ladies of Llangollen’—it was given to the Duke of Wellington as a boy. He taught himself Spanish by following its services, as he himself says in an inscription on the fly-leaf. In his old age, when Lady De Ros was with him at Strathfieldsaye, she found it in the library, and told him what a valuable book she thought it. ‘Then, if you think it such a valuable thing, I will give it you, my dear.’—‘So, as Douro and Charles were just coming, I took my book away at once,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘for fear they should stop me.’ Some years afterwards the Duke asked Lady De Ros to lend him the book to show to some great librarian. She let it go, but made it a condition that, before it was returned, the Duke should write its history in the book with his own hands; and this he did.
“Lady De Ros also showed me a brush of hogs’-bristles, mounted in ebony, and with a silver plate. And she told how, when she was hunting wild boars with the Duke on Mont St. Jean near Cambrai, an immense boar sprang out of the thicket close by her. The Duke speared it. It was a horrid sight and she shrank from it. ‘Oh, my dear,’ said the Duke, ‘you must not mind it, for I am prouder of having killed that boar than of the battle of Waterloo.’
“Lady De Ros was very full of her dispute with Sir William Fraser about the house in which the ball was given at Brussels by her father, the Duke of Richmond, on the eve of the battle of Waterloo. She was quite certain of her facts, and that the house was now gone. She had been living in the house itself, in the Rue de la Blanchisserie (‘where the Duke would direct to me “in the wash-house“‘), and cited as a proof that the ball was given in her own house, the fact that her youngest sister, who had been sent to bed, stole out, and watched the company arrive through the banisters. ‘I believe Sir William Fraser asserts,’ said Lady De Ros, ‘that I am confused and doting now through my great age, but you know very old people remember the long-ago as if it was to-day, and that is the case with me. In 1860 I went back to see Brussels, and I could not find our house then; the whole street was swept away. At last, as I was walking up and down, I was attracted by the name on a pastry-cook’s shop: it was a name I remembered in that long-ago time. So I went in and asked if they knew anything of our house. “Oh, a house in the Rue de la Blanchisserie,” they said; “it has been pulled down years and years ago.”’
“Le monde n’est éternel pour personne; laisse le passer, et t’attache à celui qui l’a fait.”—Diderot, “Sarrasins.”
“I hope the hereafter will not lack something to remind us of the beautiful earth-life—beautiful in spite of its sin and sorrow.”—Whittier’s Letters.
WHEN my friend George Jolliffe had passed his diplomatic examination, I promised him that I would go out and pay him a month’s visit wherever he was sent to. Thus I came to set out for Constantinople on April 10, 1890. The faithful Hugh Bryans went with me. At Vienna I spent several days with the Lützows, who showed me the sights in the most agreeable way. The town was full of grand-dukes or exiled princes—Cumberland, Parma, Tuscany, &c., all very rich and adding to its prosperity.
To Miss Leycester.
“British Embassy, Constantinople, April 22, 1890.—We came straight through from Vienna, through the strange unknown country. There were vast plains of corn till Belgrade, a poor town hanging shaggy on the hillside: then we entered low wooded hills like the Sabina. In the Servian villages of rude huts and ruder fences we could see the swarming people, men and women in loose folds of white linen, the former with the air of princes. All seemed remote and unreal, and the shadows, as in Syrian clearness, fell pure blue upon the dusty hills. By the second morning we were passing through Roumelia. All had become poorer. The villages, of wretched huts, stood in wattled enclosures of thorns, inside which all the domestic animals are driven. Now, the men were seen in crimson and green, with magnificent mahogany-coloured faces beneath their turbans, and the women, all closely veiled, moved like masses of dark drapery; a little mosque appeared, with a delicate and refined minaret; a little fountain-cistern with a gothic arch in a grove of thorns; marshes with storks; plains with buffaloes.
“About 3 P.M. the lovely Sea of Marmora gleamed upon the right, with a variety of inlet bays of solitary beauty, and, in the distance, the aërial mountains of Asia. Then a succession of battlemented towers rose on the left from the untrodden plain—the walls of Stamboul! Through these the train passes. We were far from the station still, but what a change from our two days’ desolation! We rushed across many shabby courts, paved either with mud or rough stones. The old houses, with their projecting lattices, were veiled in a web of flowering wistaria, and shaded by pink Judas-trees in fullest bloom. Then above us rose the mosques with their slender minarets and huge storm-blasted cypresses. St. Sophia itself, Achmet, Suleiman, Mahmoud were passed, with many a strange gothic fountain or decorated cistern, before we reached the shed-like station, where George was a most welcome sight, armed with an Embassy cavass to extricate us from the mass of yelping, screaming natives.
“Off we went across the creaking, rocking, timber bridge over the Golden Horn, thronged by the strangest of multitudes. Then up the steep street of Galata, where the lattices project till they almost obliterate the sky, and the pavement is made of rough stones set edgeways, up which the horses scrambled like cats. A road succeeded, a dusty deep-rutted track, overlooking an old burial-ground without barriers, where, amid the immemorial cypresses, thousands of battered tombstones remain, neglected, ruined, but never wilfully destroyed; and so we reached the handsome palace of the Embassy, with its delightful garden, overlooking the valley of the Golden Horn.
enlarge-image
CEMETERY OF PERA, CONSTANTINOPLE.
CEMETERY OF PERA, CONSTANTINOPLE.
“I have been here two days now, and cannot say how delightful I find it to be with George, with whom every thought may be exchanged. I live in the room of an absent attaché, and the life is like that of a college. Unfortunately, on the first afternoon I caught a dreadful chill in the boat, and have been very ill ever since, though I dragged myself out yesterday to take advantage of a rarely procured permit to see the famous church of St. Irene, where the Council of Constantinople was held, and where the Christian emperors, Constantine, Arcadius, &c., repose, some of them in grand porphyry sarcophagi. I went with two clergymen, friends of Arthur Stanley, Canon Farrar of Durham, and Dr. Livingstone, who had been to every other scene of a General Council: this was the last!”
“April 27.—I have been suffering terribly from rheumatic fever, but am better to-day, and have been to St. Sophia. The carriage stopped at an obscure door on the N.W., where the cavass took off his boots and fetched some of the Turkish guardians of holiness, who, for a very large consideration of baksheesh, put slippers over ours. Then we passed the curtain, and found ourselves at once at the northern extremity of the great western narthex, like that of St. Mark’s at Venice on a huge scale, and—almost immediately—from a side-door, in the church itself.
“It is so unspeakably, overwhelmingly, indescribably, entrancingly, bewilderingly glorious, words can give no idea of it.
“Of the immense space—a St. Mark’s lifted into the heavens, soaring far above in the mystic involutions of its entwining arches and the delicate nuances of its grey-golden colouring, never sufficiently defined to be obtrusive in any special point, only melting and harmonising into a whole as tender and glorious as the hues on a dove’s back. So also in the architectural details; all the walls, all the chapels are filled with the most exquisite and graceful sculptured ornament, but the grand impression of space is never lessened by any single object leaving its own identity upon the vision, till the gaze rests far above upon the pendentives of the mightiest dome, where float the four huge prophetic seraphim[486] with their many wings folded in repose—with twain they covered their breasts, with twain they covered their feet, and with twain they did fly.
“Close to the entrance was a vast fountain gurgling, rushing, spouting—a fountain of ablutions. Far towards the east, and beneath the two floating green banners of the Prophet, was the mimber or pulpit of Friday prayer, and near it a platform for the choir, who face, not the east, but the Kibla, the holy house of Mecca. Under the shadowy arches are the cup and cradle of Jesus of Bethlehem, revered as a great teacher, the latter a hollowed block of red marble; the ‘sweating column,’ the ‘shining stone,’ and the ‘cold window,’ fresh with the north wind, where the Sheik Shemseddin, the companion of Mahomet II. (the Conqueror), expounded the Koran. We may also see the pillar on which Mahomet the Conqueror left the mark of his bloody hand; for through the church itself, and the crowds of clergy and virgins who had taken refuge there, he rode, exclaiming ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his Prophet,’ and ordaining the violation of sanctuary. Here and there, but lost in the extreme immensity, are chapels or refuges where groups of men, or of veiled women apart from them, seem to hold little services, with private litanies of their own. In some of these, solitary individuals, wrapped in devotion or penance, were perpetually smiting the earth with their foreheads: in one an old man was shouting, yelling, screaming portions of the Koran, flinging the words with savagest ferocity amongst groups of squatters in fezes and turbans, who received them quite unconcerned.
“The columns in the church make up the mystic number of forty, typical to the Eastern mind of all pomp and splendour. The cupola is inscribed ‘God is the light of the heavens and the earth!’ On its Rhodian tiles are written ‘God hath founded it, and it will not be overthrown: God will support it in the blush of the dawn.’ Nothing probably remains of the fourth-century church of Constantine, but the present church is chiefly that of Justinian, who employed a hundred architects, each with a hundred masons under him, of whom five thousand worked on the right, and five thousand on the left, according to the advice given to the emperor by an angel. The church itself is under the guardianship of an angel, who appeared to a boy watching the tools of lazy masons, and bade him hurry them back to their work, saying he would guard his charge till he came back. But the boy never came back, for the emperor intercepted him, and sent him off, well provided for, to the Cyclades, that the angel might be obliged to watch for ever.
“Our driver stuck his cigarette behind his ear and took us to the Hippodrome, where we saw the great obelisk, raised by Theodosius on a base with curious reliefs: and the brazen serpents supposed to have been brought from Delphi, or the remains of them, for the Sultan Murad broke off one of their heads. Along the side of the square runs the screen of the Mosque of Ahmed (the state church), enclosing its vast dusty court, old elm-trees, cloister, and a fountain, around which were groups of people washing, dressing, and being shaved before entering the sanctuary.
“We drove by the tomb of the Sultan Mahmoud the Reformer, where we stared through a metal screen at his sarcophagus, to the finest of the great mosques or djami, the glorious Suleimanyeh, which Solyman the Magnificent intended to surpass St. Sophia. On its giant dome is the truly catholic inscription (Sura xxiv. 36), ‘God is the light of heaven and earth. His light is in the windows on the wall, in which a lamp burns covered with glass. The glass shines like a star, the lamp is lit with the oil of a blessed tree. No Eastern, no Western oil; it shines for whoever wills it.’ On the ever-clean matted floor of this mosque of glorious proportions numbers of barefooted children were sporting as in a playground, and very pretty and graceful were the interlacing groups which they made. The ecclesiastical revenue of Suleimanyeh is 300,000 piastres. Behind is a curious burial-ground, crowded with tombs, chiefly of women, marked by a sculptured rose, whilst the headstones of the men are crowned by a turban or fez. In two great sepulchral chapels or turbé lie Solyman the Magnificent and his immediate family and successors. The sarcophagi are covered with splendid embroideries and delicate muslins, those of the sultans being often shrouded by their favourite wives with their shawls—most precious of their possessions. At their heads are their tall white turbans, with bunches of peacocks’ feathers on either side. The famous Roxolana lies amongst the group of ladies.
“But all through the streets of Stamboul the greatest feature is the little burial-grounds, with their closely packed tombs and their huge cypresses or tamarind trees, which always give them picturesqueness, between the houses, at the angles of the streets, everywhere—the dead forced, as it were, into the very life of the living, and never to be forgotten for a moment.
“The next great feature—and an odious one—is the swarms of dogs, like little foxes, which lie about everywhere in the sun, encumbering the footways, and refusing to move for any one. They are the friends of cats, but if a strange dog enters their quarter, they demolish him at once. They never bite a human being, at least they have never been known to bite more than one, and that was—the Russian ambassador! Successive travellers have given the idea that they are scavengers, but it is quite false: a man goes round at night with a cart and takes everything undesirable away. All night the air resounds with the yells of the dogs. The English doctor is obliged to poison them by hundreds near the hospital, or all the patients would die of the noise.
“We ended our first eventful drive at the Mosque of Bajazet, where the court was now turned into a bazaar, and round the central fountain glowed a moving mass of colour—white turbans, green turbans of Mecca, pilgrims, negroes, Armenians, robed women in shot violet silk. Overhead a perfect roar of wings indicated that the sacred pigeons of the mosque were moving in vast battalions from one part to another. At the many-coloured stalls, the beads—especially the green beads—were quite irresistible. In the turbé of Bajazet, under the head of the Sultan, is a brick made of all the dust collected off his clothes and shoes during his lifetime: his mother and his two daughters lie beside him.
“It is a great pleasure having Gerard Lowther here; and the other attachés, Finlay and Tower, are charming.”
“May 12.—As I have felt stronger, each day here has been more full of interest. On alternate mornings I stay quietly in the Embassy garden or the adjoining cemeteries and have luncheon with my kind hosts, with whom I have several times been out afterwards to the bazaars, steep, rugged, stony lanes, arched overhead, and a blaze of colour from their shops and costumes. Here we have been served with cups of coffee in the inner den of Marchetto, the tradesman of ‘Paul Patoff,’[487] whilst going through the wearisome routine of bargaining for old silver, weighing and reweighing, and only discovering one had concluded a purchase when one had utterly despaired of it. How forcibly the truth of that verse of Proverbs strikes one here—‘It is nought, it is nought, saith the buyer, but when he goeth his way, he boasteth thereof.’ The whole bazaar seems like an inextricable web to outsiders, yet any one or anything can be found there in ten minutes by one who knows the place; and, amid all the bustle and confusion, one sees many a charming picture of an old Turk with snowy beard and robes, sitting cross-legged at an angle of his counter, poring over an ancient parchment Koran, and as utterly absorbed in it as if he were in the Great Desert. How the names Aladdin, Mustapha, Scheherazade, Zobeide, recalled the large edition of the ‘Arabian Nights’ which was at Hurstmonceaux Rectory in my childhood.
“On other days I have gone off immediately after breakfast with a cavass from the Embassy—Dimitri—as my guard, making much use of the trams, from which one sees so much that is curious, and in which one has so many experiences of Turkish life, from the ladies like bundles of green, brown, or shot silk, who are huddled behind the curtain at the end of the carriage, to the child-pasha well provided with copper coins to quiet the numerous clamourers for baksheesh. Thus I have twice reached Yedi Kouli, the Seven Towers, where the triple walls of the town make their farthest angle close to the Sea of Marmora—bluest of blue waters melting into chrysoprase-green near the shore. Here I was drawing an old gate in pencil in my little book, heedless of an old Turk who had been cursing the ‘christian dog’ as a breaker of the second commandment, when suddenly, with a spring, he flew upon me, and in an instant his long talons would have torn out my eyes, if Dimitri, throwing himself upon him, had not hurled him on his back in the gutter, after which he got up, and went away quite quietly. Another day, after we had made the circuit of the wonderful walls, I was sitting to draw in the middle of the white dusty road near the Adrianople gate, and Dimitri had fallen asleep on a tombstone a few steps behind me, when suddenly he called out with a rueful voice that he had been robbed, plundered of his watch and chain, whilst I, rather more in evidence in the sunshine, had escaped. It is near this gate, the Polyandria of the Greeks, that we saw the curious mosque, once a church covered with mosaics like St. Mark’s, and still retaining many of them. One was shown as the Virgin waiting for her Teskerei, or passport, to go into Egypt!
“All around the walls are tombs: the woods are filled, the hillsides are powdered, with them. The woods are all of cypress, which is supposed to neutralise effluvia. When a death occurs, a body is hurried to the grave as soon as possible, for the soul is always in torment, it is believed, between the death and burial. Little parcels of food are laid in holes by the side of the grave, and large headstones are always erected, stones on which the angels Nebir and Munkir sit to judge the souls of the dead. We saw many touching little funerals—young girls being carried to the grave without any coffin or shroud. The blocks of stone on the road date from the time of Justinian. At an angle of the cemetery opposite the gate of Silivri a row of head-stones marks the graves of the heads of Ali Pacha (de Tébelin) and his four sons, cut off in 1827. Close to this a lane turns off through the tombs and cypresses to the monastery of Baloukli. Here, from a courtyard, filled, like everything else, with tombs, we descended a staircase at the head of which an old priest was squatting as guardian of a number of huge brass alms-dishes. In the subterranean chapel below are more alms-dishes, and a fountain with the ‘miraculous fish,’ black on one side, red on the other. On the 29th of May 1455, a monk was engaged in frying them, when a man rushed in and announced the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. ‘I shall believe it,’ said the monk, ‘when these fish leap out of the frying-pan,’ and they leapt out immediately, and have remained half-cooked to this day! At the little restaurant close to the monastery, shaded by pink Judas-trees and strewn with white sand, we had our luncheon, bread, pilaf, galetta, hard eggs, wine, and syrup of roses.
“Beyond the Adrianople Gate the walls and cemetery descend together to Eyoub, a hamlet at the head of the Golden Horn, with a very sacred mosque, which heretics are not allowed to enter, as it contains the sword of Mahomet, with which the Sultan girds himself on the day of his installation, and in its court, shaded by noble plane-trees, the tomb of Eyoub, standard-bearer of the Prophet, near whose resting-place are grouped a number of royal turbé, those of the Valide Sultana, mother of Selim III., and of Hussein Pacha being the most remarkable. We made a separate excursion hither, finding the rugged streets round the mosque occupied by the gay booths of a fair shaded by banksia roses in full bloom, and the keeper of the sanctuary standing at the gate with a drawn sword to prevent the entrance of the giaours. But we wandered behind, by the steep ascent between the eternal burial-grounds, where there was a grand view down the Golden Horn between the old cypresses, all the mosques of Stamboul embossed upon an aërial sunset sky.
“On May 3 we met a large party at Dolma Baghtché, one of the great palaces which are memorials of the extravagance of Abdul Medjid. The rooms are those in which his son, the savage Abdul Aziz, used to throw everything that came to hand at those who offended him. They are only used by the present Sultan for the great reception of Beiram, when all the great dignitaries of the empire flock to kiss the hem of his garment. The palace is vast, but decorated like a French café, with glass banisters to the staircase and numbers of fifth-rate pictures: nothing but the hall is worth seeing. Close by is the mosque of Abdul Medjid, with two slender minarets, and beyond it the palace of Teheragan-Sérai, where the ex-Sultan Murad is kept a prisoner, no one being allowed to linger either on the road or in a boat in front of the building. The existing Sultan goes to see him sometimes, but asserts ‘My brother and every one belonging to him are quite perfectly mad.’
“We all went by carriage with an order to the Seraï or Seraglio near St. Sophia, which occupies at least two-thirds of the ancient Byzantium, selected by Constantine for his capital. By an unkempt ascent we reach the Bab-el-Sélam, or Gate of Safety, which had doors on either side, and in the intermediate space of which high officials condemned by the Divan were executed. Passing an avenue of cypresses, we reached a second gate, the Bab Seadet, or Gate of Happiness, guarded by white eunuchs. It was here that the sultans used to give up their unpopular ministers to the popular fury; that Murad III. gave up his favourite falconer, Mehemet, to be cut to pieces before his eyes; that Mahomet III. gave up his three chief eunuchs, and Murad IV. his grand-vizier Hafiz, who was killed by seventeen wounds. Many old aunts and cousins of sultans still reside in the inner apartments, guarded by numbers of eunuchs, the historic criminal figures of Turkish history, whose existence is expressly condemned by the Koran, and who are generally bought or stolen as children from Syria or Abyssinia. Without name, family, or sex, they often marry, and even have harems for the sake of feminine friendship.
“The treasury is full of boundless barbaric treasures, uncut emeralds, &c., and much fine armour and china. The finest single object is the throne of Selim I., taken from the Shah of Persia, of green enamel studded with pearls and rubies. In the Salle du Divan is the curious bed where the sultans received ambassadors, though they only saw him through the window. We also saw the glorious Bagdad mosque lined with blue Persian tiles, built by the Sultan Amurath in remembrance of one he had known at Bagdad. In the garden is the famous cage where, from the time of Mahomet IV., sultans shut up princes who rebelled against them: Abdul Aziz was confined there from his deposition to his death. Afterwards, I sat with Sir George Bowen on the terrace, which has an exquisite view up the Bosphorus, while immediately below us ran the railway line, which suggests the fall of Turkey. We were served with sweetmeats of rose-leaves, and coffee in golden cups studded with diamonds, by an attendant who bore an embroidered cloth upon his shoulder to conceal the empty cups which had been used by Christians, and were therefore unclean. This would sound hospitable on the part of the Sultan if one forgot to mention that we had each had to pay about fifteen francs to enter the palace, and that there were about thirty of us.
“Another day we went to the mosque of Selimyeh, beautifully situated, and afterwards I sat to draw under a bower of banksia roses, surrounded by a marvellous group of Turkish figures, in the Saddlers’ Bazaar (serra-jobane-jamissi). Here the people were good to us, as there are so many Christians in that quarter of the town, but generally the natives never cease cursing those who are breaking the second commandment by making a likeness of something in heaven or earth. In the courtyard of Suleimanyeh I was less fortunate: a number of soldiers crowded in front, wholly obstructing all view, and on Dimitri remonstrating, their officer came up quite furious, with ‘My men shall stand where they like, and if they wish to hide the man’s view they shall certainly do so.’ Twice I have toiled to the distant mosque of Mehmedyé, for Mahomet the Conqueror built it on the site of the famous church of the Holy Apostles, founded by Constantine the Great, and where he was buried with eleven other emperors. A dial over a gate near this is inscribed (from the Koran), ‘Didst thou not see thy Lord, how He extended thy shadow?’ On some of these excursions it has been most difficult to procure anything whatever for luncheon, for it is the fast of Ramazan, when no good Turk allows any food whatever to pass his lips between sunrise and sunset, on the approach of which he will begin to hold in his hands the viands which he will devour the very instant the gun fires. Wine at all times is described as ‘the father of all abominations,’ yet Solyman the Great, who burnt all the vessels laden with wine in the port, himself died drunk: Murad IV., who cut off the head of any one who smelt of wine, was a regular drunkard: Bajazet I. and II. both drank, and to Selim II. was given the surname of ‘mesth’—the drunkard: so much for the far-famed Turkish consistency.
“We went to the evening service at St. Sophia, three white-turbaned figures receiving us in the dark at a postern door, and—after exacting ten francs apiece—conducting us by a winding stair to the broad gallery, far beneath which the great chandeliers gleamed like flower-beds over the immense grey space, intersected by long lines of black figures—all males, for women are soulless—bending, curvetting, prostrating symmetrically like corn in a wind, and with the same kind of rush and rustle. It is a curious but monotonous sight, a repetition of the same movement over and over again, and the shrill harsh cry of the swaying and falling lines, even more discordant in its echo by the choir, soon grates upon one: especially as the priests never cease whispering and worrying for extra baksheesh.
“After waiting one morning for a weary time with an order at the ‘Selamlik,’ we saw the Sultan go to the Yildis mosque. The coachman was gorgeous in his golden livery, but the ‘Sultan of Sultans, the King of Kings,’ was a piteous sight, a mixture of boredom and terror. Cringing cowardice prevents his going to Stamboul more than one day in the year, and this occurred lately. It is a great day for the court ladies, who are all allowed to accompany him in three hundred carriages, and avenge themselves for veiled faces by exhibiting their bare arms covered with bracelets and as much else as they dare. Mahomet says, ‘He who espouses only one wife is praiseworthy,’ and now it is considered indiscreet to have more than four legitimate wives, who are all equal, and who have each their own dowry and servants. Women are generally well treated here now, a divorce is easy, and each wife has a right to a separate room, and may even exact a separate house, if she cannot get on with the other wives.
“Almost every night through the streets there is a rush of the Talumbodgi or firemen—half-naked savages with primitive engines, who scurry to save the valuables of burning houses, not for the owners, but for themselves, so that they are far more dreaded than the flames. In recent conflagrations in Galata and Pera it is certain that the fire began in three or four places at the same moment; for when a street in Constantinople is wholly bad or unsafe, the authorities do not scruple to set fire to it, regardless of the consequences, though the people are such fatalists that they will not leave their dwellings till the last moment, and then fly, leaving everything behind them.”
“May 22.—I write during a quiet day with George at the Embassy, after my return from Broussa, where I have been spending a week.... It was a voyage of five hours in a steamer crowded with Turks on their carpets, sleeping, praying, or reciting the Koran, and at the ends of the vessel knots, lumps, and clusters of women. Outside Seraglio Point the view of Stamboul is very fine, St. Sophia and the Achmet mosque rising above the old sea-walls, and the gardens lovely with rich green and pink Judas bloom. We passed the islands—Antigone, where Sir H. Bulwer lived with the Greek princess, and Prinkapo, to which the Empress Irene was banished, and where she is buried. After two hours it became very rough, and all were sick, especially a number of Turkish officers, who up to that time had been eating voraciously. So it was indeed a relief when we entered the comparatively calm bay of Mudania, with its glorious leaping ‘multitudinous seas’ of sapphire and chrysoprase waves, amid which endless dolphins—true clowns of the sea—were tumbling and sporting.
“At Mudania a horde of half-naked savages leaped on board to seize our luggage, and a hand-to-hand fight ensued, during which we had to scale the bulwarks of the vessel to reach the pier. Then came a scramble and a bargaining for carriages, but at last we were off and up the hills, where boys were selling piles of cherries for half a piastre (1¼ d.) on the ascent. In the valley beyond, we came up with a knot of carriages in a desolate place, the inmates standing in the road round one whose wheel was coming off. It had contained two ladies, and I took up one of them, who turned out to be Miss Holmes, sister of the librarian at Windsor. Very lovely was the ascent to Broussa, through the rich green walnut-woods and by rushing streams, to the exquisite chain of mosques and minarets under the lower slopes of Olympus. At the table-d’hôte we had the British Consul, who stated that he ‘was not at all gone on mosques;’ he had been seventeen years in Constantinople and had seen nothing but St. Sophia—‘what on earth was the good?’ The hotel was delightful, and nothing could be more exquisite than the view from my window, whence I watched the long lines of camels following the inevitable donkey, and the handsome population, arrayed in every colour of the rainbow as to male turbans and girdles and the loose robes women are arrayed in. Thence also, I constantly heard, from the mosque of Murad, the shrill voice ‘La Ilah il Allah vè Mohammed resoul Allah,’ calling the people to prayer.
“On the first day I joined Miss Holmes and her friend Miss Bacon on a long excursion through the town, going first to the famous Green Mosque (Yéchil-Djami), which stands on a platform with old trees and a glorious view over the plain. We were not allowed to enter at once; it was the service for women, who are permitted this mosque only. ‘Priest very old and well covered up: it must be so,’ said the dragoman; ‘it is necessary to guard their moralities: just let them a little loose, and it is a very bad job.’
“Close by is a beautiful turbé with an entrance worthy of the Alhambra, and lovely tiles and jewelled glass within. Beneath the dome lies the sarcophagus of Mahomet I., with those of his son, his six daughters, and their nurse—the last very plain, but close to the royal coffins. In the centre of the mosque itself is a beautiful fountain, which freshens the air with a rush of falling waters: around are inscriptions—‘God is love,’ ‘Mahomet is the prophet of God,’ and the names of the six caliphs who were the companions of Mahomet. The mimber here is only ascended by the Sheik el Islam himself, when he gives the blessing with the Koran. As an interior, Oulou-Djami, the great mosque in the centre of the town, has even more perfect proportions—a perfection of interlacing architecture inclining to gothic, forming twenty-four cupolas, and centering in the great dome above a splashing fountain. Outside this mosque, facing the street, a bay-tree overshadows the tomb of a sainted dervish: sick people hang bits of their clothes around it, and think that, with them, they leave their ailments there. Oulou-Djami stands on the edge of the vast bazaar, where splendid Eastern dresses are seen in perfection: the perfectly fitting jackets and breeches of the men, of richest embroidered stuff, never costing less than from £3 to £10, so that one wondered at their not minding the frequent torrents of rain; but it is all ‘kismet.’ When at home these glorious-looking Turks do nothing, for there is nothing to do: if a house takes fire, they do not care—there is nothing to burn but a few divans: perhaps the owner takes his clothes with him when he escapes—there is nothing else to take. They rise early and have a cup of coffee, at ten they breakfast, at six is dinner, at eight they go to bed: a few possible visits are the only variety of the day.
“It was a delightful drive to the Citadel, where all the space not occupied by wonderful old buildings is shaded by the most magnificent planes and cypresses, watered by crystal streams, which have their source here. The tombs of the first Osmanli princes, Osman and Orchan, are here, restored after an earthquake. On the tomb of Osman lies the order of the Osmanlieh: two of his sons and fourteen of his daughters surround him. A more curious family burial-place is that of Mouradié, a green enclosure, bright with fountains and roses, and containing a whole succession of venerable turbé of the family of Murad I. and Mehemet II., chiefly murdered victims. Amongst the latter, the tomb of the hero-prince Djem is especially rich and striking. The grave of Murad, by his own desire, is left open to the rain of heaven, and is covered with sickly grass. Of the early Broussa Sultans, several—being sons of fathers of eighteen and mothers of sixteen—were generals of armies and governors of provinces at fourteen, and their enormous families were due to the fact that they continued to have children from sixteen to seventy.
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THE BATHS, BROUSSA.
THE BATHS, BROUSSA.
“We drove on to another noble mosque at Tchékirgué, about two miles from Broussa, with more tombs and relics. Amongst the latter is shown a prayer, inscribed on wood and enclosed in a bottle. ‘When the bottle breaks, Broussa will become christian,’ is the tradition—suggesting an easy and cheap enterprise for missionaries. In front of this mosque (Ghazy-Hounkiar) is a fountain surrounded by cold and hot springs alternately, and a little below the village, on the edge of the valley, are the picturesque old domed baths, the strong sulphuric springs of which are famous throughout Turkey. All around Broussa is rich soil and vegetation; hollyhocks grow wild along the hedges: it is a glorious climate: only justice and government are needed.
“I am sorry to go away without seeing more of the Bosphorus, but I have just been to Therapia, where the villeggiatura life in summer must be delightful.”
“May 23.—My last hours at Constantinople were spent in an expedition with the Whites in their picturesque state barge to the Sweet Waters of Europe. I believe I have said nothing of Sir William White, though he is the ambassador in whose house I have been living so long. His simple manners are full of bluff humour. He is said to understand the Turk perfectly, and rose entirely by his own merits, with the help of a lucky appointment to the Conference of 1876-77.”
To Louisa, Marchioness of Waterford.
“Ober-Ammergau, June 2.—We have seen the Passion-Play. It is a day to have lived for: nothing can be more sublimely devotional, more indescribably pathetic.
“Our journey from Constantinople was accomplished very easily. We stayed to see Buda-Pesth, a very handsome modern city, and then had two days of perfect enjoyment at Halstadt and the exquisite Gosau Lake. On Friday night we slept at Oberau, and drove here early on Saturday morning, finding the Lowthers at once in the village street, and spending most of that day in drawing with them. We went at once to the house of the Burgomaster to inquire where we were billeted. All the material part of life is most comfortably and economically arranged for visitors. I am quartered with St. Thomas, and all through the day one meets peasants with long hair, recalling Biblical figures. The Burgomaster’s beautiful daughter is the Virgin Mary. In a gracious and touching spirit of unselfish love all these villagers live together for mutual help and comfort. They have been trained under their late pastor, Aloys Daisemberger, to regard the Passions-Spiel, which is the great event of their quiet lives, not only as a religious service of thanksgiving to which every talent and energy must be contributed for the glory of God, and a manifestation of gratitude for His preservation of them, but they are also taught to look upon it as an instrument which God’s grace has placed in their hands for the calling back of Europe to Christianity, through the dark mists of infidelity which have been creeping over it in the nineteenth century. And truly in this the actual visit to Ober-Ammergau may be as full of teaching as the great representation itself—the simple contact with such men as ‘Christus Maier,’[488] as he is called, whose life’s work is ‘to endeavour to do God’s will aufs innersten, and to be helpful to those around him.’ Here, in Ober-Ammergau—perhaps here alone—religion takes no heed of Roman Catholic or Protestant vagaries; the will of God, the example of Christ, those are the only guidance of life. In the five sermons of Daisemberger preparatory to the Passion-Play of 1871,[489] there is not a single word which indicates Romanism. ‘Look, O disciples of Christ,’ says Daisemberger to his people; ‘see your Master, how gentle, how kind He is, how mild in His intercourse with those around Him, how full of heartiest sympathy for their joys and sorrows. Then can you, in your intercourse with those around you, be grumbling, rough, discourteous, self-asserting, repellent, and wanting in sympathy? Oh no! you could never endure to be so unlike your Master.’
“It is a beautiful place, a high upland mountain valley, covered with rich pastures and enamelled with flowers. A long street, or rather road, lined by comfortable detached timber houses, leads to the handsome church, around which the older part of the village groups itself above the clear rushing Ammer, and is highly picturesque. Beyond the village, in the meadows overlooked by the peak of the Kofel, is the theatre where the great drama of the Passion is enacted, which, ever since 1634, has commemorated every tenth year the then deliverance of Ammergau from the plague which was devastating the neighbouring villages.
“All through Friday it was curious to meet a succession of London acquaintances, and most unexpected ones, but from all being here with one object, no one was uncongenial. And all is so perfectly managed, there is no fuss or hurry; comfortable accommodation, good seats, excellent food are provided for all who are permitted to come, for the visitors for every performance are limited to the 2000 for whom there is room; no unexpected persons, no excursionists are ever admitted. No thought of gain has ever the slightest influence upon the villagers, and the prices are only such as pay what is absolutely due.
“Yesterday morning, I imagine, no visitor could sleep after four, when their peasant hosts began to tramp overhead and clatter down their narrow oak staircases. Then, after an excellent breakfast of hot coffee, cream, eggs, and toast, many visitors and all the people of Ober-Ammergau hurried to the six-o’clock service in the church, where all the five hundred actors knelt with their pastor in silent prayer, and many of them received the Sacrament. At eight all were comfortably placed in their seats in the open-air theatre, and the soft wild music of Schutzgeister, which seems to come from behind the hills, preluded the performance.
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OBER-AMMERGAU.
OBER-AMMERGAU.
“One might be seated in the Piazza del Popolo at Rome with one’s back to the gate. There is the same vast intervening space, and the same three branching streets (the central closed by an inner theatre for tableaux), with marked buildings at the entrance. Only here those buildings are the houses of Annas, Caiaphas, and Pilate, and the streets are those of Jerusalem, lined with Eastern houses, domes, and here and there a palm-tree, and they melt far away into lovely ethereal mountain distances, the real mountains of the Bavarian Alps. The performance begins when the spirit-chorus of eighteen persons, male and female, in many-coloured tunics and mantles, advance in stately lines from either side of the stage, and in a chaunt, weird but most distinctly audible, explain what is coming, and urge those present to receive it in a humble spirit of reverence and adoration of God. Then, on the central stage, begin the strange series of types and antitypes, and, as the veil falls the second time, the vast Hosanna-procession of five hundred men, women, and children, singing, shouting, and strewing palm-branches, appears down the distant streets, and, as it draws nearer, and the mountains resound with jubilant shouts and the whole air is ablaze with life and colour, the serene, rapt, stately figure of the Christus, riding upon the ass, but even then spiritualised into absolute sublimity by the sense of his divine mission, comes for the first time before us. Afterwards, through the long eight hours of thrilling tension which follow, overshadowing the endless, almost wearisome, series of Old Testament scenes, drawing every heart and eye nearer to himself through the agony of the trial, the cross-bearing, the crucifixion, does that sublime figure become more familiar; never again can the thought of the God-man be severed from it. And in the great drama itself one sees all the rest, but one feels with, one lives for, the Christ alone; and the dignity of his lofty patience, unmoved from the holy calm which pervades his whole being even when four hundred savage Jews are shouting and jibing round in clamorous eagerness for his death, must be present with one through life.
“I cannot tell it all. Words fail and emotions are too much. Through that long day—oh! is it that day alone?—one knows how to live with, to suffer with Christ: one is raised above earth and its surroundings: one dies with Him to sin and suffering: one is raised with Him into heavenly places. After some hours, England is forgotten, Germany is forgotten. You are a Jew. Jerusalem is your home: all, all your interests are centred there: nothing earthly is of the very least importance to you except the great tragedy that is being enacted before your eyes. It is perhaps the humanity of Christ which is brought most forcibly before you; but oh! how divinely human, how humanly divine!
“Could one wonder that Mr. Vanderbilt, the American millionaire, said that he owed everything—everything for this world and the next—to Ober-Ammergau? it had unveiled and explained religion for him: it had made the Bible a living reality.
“I think of the Old Testament scenes, the Fall of the Manna is the most beautiful. More than four hundred Israelites, including a hundred and fifty children, are seen—groups of the most exquisite and harmonious colour—with Moses and Aaron in the desert; and between you and them, and amongst and around them, falls mysteriously the soft vaporous manna; whilst the chorus in sweet, wild, lingering monotone chaunt the beautiful hymn beginning—