This built by the monastic Order of Templars, at the time when sacerdotal and military theocracies, uniting in revolt against princes with tyranny toward the people, constructed for themselves forts for monasteries, and marched to dominion by the double power of the cross and the sword. After their fall their fortified dwelling had remained standing, as a wreck of past times neglected by the present. The château of the Temple was situated near the Faubourg St. Antoine, not far from the Bastile; it enclosed with its buildings, its palace, its towers, and its gardens, a vast space of solitude and silence, in the center of a most densely populated quarter. The buildings were composed of a prieuré, or palace of the Order, the apartments of which served as an occasional dwelling for the Comte d'Artois, when that prince came from Versailles to Paris. dilapidated palace contained apartments furnished with ancient movables, beds and linen for the suite of the prince. A porter and his family were its only hosts. A garden surrounded it, as empty and neglected as the palace. At some steps from this dwelling was the donjon of the château, once the fortification of the Temple. Its abrupt, dark mass rose on a simple spot of ground toward the sky; two square towers, the one larger, the other smaller, were united to each other like a mass of walls, each one having at its flank other small suspended towers, in former days crowned with battlements at their extremity, and these formed the principal group of this construction. Some low and more modern buildings abutted upon it, and served, by disappearing in its shade, to raise its height. This donjon and tower were constructed of large stones, cut in Paris, the excoriations and cicatrices of which marbled the walls with yellow, livid spots, upon the black ground which the rain and snow incrust upon the large buildings of the north of France. The large tower, almost as high as the towers of a cathedral, was not less than sixty feet from the base to the top. It enclosed within its four walls a space of thirty square feet. An enormous pile of masonry occupied the center of the tower, and rose almost to the point of the edifice. This pile, larger and wider at each story, leaned its arches upon the exterior walls, and formed four successive arched roofs, which contained four guard-rooms. These halls communicated with other hidden and more narrow places cut in the towers. The walls of the edifice were nine feet thick. The embrasures of the few windows which lighted it, very large at the entrance of the hall, sunk, as they became narrow, even to the crosswork of stone, and left only a feeble and remote light to penetrate into the interior. Bars of iron darkened these apartments still further. Two doors, the one of doubled oak-wood very thick, and studded with large diamond-headed nails; the other plated with iron, and fortified with bars of the same metal, divided each hall from the stair by which one asIcended to it. This staircase rose in a spiral to the platform of the edifice. Seven successive wickets, or seven solid doors, shut by bolt and key, were ranged from landing to landing, from the base to the terrace. At each one of these wickets a sentinel and a keybearer were on guard. An exterior gallery crowned the summit of the donjon. One made here ten steps at each turn. The least breath of air howled there like a tempest. The noises of Paris mounted there, weakening as they came. Thence the eye ranged freely over the low roofs of the quarter Saint Antoine, or the streets of the Temple, upon the dome of the Pantheon, upon the towers of the cathedral, upon the roofs of the pavilions of the Tuileries, or upon the green hills of Issy, or of Choisy-le-Roi, descending, with their villages, their parks, and their meadows, toward the course of the Seine. The small tower stood with its back to the large one. It had also two little towers upon each of its flanks. It was equally square, and divided into four stories. No interior communication existed between these two contiguous edifices; each had its separate staircase; an open platform crowned this tower in place of a roof, as on the donjon. The first story enclosed an antechamber, an eating-hall, and a library of old books collected by the ancient priors of the Temple, or serving as a depot for the refuse of the libraries of the Comte d'Artois; the second, third, and fourth stories offered to the eye the same disposition of apartments, the same nakedness of wall, and the same dilapidation of furniture. The winds whistled there, the rain fell across the broken panes, the swallow flew in there at pleasure; no beds, sofas, or hangings were there. One or two couches for the assistant jailers, some broken straw-bottom chairs, and earthen vessels in an abandoned kitchen formed the whole of the furniture. Two low-arched doors, whose freestone moldings represented a bundle of pillars, surmounted by broken escutcheons of the Temple, led to the vestibule of these two towers. Large alleys paved with flagstones surrounded the building; these were separated by barriers of planks. The garden was overgrown with vegetation-thick with coarse herbs, and choked by heaps of stones and gravel, the relics of demolished buildings. A high and dull wall, like that of a cloister, made the place still more gloomy. This wall had only one outlet, at the extremity of a long alley on the Vieille Ru du Temple. Such were the exterior aspect and interior disposition of this abode, when the owners of the Tuileries, Versailles, and Fontainebleau arrived at nightfall. These deserted halls no longer expected tenants since the Templars had left them, to go to the funeral pile of Jacques de Molay. These py ramidal towers, empty, cold, and mute for so many ages, more resembled the chambers of a pyramid in the sepulcher of a Pharaoh of the West than a residence. GODLESSNESS OF THE FRENCH THE HE Republicans of Cromwell sought only the way of God, even in the blood of battles. But look at Mirabeau on the bed of death. "Crown. me with flowers," said he; "intoxicate me with perfumes. Let me die to the sound of delicious music." Not a word was there of God or of his Own soul! Sensual philosopher, supreme sensualism was his last desire in his agony! Contemplate Madame Roland, the strong-hearted woman of the Revolution, on the cart that conveyed her to death. Not a glance toward heaven! Only one word for the earth she was quitting: "O Liberty, what crimes in thy name are committed!" Approach the dungeon door of the Girondins. Their last night is a banquet,-their only hymn the "Marseillaise"! Hear Danton on the platform of the scaffold: "I have had a good time of it; let me go to sleep." Then, to the executioner: "You will show my head to the people; it is worth the trouble!" His faith, annihilation; his last sigh, vanity. CHARLES LAMB CHARLES LAMв, poet and humorist, born in London, England, in 1775; died at Edmonton in 1834. At an early age he received an appointment in the office of the East India Company, a position he held for over thirty years. He wrote his first poems about 1797, and then branched off to prose and to dramatic writing. His most famous work, "The Essays of Elia," which appeared at intervals for thirteen years from 1820, shows this writer at his best. Graceful in style, humorous and of much originality, they have appealed strongly to the thinking people of two generations. With his sister, Mary, he wrote "Tales from the Plays of Shakespeare." A POOR RELATIONS (From the "Essays of Elia") POOR Relation-is the most irrelevant thing in nature, a piece of impertinent correspondency, an odious approximation, a haunting conscience, a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noon-tide of our prosperity, an unwelcome remembrancer,—a perpetually recurring mortification, -a drain on your purse, a more intolerable dun upon your pride, a drawback upon success,-a rebuke to your rising, a stain in your blood,—a blot on your 'scutcheon,-a rent in your garment, a death's head at your banquet,-Agothocle's pot,-a Mordecai in your gate, a Lazarus at your door,-a lion in your path, a frog in your chamber,-a fly in your ointment, a mote in your eye, a triumph to your enemy, an apology to your friends, the one thing |