ness at German tables d'hôte,) went with all our party a roughly paved ramble about the streets, noticing the outside of the Domkirk, and the inside of the Apostles' church, and buying a book of Rhine views, as a whet to present appetite, and thereafter for a me

mento.

21st.-Everywhere we find splendid apartments, capital for summer weather, but unendurable, one must think, in the winter months; all this marble and lacker and varnish and finery must be freezing to every sense, with snow on the ground, however suitable just now; comfort is not the word for continental houses, but magnificence: the porte cocher and grand suite-of-room system, with polished floors and vast quantities of ormolu, may be very stately, but it is not homely. Clatter and racket all night long; that echoing bridge of boats trampled by carts, and opening for steam tugs, is by no means soporific; especially as wharfs full of steamers and other craft lie alongside our inn. And this inn, n.b., though in a first-rate situation, is a very bad one, and by no means recommendable; kept by a stingy rich old widow, (one hates widows with a Wellerian intensity,) who cares only to fleece the few people who

come to her house. At Malines, (according to guide-books,) there is a sort of convent for eight hundred widows; imagine what a corps those old beldames would make in the Crimea ! nothing could stand against their tongues and tempers if Belgium were only of our league, this idea might be carried out with advantage. Progressed with all my following and a commissionaire, between the showers to the Domkirk, which I found disappointing. Fact is, that as long as it was a gigantic ruin at the tower end, and a glorious choir at the east end, with a shed between, you had every element for the imagination to rejoice in; but now that the old is being scraped up, and ruins mended, and all things made new and perfect, the charm is broken, cold reality succeeds to the romantic ideal. The kings of Prussia and Bavaria had far better have left Cologne Cathedral alone; but hereabouts, people seem to have voted the world young, not old, and to be supposing that we are to have a thousand years more of it. Everywhere a most expensive, and generally tasteless, spirit of renovation has pervaded these parts: ancient buildings are resurging new; and antiquity is being whitewashed, and chiselled, and scraped away. I find serious fault also with certain bisected arches in stained glass, given by these modern

kings of Cologne: surely, it is a received rule of taste not to cut an arch straight up to its keystone; yet this is done here in blazing colours. Well, we duly did the traveller's duty by the cathedral; with its relics, (St. Matthew's fingers are among them, and St. Sebastian's ribs !) its monstrants, crosses, and chalices, all begemmed; the glorious tomb of the three kings, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, crusted over with jewels and pearls and cameos and entaglios; the tombs, and pictures, and carved altar-pieces and all; afterwards, mounting the tower, and viewing bird'seye all this old Cologne.

Home by the Rathhaus, passing three real ancient Roman stone arches, where centurions had many times been there before us. As I mean to see this beautiful Maison de Ville again, I'll say nothing more about it now; meanwhile more steeple-hunting. The best -because entirely original and unrenovated-church in Cologne is St. Gereon's, circular with an apse, Byzantine within and without, and none of its ancient fresco-painting desecrated by whitewash; everywhere else, all is scrubbed clean, but this has the tints of age upon it, and architecturally, as well as decoratively, is peculiar and full of interest; the choir being raised higher by many steps than

the nave, and like our next church a vast bone reliquary. St. Ursula's is noted for its skulls, and everybody knows how "Ursula et Undecimilla Virgines" became, after a miraculous fashion, "Ursula et Undecimillia Virgines!" and how the nuns of the convent of St. Ursula amused themselves by collecting skeletons, and shaping the bones in patterns, and embroidering the skulls with velvet, gold thread, and pearls; and so how miraculously, by the pious fraud of an interpolated tittle, the one eleventh lassie became eleven thousand! The room in which these glorified crania are kept is very curious, surrounded with gilt glazed niches, and metal busts; each with a skull, and each with a legend in pearls of a Christian name, invented by those little-scrupulous nuns. Marvellous relics also are here shown alike to sceptics and believers; fingers, and teeth, and fragments of clothing, all appropriated to St. somebodies; and two thorns from our Lord's crown. Plenty more there is to tell of, but no time to tell it in, and these things pall.

The Jesuits' church is very striking for its sculptures in wood and marble, all being white and gold; a splendid coup-d'œil. St. Peter's is famous for a disagreeable picture by Rubens of Peter's crucifixion, head downwards. Other churches also we looked into, but as it was

WEYER'S GALLERY.

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Confession-day in most of them, we would not, with our crowd, disturb the poor folks every confessor had a handkerchief over his face,-I suppose to hide the changes of his fatherly countenance consequent on what he might be hearing; and there, were those degraded suppliants, chiefly women, pouring into the Jesuits' ears all that never should be heard nor uttered.

One is apt to forget, even from one church to another, the ecclesiastical specialities of each; but I think that St. Mary of the capitol is rememberable for ancient, plain round arches, and a Byzantine appearance, which would have looked splendid in its original fresco; but alas for paint and whitewash ! Restoration is the bane of all these churches. Lastly, we visited M. Weyer's beautiful gallery of paintings, full of Rembrandts, Rubenses, Vandykes, Guidos, and every other master-in especial, the pre-Raphaelites :-Quentin Matsys, and Albert Durer have strangely plagiarized the one from the other in a picture of St. Jerome; Hemmelinck, and Van Eyck, and his brother and sister, have several choice specimens, and altogether a long and ornate gallery (as well as two ante-rooms) is well filled with virtuoso delights. It is very liberal in M. Weyer thus to throw his mansion open to