At Oxford the attitude of the Jewry towards the national religion showed a marked consciousness of this royal protection. Prior Philip of St. Frideswide complains bitterly of a certain Hebrew with the odd name of "Deus-cum-crescat," who stood at his door as the procession of the saint passed by, mocking at the miracles wrought at her shrine. Halting and then walking firmly on his feet, showing his hands clenched as if with palsy and then flinging open his fingers, the mocking Jew claimed gifts and oblations from the crowd who flocked to St. Frideswide's on the ground that such recoveries of limb and strength were quite as real as any Frideswide had wrought. But though sickness and death, in the prior's story, avenge the insult to his shrine, no earthly power, ecclesiastical or civil, seems to have ventured to meddle with "Deus-cum-crescat." The feud between the priory and the Jewry went on unchecked for a century more to culminate in a daring act of fanaticism on the Ascension-day of 1268. As the usual procession of scholars and citizens returned from St. Frideswide's, a Jew suddenly burst from the group of his comrades in front of the synagogue, and snatching the crucifix from its bearer trod it under foot. But even in presence of such an outrage as this the terror of the Crown shielded the Jewry from any burst of popular indignation. The sentence of the king condemned the Jews of Oxford to erect a cross of marble on the spot where the crime was committed; but even this was remitted in part, and a less offensive place was allotted for the cross in an open plot by Merton College.

With the Jewish settlement began the cultivation of physical science in Oxford. The Hebrew instruction, the Hebrew books which he found among its rabbis, were the means by which Roger Bacon penetrated to the older world of material research. A medical school which we find established there and in high repute during the twelfth century can hardly have been other than Jewish: in the operation for the stone, which one of the stories in the 'Miracles of St. Frideswide' preserves for us, we trace the traditional surgery which is still common in the East. But it is perhaps in a more purely material way that the Jewry at Oxford most directly influenced our academical history. There as elsewhere the Jew brought with him something more than the art or science which he had gathered at Cordova or Bagdad; he brought with him the new power of wealth. The erection of stately castles, of yet statelier abbeys, which followed the Conquest, the rebuilding of almost every cathedral or conventual church, marks the advent of the Jewish capitalist. No one can study the earlier history of our great monastic houses without finding the secret of that sudden outburst of industrial activity to which we owe the noblest of our minsters in the loans of the Jew. The bonds of many a great baron, the relics of many an abbey, lay pledged for security in the "Star-chamber" of the Jew.

His arrival at Oxford is marked by the military and ecclesiastical erections of its Norman earls. But a result of his presence, which bore more directly on the future of the town, was seen in the remarkable developement of its domestic architecture. To the wealth of the Jew, to his need of protection against sudden outbursts of popular passion, very probably to the greater refinement of his social life, England owes the introduction of stone houses. Tradition attributes almost every instance of the earliest stone buildings of a domestic character to the Jew; and where the tradition can be tested, as at Bury St. Edmunds or Lincoln, it has proved to be in accordance with the facts. In Oxford nearly all the larger dwelling-houses which were subsequently converted into halls bore traces of their Jewish origin in their names, such as Moysey's Hall, Lombards', Jacob's Hall. It is a striking proof of the superiority of the Hebrew dwellings to the Christian houses around them that each of the successive town-halls of the borough had, before their expulsion, been houses of Jews. Such houses were abundant in the town, not merely in the purely Jewish quarter on Carfax but in the lesser Jewry which was scattered over the parish of St. Aldate; and we can hardly doubt that this abundance of substantial buildings in the town was at least one of the causes which drew teachers and students within its walls.

The same great event which flung down the Jewish settlement in the very heart of the English town bounded it to the west by the castle and the abbey of the conquerors. Oxford stood first on the line of great fortresses which, passing by Wallingford and Windsor to the Tower of London, guarded the course of the Thames. Its castellan, Robert D'Oilly, had followed William from Normandy and had fought by his side at Senlac. Oxfordshire was committed by the Conqueror to his charge; and he seems to have ruled it in rude, soldierly fashion, enforcing order, heaping up riches, tripling the taxation of the town, pillaging without scruple the older religious houses of the neighbourhood. It was only by ruthless exaction such as this that the work which William had set him to do could be done. Money was needed above all for the great fortress which held the town. The new castle rose on the eastern bank of the Thames, broken here into a number of small streamlets, one of which served as the deep moat which encircled its walls. A well marked the centre of the wide castle-court; to the north of it on a lofty mound rose the great keep; to the west the one tower which remains, the tower of St. George, frowned over the river and the mill. Without the walls of the fortress lay the Bailly, a space cleared by the merciless policy of the castellan, with the church of St. Peter le Bailly which still marks its extent.

The hand of Robert D'Oilly fell as heavily on the Church as on the townsmen. Outside the town lay a meadow belonging to the Abbey of Abingdon, which seemed suitable for the exercise of the soldiers of his garrison. The earl was an old plunderer of the Abbey; he had wiled away one of its finest manors from its Abbot Athelm; but his seizure of the meadow beside Oxford drove the monks to despair. Night and day they threw themselves weeping before the altar of the two English saints whose names were linked to the older glories of their house. But while they invoked the vengeance of Dunstan and AEthelwold on their plunderer, the earl, fallen sick, tossed fever-smitten on his bed. At last Robert dreamt that he stood in a vast court, one of a crowd of nobles gathered round a throne whereon sate a lady passing fair. Before her knelt two brethren of the abbey, weeping for the loss of their mead and pointing out the castellan as the robber. The lady bade Robert be seized, and two youths hurried him away to the field itself, seated him on the ground, piled burning hay around him, smoked him, tossed haybands in his face, and set fire to his beard. The earl woke trembling at the divine discipline; he at once took boat for Abingdon, and restored to the monks the meadow he had reft from them. His terror was not satisfied by the restitution of his plunder, and he returned to set about the restoration of the ruined churches within and without the walls of Oxford. The tower of St. Michael, the doorway of St. Ebbe, the chancel arch of Holywell, the crypt and chancel of St. Peter's-in-the-East, are fragments of the work done by Robert and his house. But the great monument of the devotion of the D'Oillys rose beneath the walls of their castle. Robert, a nephew of the first castellan, had wedded Edith, a concubine of Henry I. The rest of the story we may tell in the English of Leland. "Edith used to walke out of Oxford Castelle with her gentlewomen to solace, and that oftentymes where yn a certen place in a tree, as often as she cam, a certain pyes used to gather to it, and ther to chattre, and as it were to spek on to her, Edyth much mervelyng at this matter, and was sumtyme sore ferid by it as by a wonder." Radulf, a canon of St. Frideswide's, was consulted on the marvel, and his counsel ended in the erection of the priory of Osney beneath the walls of the castle. The foundation of the D'Oillys became one of the wealthiest and largest of the English abbeys; but of its vast church and lordly abbot's house, the great quadrangle of its cloisters, the almshouses without its gate, the pleasant walks shaded with stately elms beside the river, not a trace remains. Its bells alone were saved at the Dissolution by their transfer to Christchurch.

The military strength of the castle of the D'Oillys was tested in the struggle between Stephen and the Empress. Driven from London by a rising of its burghers at the very moment when the crown seemed within her grasp, Maud took refuge at Oxford. In the succeeding year Stephen found himself strong enough to attack his rival in her stronghold; his knights swam the river, fell hotly on the garrison which had sallied without the walls to meet them, chased them through the gates, and rushed pell-mell with the fugitives into the city. Houses were burnt and the Jewry sacked; the Jews, if tradition is to be trusted, were forced to raise against the castle the work that still bears the name of "Jews' Mount"; but the strength of its walls foiled the efforts of the besiegers, and the attack died into a close blockade. Maud was however in Stephen's grasp, and neither the loss of other fortresses nor the rigour of the winter could tear the king from his prey. Despairing of relief the Empress at last resolved to break through the enemy's lines. Every stream was frozen and the earth covered with snow, when clad in white and with three knights in white garments as her attendants Maud passed unobserved through the outposts, crossed the Thames upon the ice, and made her way to Abingdon and the fortress of Wallingford.

With the surrender which followed the military history of Oxford ceases till the Great Rebellion. Its political history had still to attain its highest reach in the Parliament of De Montfort. The great assemblies held at Oxford under Cnut, Stephen, and Henry III., are each memorable in their way. With the first closed the struggle between Englishman and Dane, with the second closed the conquest of the Norman, with the third began the regular progress of constitutional liberty. The position of the town, on the border between the England that remained to the West-Saxon kings and the England that had become the "Danelagh" of their northern assailants, had from the first pointed it out as the place where a union between Dane and Englishman could best be brought about. The first attempt was foiled by the savage treachery of AEthelred the Unready. The death of Swegen and the return of Cnut to Denmark left an opening for a reconciliation, and Englishmen and Danes gathered at Oxford round the king. But all hope was foiled by the assassination of the Lawmen of the Seven Danish Boroughs, Sigeferth and Morcar, who fell at a banquet by the hand of the minister Eadric, while their followers threw themselves into the tower of St. Frideswide and perished in the flames that consumed it. The overthrow of the English monarchy avenged the treason. But Cnut was of nobler stuff than AEthelred, and his conquest of the realm was followed by the gathering of a new gemote at Oxford to resume the work of reconciliation which Eadric had interrupted. Englishman and Dane agreed to live together as one people under Eadgar's Law, and the wise government of the King completed in the long years of his reign the task of national fusion. The conquest of William set two peoples a second time face to face upon the same soil, and it was again at Oxford that by his solemn acceptance and promulgation of the Charter of Henry I. in solemn parliament Stephen closed the period of military tyranny, and began the union of Norman and Englishman into a single people. These two great acts of national reconciliation were fit preludes for the work of the famous assembly which has received from its enemies the name of "the Mad Parliament." In the June of 1258 the barons met at Oxford under earl Simon de Montfort to commence the revolution to which we owe our national liberties. Followed by long trains of men in arms and sworn together by pledges of mutual fidelity, they wrested from Henry III. the great reforms which, frustrated for the moment, have become the basis of our constitutional system. On the "Provisions of Oxford" followed the regular establishment of parliamentary representation and power, of a popular and responsible ministry, of the principle of local self-government.

From parliaments and sieges, from Jew and castellan, it is time to turn back to the humbler annals of the town itself. The first event that lifts it into historic prominence is its league with London. The "bargemen" of the borough seem to have already existed before the Conquest, and to have been closely united from the first with the more powerful guild, the "boatmen" or "merchants" of the capital. In both cases it is probable that the bodies bearing this name represented what in later language was known as the merchant guild of the town; the original association, that is, of its principal traders for purposes of mutual protection, of commerce, and of self-government. Royal recognition enables us to trace the merchant guild of Oxford from the time of Henry I.; even then indeed lands, islands, pastures already belonged to it, and amongst them the same "Port-meadow" or "Town-mead" so familiar to Oxford men pulling lazily on a summer's noon to Godstow, and which still remains the property of the freemen of the town. The connection between the two cities and their guilds was primarily one of traffic. Prior even to the Conquest, "in the time of King Eadward and Abbot Ordric," the channel of the river running beneath the walls of the Abbey of Abingdon became so blocked up "that boats could scarce pass as far as Oxford." It was at the joint prayer of the burgesses of London and Oxford that the abbot dug a new channel through the meadow to the south of his church, the two cities engaging that each barge should pay a toll of a hundred herrings on its passage during Lent. But the union soon took a constitutional form. The earliest charter of the capital which remains in detail is that of Henry I., and from the charter of his grandson we find a similar date assigned to the liberties of Oxford. The customs and exemptions of its burghers are granted by Henry II., "as ever they enjoyed them in the time of King Henry my grandfather, and in like manner as my citizens of London hold them." This identity of municipal privileges is of course common to many other boroughs, for the charter of London became the model for half the charters of the kingdom; what is peculiar to Oxford is the federal bond which in Henry II.'s time already linked the two cities together. In case of any doubt or contest about judgment in their own court the burgesses of Oxford were empowered to refer the matter to the decision of London, "and whatever the citizens of London shall adjudge in such cases shall be deemed right." The judicial usages, the municipal rights of each city were assimilated by Henry's charter. "Of whatever matter they shall be put in plea, they shall deraign themselves according to the law and customs of the city of London and not otherwise, because they and the citizens of London are of one and the same custom, law, and liberty."

In no two cities has municipal freedom experienced a more different fate than in the two that were so closely bound together. The liberties of London waxed greater and greater till they were lost in the general freedom of the realm: those of Oxford were trodden under foot till the city stood almost alone in its bondage among the cities of England. But it would have been hard for a burgher of the twelfth century, flushed with the pride of his new charter, or fresh from the scene of a coronation where he had stood side by side with the citizens of London and Winchester as representing one of the chief cities of the realm, to have dreaded any danger to the liberties of his borough from the mob of half-starved boys who were beginning to pour year after year into the town. The wealthy merchant who passed the group of shivering students huddled round a teacher as poor as themselves in porch and doorway, or dropped his alms into the cap of the mendicant scholar, could hardly discern that beneath rags and poverty lay a power greater than the power of kings, the power for which Becket had died and which bowed Henry to penance and humiliation. On all but its eastern side indeed the town was narrowly hemmed in by jurisdictions independent of its own. The precincts of the Abbey of Osney, the wide bailly of the castle, bounded it narrowly on the west. To the north, stretching away to the little church of St. Giles, lay the fields of the royal manor of Beaumont. The Abbot of Abingdon, whose woods of Cumnor and Bagley closed the southern horizon, held his leet court in the small hamlet of Grampound beyond the bridge. Nor was the whole space within its walls altogether subject to the self-government of the citizens. The Jewry, a town within a town, lay isolated and exempt from the common justice or law in the very heart of the borough. Scores of householders, dotted over the various streets, were tenants of abbey or castle, and paid neither suit nor service to the city court. But within these narrow bounds and amidst these various obstacles the spirit of municipal liberty lived a life the more intense that it was so closely cabined and confined.

It was in fact at the moment when the first Oxford students appeared within its walls that the city attained complete independence. The twelfth century, the age of the Crusades, of the rise of the scholastic philosophy, of the renewal of classical learning, was also the age of a great communal movement, that stretched from Italy along the Rhone and the Rhine, the Seine and the Somme, to England. The same great revival of individual, human life in the industrial masses of the feudal world that hurried half Christendom to the Holy Land, or gathered hundreds of eager faces round the lecture-stall of Abelard, beat back Barbarossa from the walls of Alessandria and nerved the burghers of Northern France to struggle as at Amiens for liberty. In England the same spirit took a milder and perhaps more practical form, from the different social and political conditions with which it had to deal. The quiet townships of Teutonic England had no traditions of a Roman past to lure them on, like the cities of Italy, into dreams of sovereignty. Their ruler was no foreign Caesar, distant enough to give a chance for resistance, but a king near at hand and able to enforce obedience and law. The king's peace shielded them from that terrible oppression of the mediaeval baronage which made liberty with the cities of Germany a matter of life or death. The peculiarity of municipal life in fact in England is that instead of standing apart from and in contrast with the general life around it the progress of the English town moved in perfect harmony with that of the nation at large. The earlier burgher was the freeman within the walls, as the peasant-ceorl was the freeman without. Freedom went with the possession of land in town as in country. The citizen held his burgher's rights by his tenure of the bit of ground on which his tenement stood. He was the king's free tenant, and like the rural tenants he owed his lord dues of money or kind. In township or manor alike the king's reeve gathered this rental, administered justice, commanded the little troop of soldiers that the spot was bound to furnish in time of war. The progress of municipal freedom, like that of national freedom, was wrought rather by the slow growth of wealth and of popular spirit, by the necessities of kings, by the policy of a few great statesmen, than by the sturdy revolts that wrested liberty from the French seigneur or the century of warfare that broke the power of the Caesars in the plain of the Po.

Much indeed that Italy or France had to win by the sword was already the heritage of every English freeman within walls or without. The common assembly in which their own public affairs were discussed and decided, the borough-mote to which every burgher was summoned by the town-bell swinging out of the town-tower, had descended by traditional usage from the customs of the first English settlers in Britain. The close association of the burghers in the sworn brotherhood of the guild was a Teutonic custom of immemorial antiquity. Gathered at the guild supper round the common fire, sharing the common meal, and draining the guild cup, the burghers added to the tie of mere neighbourhood that of loyal association, of mutual counsel, of mutual aid. The regulation of internal trade, all lesser forms of civil jurisdiction, fell quietly and without a struggle into the hands of the merchant guild. The rest of their freedom was bought with honest cash. The sale of charters brought money to the royal treasury, exhausted by Norman wars, by the herd of mercenaries, by Crusades, by the struggle with France. The towns bought first the commutation of the uncertain charges to which they were subject at the royal will for a fixed annual rent. Their purchase of the right of internal justice followed. Last came the privilege of electing their own magistrates, of enjoying complete self-government. Oxford had already passed through the earlier steps of this emancipation before the conquest of the Norman. Her citizens assembled in their Portmannimote, their free self-ruling assembly. Their merchant-guild leagued with that of London. Their dues to the Crown are assessed in Domesday at a fixed sum of honey and coin. The charter of Henry II. marks the acquisition by Oxford, probably at a far earlier date, of judicial and commercial freedom. Liberty of external commerce was given by the exception of its citizens from toll on the king's lands; the decision of either political or judicial affairs was left to their borough-mote. The highest point of municipal independence was reached when the Charter of John substituted a mayor of their own choosing for the mere bailiff of the Crown.

It is hard in dry constitutional details such as these to realize the quick pulse of popular life that stirred such a community as Oxford. Only a few names, of street and lane, a few hints gathered from obscure records, enable one to see the town of the twelfth or thirteenth century. The church of St. Martin in the very heart of it, at the "Quatrevoix" or Carfax where its four roads meet, was the centre of the city's life. The Town-mote was held in its church yard. Justice was administered by mayor and bailiff sitting beneath the low shed, the "penniless bench" of later times, without its eastern wall. Its bell summoned the burghers to counsel or to arms. Around the church lay the trade-guilds, ranged as in some vast encampment; Spicery and Vintnery to the south, Fish Street falling noisily down to the Bridge, the corn market occupying then as now the street which led to North-gate, the stalls of the butchers ranged in their "Butcher-row" along the road to the castle. Close beneath the church to the south-east lay a nest of huddled lanes broken by a stately synagogue and traversed from time to time by the yellow gaberdine of the Jew, whose burying-place lay far away to the eastward on the site of the present Botanic Garden. Soldiers from the castle rode clashing through the narrow streets; the bells of Osney clanged from the swampy meadows; long processions of pilgrims wound past the Jewry to the shrine of Saint Frideswide. It was a rough time, and frays were common enough,—now the sack of a Jew's house, now burgher drawing knife on burgher, now an outbreak of the young student lads, who grew every day in numbers and audacity. But as yet the town seemed well in hand. The clang of the city bell called every citizen to his door, the summons of the mayor brought trade after trade with bow in hand and banners flying to enforce the king's peace. Order and freedom seemed absolutely secure, and there was no sign which threatened that century of disorder, of academical and ecclesiastical usurpation, which humbled the municipal freedom of Oxford to the dust.



THE HOME OF OUR ANGEVIN KINGS.

For those who possess historic tastes, slender purses, and an exemption from Alpine mania, few holidays are more pleasant than a lounge along the Loire. There is always something refreshing in the companionship of a fine river, and whatever one may think of its summer sands Loire through the spring and the autumn is a very fine river indeed. There is, besides, the pleasantest variety of scenery as one wanders along from the sombre granite of Brittany to the volcanic cinder-heaps of Auvergne. There is the picturesque contrast between the vast dull corn-flats to the north of the great river and the vines and acacias to the south. There is the same contrast in an ethnological point of view, for one is traversing the watershed that parts two different races, and enough of difference still remains in dialect and manner to sever the Acquitanian from the Frank. And historically every day brings one across some castle or abbey or town that has been hitherto a mere name in the pages of Lingard or Sismondi, but which one actual glimpse changes into a living fact. There are few tracts of country indeed where the historical interest ranges equally over so long a space of time. The river which was the "revolutionary torrent" of Carrier had been the highway for the Northmen into the heart of Carolingian France. Saumur blends the tenth century and the sixteenth together in the names of Gelduin and Du Plessis; Chinon brings into contact the age of the Plantagenets and the age of Joan of Arc. From the mysterious dolmen and the legendary well to the stone that marks the fusillade of the heroes of La Vendee there is a continuous chain of historic event in these central provinces. Every land has its pet periods of history, and the brilliant chapters of M. Michelet are hardly needed to tell us how thoroughly France identifies the splendour and infamy of the Renascence with the Loire. Blois, Amboise, Chenonceaux, embody still in the magnificence of their ruin the very spirit of Catherine de Medicis, of Francis, of Diana of Poitiers. To Englishmen the relics of an earlier period have naturally a greater charm. Nothing clears one's ideas about the character of the Angevin rule, the rule of Henry II. or Richard or John, so thoroughly as a stroll through Anjou.

There the Angevin Counts are as vivid, as real, as the Angevin Kings are on English soil unreal and dim. Hardly a building in his realm preserves the memory of Henry II.; Richard is a mere visitor to English shores; Beaulieu alone and the graven tomb at Worcester enable us to realize John. But along the Loire these Angevin rulers meet us in river-bank and castle and bridge and town. Their names are familiar words still through the length and breadth of the land. At Angers men show you the vast hospital of Henry II., while the suburb around it is the creation of his son. And not only do the men come vividly before us, but they come before us in another and a fresher light. To us they are strangers and foreigners, stern administrators, exactors of treasure, tyrants to whose tyranny, sometimes just and sometimes unjust, England was destined to owe her freedom. But for Anjou the period of their rule was the period of a peace and fame and splendour that never came back save in the shadowy resurrection under King Rene. Her soil is covered with monuments of their munificence, of their genuine care for the land of their race. Nine-tenths of her great churches, in the stern grandeur of their vaulting, their massive pillars, their capitals breaking into the exquisite foliage of the close of the century, witness to the pious liberality of sovereigns who in England were the oppressors of the Church, and who when doomed to endow a religious house in their realm did it by turning its inhabitants out of an already existing one and giving it simply a new name. As one walks along the famous Levee, the gigantic embankment along the Loire by which Henry saved the valley from inundation, or as one looks at his hospitals at Angers or Le Mans, it is hard not to feel a sympathy and admiration for the man from whom one shrinks coldly under the Martyrdom at Canterbury. There is a French side to the character of these Kings which, though English historians have disregarded it, is worth regarding if only because it really gave the tone to their whole life and rule. But it is a side which can only be understood when we study these Angevins in Anjou.

To the English traveller Angers is in point of historic interest without a rival among the towns of France. Rouen indeed is the cradle of our Norman dynasty as Angers of our Plantagenet dynasty; but the Rouen of the Dukes has almost vanished while Angers remains the Angers of the Counts. The physiognomy of the place—if we may venture to use the term—has been singularly preserved. Few towns have it is true suffered more from the destructive frenzy of the Revolution; gay boulevards have replaced "the flinty ribs of this contemptuous city," the walls which play their part in Shakspere's 'King John'; the noblest of its abbeys has been swept away to make room for a Prefecture; four churches were demolished at a blow to be replaced by the dreariest of squares; the tombs of its later dukes have disappeared from the Cathedral. In spite however of new faubourgs, new bridges, and new squares, Angers still retains the impress of the middle ages; its steep and narrow streets, its dark tortuous alleys, the fantastic woodwork of its houses, the sombre grimness of the slate-rock out of which the city is built, defy even the gay audacity of Imperialist prefects to modernize them. One climbs up from the busy quay along the Mayenne into a city which is still the city of the Counts. From Geoffry Greygown to John Lackland there is hardly one who has not left his name stamped on church or cloister or bridge or hospital. The stern tower of St. Aubin recalls in its founder Geoffry himself; the nave of St. Maurice, the choir of St. Martin's, the walls of Roncevray, the bridge over Mayenne, proclaim the restless activity of Fulc Nerra; Geoffry Martel rests beneath the ruins of St. Nicholas on its height across the river; beyond the walls to the south is the site of the burial place of Fulc Rechin; one can tread the very palace halls to which Geoffry Plantagenet led home his English bride; the suburb of Roncevray, studded with buildings of an exquisite beauty, is almost the creation of Henry Fitz-Empress and his sons.

But, apart from its historical interest, Angers is a mine of treasure to the archaeologist or the artist. In the beauty and character of its site it strongly resembles Le Mans. The river Mayenne comes down from the north, from its junction with the Sarthe, edged on either side by low ranges of coteaux which approaching it nearly on the west leave room along its eastern bank for vast level flats of marshy meadow land, cut through by white roads and long poplar-rows—meadows which in reality represent the old river-bed in some remote geological age before it had shrunk to its present channel. Below Angers the valley widens, and as the Mayenne coils away to Ponts de Ce it throws out on either side broad flats, rich in grass and golden flowers, and scored with rhines as straight and choked with water-weeds as the rhines of Somersetshire. It is across these lower meadows, from the base of the abbey walls of St. Nicholas, that one gets the finest view of Angers, the colossal mass of its castle, the two delicate towers of the Cathedral rising sharp against the sky, the stern belfry of St. Aubin. Angers stands in fact on a huge block of slate-rock, thrown forward from one of the higher plateaux which edge the marshy meadows, and closing up to the river in what was once a cliff as abrupt as that of Le Mans. Pleasant boulevards curve away in a huge semicircle from the river, and between these boulevards and the Mayenne lies the dark old town pierced by steep lanes and break-neck alleys. On the highest point of the block and approached by the steepest lane of all stands the Cathedral of St. Maurice, the tall slender towers of its western front and the fantastic row of statues which fill the arcade between them contrasting picturesquely enough with the bare grandeur of its interior, where the broad, low vaulting reminds us that we are on the architectural border of northern and southern Europe. St. Maurice is in the strictest sense the mother church of the town. M. Michelet has with singular lucklessness selected Angers as the type of a feudal city; with the one exception of the Castle of St. Louis it is absolutely without a trace of the feudal impress. Up to the Revolution it remained the most ecclesiastical of French towns. Christianity found the small Roman borough covering little more than the space on the height above the river afterwards occupied by the Cathedral precincts, planted its church in the midst of it, buttressed it to north and south with the great Merovingian Abbeys of St. Aubin and St. Serge, and linked them together by a chain of inferior foundations that entirely covered its eastern side. From the river on the south to the river on the north Angers lay ringed in by a belt of priories and churches and abbeys. Of the greatest of these, that of St. Aubin, only one huge tower remains, but fragments of it are still to be seen embedded in the buildings of the Prefecture—above all a Romanesque arcade, fretted with tangled imagery and apocalyptic figures of the richest work of the eleventh century. The Abbey of St. Serge still stands to the north of Angers; its vast gardens and fishponds turned into the public gardens of the town, its church spacious and beautiful with a noble choir that may perhaps recall the munificence of Geoffry Martel. Of the rivals of these two great houses two only remain. Portions of the Carolingian Church of St. Martin, built by the wife of Emperor Louis le Debonnaire, are now in use as a tobacco warehouse; the pretty ruin of Toussaint, not at all unlike our own Tintern, stands well cared for in the gardens of the Museum.

But, interesting as these relics are, it is not ecclesiastical Angers that the English traveller instinctively looks for; it is the Angers of the Counts, the birthplace of the Plantagenets. It is only in their own capital indeed that we fully understand our Angevin Kings, that we fully realize that they were Angevins. To an English schoolboy Henry II. is little more than the murderer of Beket and the friend of Fair Rosamund. Even an English student finds it hard after all the labours of Professor Stubbs to lay hold of either Henry or his sons. In spite of their versatile ability and of the mark which they have left on our judicature, our municipal liberty, our political constitution, the first three Plantagenets are to most of us little more than dim shapes of strange manner and speech, hurrying to their island realm to extort money, to enforce good government, and then hurrying back to Anjou. But there is hardly a boy in the streets of Angers to whom the name of Henry Fitz-Empress is strange, who could not point to the ruins of his bridge or the halls of his Hospice, or tell of the great "Levee" by which the most beneficent of Angevin Counts saved the farmers' fields from the floods of the Loire. Strangers in England, the three first Plantagenets are at home in the sunny fields along the Mayenne. The history of Anjou, the character of the Counts, their forefathers, are the keys to the subtle policy, to the strangely-mingled temper of Henry and his sons. The countless robber-holds of the Angevin noblesse must have done much towards the steady resolve with which they bridled feudalism in their island realm. The crowd of ecclesiastical foundations that ringed in their Angevin capital hardly failed to embitter, if not to suggest, their jealousy of the Church.

Of the monuments of the Counts which illustrate our own history, the noblest, in spite of its name, is the Bishop's Palace to the north of the Cathedral. The residence of the Bishop was undoubtedly at first the residence of the Counts, and the tradition which places its transfer as far back as the days of Ingelger can hardly be traced to any earlier source than the local annalist of the seventeenth century. It is at least probable that the occupation of the Palace by the Bishop did not take place till after the erection of the Castle on the site of the original Eveche in the time of St. Louis; and this is confirmed by the fact that the well-known description of Angers by Ralph de Diceto places the Comitial Palace of the twelfth century in the north-east quarter of the town—on the exact site, that is, of the present episcopal residence. But if this identification be correct, there is no building in the town which can compare with it in historical interest for Englishmen. The chapel beneath, originally perhaps simply the substructure of the building, dates from the close of the eleventh century; the fine hall above, with its grand row of windows looking out upon the court, from the earlier half of the twelfth. It was to the building as it actually stands therefore that Geoffry Plantagenet must have brought home his English bride, Maud the Empress, the daughter of our Henry I., along the narrow streets hung with gorgeous tapestries and filled with long trains of priests and burghers. To Angers that day represented the triumphant close of a hundred years' struggle with Normandy; to England it gave the line of its Plantagenet Kings.

The proudest monuments of the sovereigns who sprang from this match, our Henry the Second and his sons, lie not in Angers itself but in the suburb across the river. The suburb seems to have originated in the chapel of Roncevray, the Roman-like masonry of whose exterior may date back as far as Fulc Nerra in the tenth century. But its real importance dates from Henry Fitz-Empress. It is characteristic of the temper and policy of the first of our Plantagenet Kings that in Anjou, as in England, no religious house claimed him as its founder. Here indeed the Papal sentence on his part in the murder of Archbishop Thomas compelled him to resort to the ridiculous trick of turning the canons out of Waltham to enable him to refound it as a priory of his own without cost to the royal exchequer. But in his Continental dominions he did not even stoop to the pretence of such a foundation. No abbey figured among the costly buildings with which he adorned his birthplace Le Mans. It was as if in direct opposition to the purely monastic feeling that he devoted his wealth to the erection of the Hospitals at Angers and Le Mans. It is a relief, as we have said—a relief which one can only get here—to see the softer side of Henry's nature represented in works of mercy and industrial utility. The bridge of Angers, like the bridges of Tours and Saumur, dates back to the first of the Count-Kings. Henry seems to have been the Pontifex Maximus of his day, while his care for the means of industrial communication points to that silent growth of the new mercantile class which the rule of the Angevins did so much to foster. But a memorial of him, hardly less universal, is the Lazar-house or hospital. One of the few poetic legends that break the stern story of the Angevins is the tale of Count Fulc the Good, how, journeying along Loire-side towards Tours, he saw just as the towers of St. Martin's rose before him in the distance a leper full of sores, who put by his offer of alms and desired to be borne to the sacred city. Amid the jibes of his courtiers the good count lifted him in his arms and carried him along bank and bridge. As they entered the town the leper vanished from their sight, and men told how Fulc had borne an angel unawares. Little of his ancestor's tenderness or poetry lingered in the practical utilitarian mind of Henry Fitz-Empress; but the simple Hospice in the fields by Le Mans or the grand Hospital of St. John in the suburb of Angers displayed an enlightened care for the physical condition of his people which is all the more striking that in him and his sons it had probably little connection with the usual motives of religious charity which made such works popular in the middle ages, but, like the rest of their administrative system, was a pure anticipation of modern feeling. There are few buildings more complete or more beautiful in their completeness than the Hospital of St. John; the vast hall with its double row of slender pillars, the exquisite chapel, trembling in the pure grace of its details on the very verge of Romanesque, the engaged shafts of the graceful cloister. The erection of these buildings probably went on through the whole reigns of our three Angevin sovereigns, but the sterner and simpler hall called the Lazar-house beside with its three aisles and noble sweep of wide arches is clearly of the date of Henry alone. It was occupied when I visited it some years ago as a brewery, but never was brewer more courteous, more genuinely archaeological, than its occupant. Throughout these central provinces indeed, as throughout Normandy, the enlightened efforts of the Government have awakened a respect for and pride in their national monuments which extends even to the poorest of the population. Few buildings of a really high class are now left to ruin and desecration as they were twenty years ago; unfortunately their rescue from the destruction of time is too often followed by the more destructive attack of the restorer. And in almost every town of any provincial importance one may obtain what in England it is simply ridiculous to ask for, a really intelligent history of the place itself and a fair description of the objects of interest which it contains.

The broken ruins of the Pont de Treilles, the one low tower above the river Mayenne which remains of the walls around the suburb of Roncevray, show the price which Henry and his sons set on these costly buildings. They have a special interest in Angevin history, for they were the last legacy of the Counts to their capital. Across the river, at the south-west corner of the town itself, stands the huge fortress that commemorates the close of their rule, the castle begun by the French conqueror, Philip Augustus, and completed by his descendant St. Louis. From the wide flats below Angers, where Mayenne rolls lazily on to the Loire, one looks up awed at the colossal mass which seems to dwarf even the minster beside it, at its dark curtains, its fosse trenched deep in the rock, its huge bastions chequered with iron-like bands of slate and unrelieved by art of sculptor or architect. It is as if the conquerors of the Angevins had been driven to express in this huge monument the very temper of the men from whom they reft Anjou, their grand, repulsive isolation, their dark pitiless power.

It is a relief to turn from this castle to that southern fortress which the Counts made their home. A glance at the flat tame expanse of Anjou northward of the Loire explains at once why its sovereigns made their favourite sojourn in the fairer districts south of the river. There are few drives more enjoyable than a drive along the Vienne to the royal retreat of Chinon. The country is rich and noble, deep in grass and maize and corn, with meadows set in low broad hedgerows, and bare scratchy vineyards along the slopes. The road is lined with acacias, Tennyson's "milk-white bloom" hanging from their tender feathery boughs, and here beneath the hot sun of the South the acacia is no mere garden shrub but one of the finest and most graceful of trees. Everywhere along the broad sunlit river of Vienne nature is rich and lavish, and nowhere richer or more lavish than where, towering high on the scarped face of its own grey cliff above the street of brown little houses edged narrowly in between river and rock, stands the favourite home of our Angevin Kings.

It is only in one or two points amidst the great mass of stately buildings which is known as the castle of Chinon that their hand can be traced now. The base of the Tour du Moulay, where tradition says the Grand Master of the Templars was imprisoned by Philippe le Bel, is a fine vault of twelfth-century date, which may have been the work of Henry II., and can hardly be later than his sons. But something of its original character as a luxurious retreat lingers still in the purpose to which the ground within the walls has been devoted; it serves as a garden for the townsfolk of Chinon, and is full of pleasant shadowy walks and flowers, and gay with children's games and laughter. And whatever else may have changed, the same rich landscape lies around that Henry must have looked on when he rode here to die, as we look on it now from the deep recessed windows of the later hall where Joan of Arc stood before the disguised Dauphin. Beneath is the broad bright Vienne coming down in great gleaming curves from Isle-Bouchard, and the pretty spire of St. Maurice, Henry's own handiwork perhaps, soaring lightly out of the tangled little town at our feet. Beyond, broken with copse and hedgerow and cleft by the white road to Loudun, rise the slopes of Pavilly leading the eye round, as it may have led the dying eye of the king, to the dim blue reaches of the west where Fontevraud awaited him.

No scene harmonizes more thoroughly than Fontevraud with the thoughts which its name suggests. A shallow valley which strikes away southward through a break in the long cliff-wall along the Loire narrows as it advances into a sterner gorge, rough with forest greenery. The grey escarpments of rock that jut from the sides of this gorge are pierced here and there with the peculiar cellars and cave-dwellings of the country, and a few rude huts which dot their base gather as the road mounts steeply through this wilder scenery into a little lane of cottages that forms the village of Fontevraud. But it is almost suddenly that the great abbey church round which the village grew up stands out in one colossal mass from the western hill-slope; and in its very solitude and the rock-like grandeur of its vast nave, its noble apse, its low central tower, there is something that marks it as a fit resting-place for kings. Nor does its present use as a prison-chapel jar much on those who have grown familiar with the temper of the early Plantagenets. At the moment of my visit the choir of convicts were practising the music of a mass in the eastern portion of the church, which with the transepts has now been set apart for divine service, and the wild grandeur of the music, unrelieved by any treble, seemed to express in a way that nothing else could the spirit of the Angevins. "From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been submitted—and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archaeology—it is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait. Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeologist; but these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of the Kings.



CAPRI.

I.

We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful. Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island, and pierced at its base by "blue grottoes" and "green grottoes" which have become famous from the strange play of light within their depths. The reader of Hans Andersen's 'Improvisatore' will remember one of these caverns as the scene of its closing adventure; but strange as Andersen's description is it is far less strange than the scene which he sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that of the coast runs across the midst of the island, dividing it into an upper and a lower plateau, with no means of communication save the famous rock stairs, the "Steps of Anacapri," now, alas, replaced by a daring road which has been driven along the face of the cliff.

The upper plateau of Anacapri is cold and without any striking points of scenery, but its huge mass serves as an admirable shelter to Capri below, and it is with Capri that the ordinary visitor is alone concerned. The first thing which strikes one is the smallness of the place. The whole island is only some four miles long and a mile and a half across, and, as we have seen, a good half of this space is practically inaccessible. But it is just the diminutive size of Capri which becomes one of its greatest charms. It would be hard in fact to find any part of the world where so much and such varied beauty is packed into so small a space. The visitor who lands from Naples or Sorrento mounts steeply up the slopes of a grand amphitheatre flanked on either side by the cliffs of St. Michael and Anacapri to the white line of the village on the central ridge with the strange Saracenic domes of its church lifted weirdly against the sky. Over the crest of this ridge a counter valley falls as steeply to the south till it reaches a plateau crowned with the grey mass of a convent, and then plunges over crag and cliff back again to the sea. To the east of these central valleys a steep rise of ground ends in the ruins of the Palace of Tiberius and the great headland which fronts the headland of Sorrento. Everywhere the forms of the scenery are on the largest and boldest scale. The great conical Tors, Tuoro-grande and Tuoro-piccolo, the boldly scarped rock of Castiglione with its crown of mediaeval towers, lead up the eye to the huge cliff wall of Anacapri, where, a thousand feet above, the white hermitage on Monte Solaro glimmers out fitfully from its screen of cloud.

Among the broken heights to the east or in the two central valleys there are scores of different walks and a hundred different nooks, and each walk and nook has its own independent charm. Steeps clothed from top to bottom in the thick greenery of the lemon or orange; sudden breaks like that of Metromania where a blue strip of sea seems to have been cunningly let in among the rocks; backgrounds of tumbled limestone; slopes dusty grey with wild cactus; thickets of delightful greenery where one lies hidden in the dense scrub of myrtle and arbutus; olive-yards creeping thriftily up the hill-sides and over the cliffs and down every slope and into every rock-corner where the Caprese peasant-farmer can find footing; homesteads of grey stone with low domed Oriental roofs on which women sit spinning, their figures etched out against the sky; gardens where the writhed fig-trees stand barely waiting for the foliage of the spring; nooks amidst broken boulders and vast fingers of rock with the dark mass of the carouba flinging its shade over them; heights from which one looks suddenly northward and southward over a hundred miles of sea—this is Capri. The sea is everywhere. At one turn its waters go flashing away unbroken by a single sail towards the far-off African coast where the Caprese boatmen are coral-fishing through the hot summer months; at another the eye ranges over the tumbled mountain masses above Amalfi to the dim sweep of coast where the haze hides the temples of Paestum; at another the Bay of Naples opens suddenly before us, Vesuvius and the blue deep of Castellamare and the white city-line along the coast seen with a strange witchery across twenty miles of clear air.

The island is a paradise of silence for those to whom silence is a delight. One wanders about in the vineyards without a sound save the call of the vinedressers; one lies on the cliff and hears a thousand feet below the dreamy wash of the sea. There is hardly the cry of a bird to break the spell; even the girls who meet one with a smile on the hill-side smile quietly and gravely in the Southern fashion as they pass by. It is the stillest place that the sun shines on; but with all its stillness it is far from being a home of boredom. There are in fact few places in the world so full of interest. The artist finds a world of "studies" in its rifts and cliff walls, in the sailor groups along its beach and the Greek faces of the girls in its vineyards. The geologist reads the secret of the past in its abruptly tilted strata, in a deposit of volcanic ash, in the fossils and bones which Augustus set the fashion of collecting before geology was thought of. The historian and the archaeologist have a yet wider field. Capri is a perfect treasure-house of Roman remains, and though in later remains the island is far poorer, the ruins of mediaeval castles crown the heights of Castiglione and Anacapri, and the mother church of San Costanzo with its central dome supported on marble shafts from the ruins hard by is an early specimen of Sicilian or Southern Italian architecture. Perhaps the most remarkable touch of the South is seen in the low stone vaults which form the roofs of all the older houses of Capri, and whose upper surface serves as a terrace where the women gather in the sunshine in a way which brings home to one oddly the recollections of Syria and Jerusalem.

For loungers of a steadily uninquiring order however there are plenty of amusements of a lighter sort. It is hard to spend a day more pleasantly than in boating beneath the cliffs of Capri, bobbing for "cardinals," cruising round the huge masses of the Faraglioni as they rise like giants out of the sea, dipping in and out of the little grottoes which stud the coast. On land there are climbs around headlands and "rock-work" for the adventurous, easy little walks with exquisite peeps of sea and cliff for the idle, sunny little nooks where the dreamer can lie buried in myrtle and arbutus. The life around one, simple as it is, has the colour and picturesqueness of the South. The girl faces which meet one on the hill-side are faces such as artists love. In the church the little children play about among the groups of mothers with orange kerchiefs on their heads and heavy silver rings on every finger. Strange processions with cowled faces and crucifix and banners borne aloft sweep into the piazza and up the church steps. Old women with Sibyl-like faces sit spinning at their doors. Maidens with water-jars on their heads which might have been dug up at Pompeii; priests with broad hats and huge cloaks; sailors with blue shirts and red girdles; urchins who almost instinctively cry for a "soldo" and break into the Tarantella if you look at them; quiet, grave, farmer-peasants with the Phrygian cap; coral-fishers fresh from the African coast with tales of storm and tempest and the Madonna's help—make up group after group of Caprese life as one looks idly on, a life not specially truthful perhaps or moral or high-minded, but sunny and pleasant and pretty enough, and harmonizing in its own genial way with the sunshine and beauty around.

Its rough inns, its want of English doctors, the difficulties of communication with the mainland from which its residents are utterly cut off in bad weather, make Capri an unsuitable resort for invalids in spite of a climate which if inferior to that of Catania is distinctly superior to that of either San Remo or Mentone. Those who remember the Riviera with no little gratitude may still shrink from the memory of its sharp transitions of temperature, the chill shade into which one plunges from the direct heat of its sun-rays, and the bitter cold of its winter nights. Out of the sun indeed the air of the Riviera towards Christmas is generally keen, and a cloudy day with an east wind sweeping along the shore will bring back unpleasant reminiscences of the England one has left behind. Capri is no hotter perhaps in the sunshine, but it is distinctly warmer in the shade. The wraps and shawls which are a necessity of health at San Remo or Mentone are far less necessary in the South. One may live frankly in the open air in a way which would hardly be safe elsewhere, and it is just life in the open air which is most beneficial to invalids. It is this natural warmth which tells on the temperature of the nights. The sudden change at sunset which is the terror of the Riviera is far less perceptible at Capri; indeed the average night temperature is but two degrees lower than that of the day. The air too is singularly pure and invigorating, for the village and its hotels stand some four or five hundred feet above the sea, and there are some fairly level and accessible walks along the hill-sides. At San Remo, or in the eastern bay of Mentone, one purchases shelter by living in a teacup and the only chance of exercise lies in climbing up its sides. But it must fairly be owned that these advantages are accompanied by some very serious drawbacks. If Capri is fairly free from the bitter east wind of the Riviera, the Riviera is free from the stifling scirocco of Capri. In the autumn and in the earlier part of the winter this is sometimes almost intolerable. The wind blows straight from Africa, hot, dusty, and oppressive in a strange and almost indescribable way. All the peculiar clearness of the atmosphere disappears; one sees every feature of the landscape as one would see them through a raw autumn day in England. The presence of fine dust in the air—the dust of the African desert to which this effect is said to be owing—may perhaps account for the peculiar oppressiveness of the scirocco; certain it is, that after two days of it every nerve in the body seems set ajar. Luckily however it only lasts for three days and dies down into rain as the wind veers round to the west.



CAPRI AND ITS ROMAN REMAINS.

II.

Among the many charms of Capri must be counted the number and interest of its Roman remains. The whole island is in fact a vast Roman wreck. Hill-side and valley are filled with a mass of debris that brings home to one in a way which no detailed description can do the scale of the buildings with which it was crowded. At either landing-place huge substructures stretch away beneath the waves, the relics of moles, of arsenals, and of docks; a network of roads may still be traced which linked together the ruins of Imperial villas; every garden is watered from Roman cisterns; dig where he will, the excavator is rewarded by the discovery of vases, of urns, of fragments of sculpture, of mosaic pavements, of precious marbles. Every peasant has a handful of Roman coins to part with for a few soldi. The churches of the island and the royal palaces of the mainland are full of costly columns which have been removed from the ruins of Capri; and the Museum of Naples is largely indebted for its treasures of statuary to the researches made here at the close of the last century. The main archaeological interest of the island however lies not in fragments or "finds" such as these but in the huge masses of ruin which lie scattered so thickly over it. The Pharos which guided the Alexandrian corn-ships to Puteoli stands shattered on one of its headlands. The waves dash idly against an enormous fragment of the sea-baths of Tiberius. His palace-citadel still looks from the summit of a mighty cliff across the Straits of Sorrento. The Stairs of Anacapri, which in the absence of any other date to which it is possible to assign them, we are forced to refer to the same period of construction, hewn as they were to the height of a thousand feet in the solid rock, vied in boldness with almost any achievement of Roman engineering. The smallness of the space—for the lower part of the island within which these relics are crowded is little more than a mile and a half either way—adds to the sense of wonder which the size and number of these creations excite. All that remains too, it must be remembered, is the work of but a few years. There is no ground for believing that anything of importance was added after the death of Tiberius or begun before the old age of Augustus.

We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of Cumae however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city" rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome. The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its shores.

It is with the name of the second Caesar rather than of the first that Capri is destined to be associated. While the jests and Greek verses of Augustus are forgotten the terrible invective of Tacitus and the sarcasm of Juvenal recall the cruelties and the terrors of Tiberius. His retirement to Capri, although as we have seen in form but a carrying out of the purpose of Augustus, marks a distinct stage in the developement of the Empire. For ten years not Rome, but an obscure island off the Campanian coast became the centre of the government of the world. The spell of the Eternal City was suddenly broken, and it was never thoroughly restored. If Milan, Ravenna, Nicomedia, Constantinople, became afterwards her rivals or supplanters as the seat of empire, it was because Capri had led the way. For the first time too, as Dean Merivale has pointed out, the world was made to see in its bare nakedness the fact that it had a single master. All the disguises which Augustus had flung around his personal rule were cast aside; Senate, Consuls, the Roman people itself, were left contemptuously behind. A single senator, a few knights, a little group of Greek scholars, were all that accompanied Tiberius to Capri. The figure of the Emperor stood out bare and alone on its solitary rock. But, great as the change really was, the skill of Tacitus has thrown over the retirement of Tiberius a character of strangeness which, as we have said, hardly belongs to it. What in fact distinguished it from the retirement of Augustus to the same spot was simply the persistence of his successor in never returning to Rome.

Capri in itself was nothing but a part of the great pleasure resort which Roman luxury created round the shores of the Bay of Naples. From its cliffs the Emperor could see through the pure, transparent air the villas and watering-places which fringed the coast from Misenum to Sorrentum, the groves and lakes of Baisae, the white line of Neapolis, Pompeii, and Herculaneum, the blue sea dappled with the painted sails of pleasure-boats as they wooed the summer air. The whole bay was a Roman Brighton, and the withdrawal of Tiberius from the world was much the same sort of withdrawal from the world as the seclusion of George IV. at the Pavilion. Of the viler pleasures which are commonly attributed to him in his retreat we need say nothing, for it is only by ingenious conjectures that any of the remains at Capri have been made to confirm them. The taste of Tiberius was as coarse as the taste of his fellow Romans, and the scenes which were common at Baiae—the drunkards wandering along the shore, the songs of the revellers, the drinking-toasts of the sailors, the boats with their gaudy cargo of noisy girls, the coarse jokes of the bathers among the rose-leaves which strewed the water—were probably as common in the revels at Capri. But for the more revolting details of the old man's life we have only the scandal of Rome to rely on, and scandal was easily quickened by the veil of solitude and secrecy which Tiberius flung around his retirement. The tale of his cruelties, of the fisherman tortured for having climbed the cliff which the Emperor deemed inaccessible, of criminals dashed into the sea down the steep of the "Salto di Timberio," rest on the gossip of Suetonius alone. But in all this mass of gossip there is little that throws any real light on the character of the island or of the buildings whose remains excite our interest there; we can only guess at its far wilder condition from a story which shows us the Imperial litter fairly brought to a standstill by the thick brushwood, and the wrath of Tiberius venting itself in a ruthless thrashing of the centurion who served as his guide. The story is curious because it shows that, in spite of the rapidity with which the Imperial work had been carried on, the island when Tiberius arrived was still in many parts hidden with rough and impenetrable scrub, and that the wonderful series of hanging gardens which turned almost the whole of it into a vast pleasure-ground was mainly of his own creation.

It would of course be impossible to pass in review the numberless sites where either chance or research has detected traces of the work of Tiberius. "Duodecim villarum nominibus et molibus insederat," says Tacitus; and the sites of the twelve villas may in most cases be identified to-day, some basking in the sunshine by the shore, some placed in sheltered nooks where the cool sea-breeze tempered the summer heat, the grander ones crowning the summit of the hills. We can trace the docks of the Roman island, the grottoes still paved with mosaic which marks them as the scene of Imperial picnics, the terraces and arbours of the hanging gardens with the rock boldly cut away to make room for them, the system of roads which linked the villas together, the cisterns and aqueducts which supplied water, the buildings for the slaves of the household and for the legionaries who guarded the shore, the cemetery for the dead, the shrines and pavilions scattered about on the heights, and a small Mithraic temple hidden in the loveliest of the Caprese ravines. If we restore in fancy the scene to which these ruins belonged, fill the gardens with the fountains and statues whose fragments lie profusely scattered about, rear again the porticoes of marble columns, and restore the frescoes whose traces exist on the ruined walls, we shall form some inadequate conception of the luxury and grace which Tiberius flung around his retirement.

By a singular piece of good fortune the one great wreck which towers above all the rest is the spot with which the Emperor himself is historically associated. Through the nine terrible months during which the conspiracy of Sejanus was in progress, he never left, Seutonius tells us, the Villa Jovis; and the villa still stands on a huge promontory, fifteen hundred feet above the sea, from which his eye could watch every galley that brought its news of good or ill from Misenum and from Rome. Few landscapes can compare in extent or beauty with the view on which Tiberius looked. The promontory of Massa lies across the blue reach of sea, almost as it seems under one's hand yet really a few miles off, its northern side falling in brown slopes dotted with white villas to the orange gardens of Sorrento, its southern rushing steeply down to the hidden bays of Amalfi and Salerno. To the right the distant line of Apennines, broken by the shadowy dip that marks the plain of Paestum, runs southward in a dim succession of capes and headlands; to the left the sunny bow of the Bay of Naples gleams clear and distinct through the brilliant air till Procida and Ischia lead the eye round again to the cliff of Anacapri with the busy little Marina at its feet. A tiny chapel in charge of a hermit now crowns the plateau which forms the highest point of the Villa Jovis; on three sides of the height the cliff falls in a sheer descent of more than a thousand feet to the sea, on the fourth the terrace walls are formed of fragments of brick and marble which recall the hanging gardens that swept downwards to the plain. The Villa itself lies partly hewn out of the sides of the steep rock, partly supported by a vast series of substructures whose arched vaults served as water-reservoirs and baths for the service of the house.

In strength of site and in the character of its defences the palace was strictly what Pliny calls it, "Tiberii principis arx," but this was no special characteristic of the Villa Jovis. "Scias non villas esse sed castra," said Seneca of the luxurious villas on the coast of Baiae; it was as if the soldier element of the Roman nature broke out even amidst the patrician's idlest repose in the choice of a military site and the warlike strength of the buildings he erected on it. Within however life seems to have been luxurious enough. The ruins of a theatre, whose ground-plan remains perfect, show that Tiberius combined more elegant relaxations with the coarse revels which are laid to his charge. Each passage is paved with mosaic, the walls still retain in patches their coloured stucco, and here and there in the small chambers we find traces of the designs which adorned them. It is however rather by the vast extent and huge size of the substructures than by the remains of the house itself that we can estimate the grandeur of the Villa Jovis; for here, as at the Baths near the Marina, the ruins have served as quarries for chapels and forts and every farmhouse in the neighbourhood. The Baths stand only second in grandeur to the Villa itself. The fall of the cliff has torn down fragment after fragment, but the half of an immense calidarium still stands like an apse fronting the sea, a grand sea-wall juts out into the waves, and at its base, like a great ship of stone in the midst of the water, lies still unbroken after eighteen hundred years the sea-bath itself. The roof has fallen in, the pillars are tumbled from its front, but the high walls, though undermined by the tide, still stand erect. On the cliff above, a Roman fortress which must have resembled Burgh Castle in form and which has since served as a modern fort seems to have protected the Baths and the vast series of gardens which occupied the whole of the lower ground beneath the Stair of Anacapri, and whose boundary wall remains in a series of some twenty almost perfect arches.

The importance of these remains has long been understood by the archaeologists of Italy, and something of their ruin may be attributed to the extensive excavations made by the Government of Naples a hundred years ago. But far more of the terrible wreck is owing to the ravages of time. With the death of Tiberius Capri sinks suddenly out of sight. Its name had in fact become associated with infamy, and there is no real ground for supposing that it remained as the pleasure-isle of later Emperors. But the vast buildings can only slowly have mouldered into decay; we find its Pharos flaming under Domitian, and the exile of two Roman princesses, Crispina and Lucilla, by Commodus, proves that Imperial villas still remained to shelter them. It is to the period which immediately follows the residence of Tiberius that we may refer one of the most curious among the existing monuments of Capri, the Mithraic temple of Metromania. Its situation is singularly picturesque. A stair cut in the rock leads steeply down a rift in the magnificent cliffs to the mouth of a little cave, once shrouded by a portico whose fragments lie scattered among the cacti and wild thyme. Within the walls are lined with the characteristic reticulated Roman masonry, broken chambers and doorways on either side are blocked by debris, and two semicircular platforms rise one within the other to a niche in the furthest recess of the cave where the bas-relief of the Eastern deity which is now deposited in the Museum at Naples was found by the excavators. Beside it lay a stone with a Greek inscription so strangely pathetic that it must tell its own tale:—"Welcome into Hades, O noble deities—dwellers in the Stygian land—welcome me too, most pitiful of men, ravished from life by no judgment of the Fates, but by a death sudden, violent, the death-stroke of a wrath defiant of justice. But now I stood in the first rank beside my lord! now he has left me and my parents alike of hope! I am not fifteen, I have not reached my twentieth year, and—wretched I—I see no more the light! My name is Hypatus; but I pray my brother and my parents to weep for wretched ones no more." Conjecture has coupled this wail of a strange fate with the human sacrifices offered at the shrine of Mithras, and has seen in Hypatus a slave and favourite of Tiberius devoted by his master to the Eastern deity; but there is no ground whatever for either of the guesses.

Such as it is however the death-cry of Hypatus alone breaks the later silence of Capri. The introduction of Christianity was marked by the rise of the mother church of San Costanzo, whose inner columns of giallo antico and cipollino were torn from the ruins of the Baths hard by, and from this moment we may trace the progress of destruction in each monument of the new faith. The sacrarium of San Stefano is paved with a mosaic of marbles from the Villa Jovis, and the chapel of St. Michael is erected out of a Roman building which occupied its site. We do not know when the island ceased to form a part of the Imperial estate, but the evidence of a charter of Gregory II., overlooked by the local topographers, shows that at the opening of the eighth century the "Insula Capreae cum monasterio St. Stefani" had passed like the rest of the Imperial property in the South to become part of the demesne of the Roman See. The change may have some relation to the subjection of Capri to the spiritual jurisdiction of Sorrento, of whose bishopric it formed a part till its own institution as a separate see in the tenth century. The name of the "Bishop of Quails," which attached itself to the prelate of Capri, points humorously to the chief source of his episcopal income, the revenue derived from the capture of the flocks of these birds who settle on the island in their two annual migrations in May and September. From the close of the ninth century, when the island passed out of the hands of Amalfi, it has followed the fortunes of the mainland; its ruin seems to have been completed by the raids of the Saracens from their neighbouring settlement on the coast of Lucania; and the two mediaeval fortresses of Anacapri and Castiglione which bear the name of Barbarossa simply indicate that the Algerian pirate of the sixteenth century was the most dreaded of the long train of Moslem marauders who had made Capri their prey through the middle ages. Every raid and every fortress removed some monument of the Roman rule, and the fight which wrested the isle from Sir Hudson Lowe at the beginning of the present century put the coping-stone on the work of destruction. But in spite of the ravages of time and of man enough has been left to give a special archaeological interest to the little rock-refuge of Capri.



THE FEAST OF THE CORAL-FISHERS.

III.

The Caprese peasant has never had time to get the fact of winter fairly into his head. The cold comes year after year, but it comes in a brief and fitful way that sets our northern conceptions at defiance. The stranger who flies for refuge to the shores of the little island in November may find himself in a blaze of almost tropical sunshine. If a fortnight of dull weather at the opening of December raises hopes of an English Christmas they are likely to be swept away by a return of the summer glory for a month. Far away over the sea the crests of the Abruzzi range lift themselves white against the sky, but February has almost come before winter arrives, fitful, windy, rainy, but seldom cold, even when the mistral, so dreaded on the Riviera, comes sweeping down from the north. March ought by Caprese experience to be the difficult month; but "Marzo e pazzo," say the loungers in the little piazza, and sometimes even the "madness" of March takes the form of a delicious lunacy of unbroken sunshine. Corn is already rippling under the olives, leaf-buds run like little jets of green light along the brown vine-stems, the grey weird fig-branches are dotted with fruit, women are spinning again on the housetops, boys are playing with the birds they have caught in the myrtles, the bright shore across the bay is veiled in a summer haze, and winter is gone. It is hard to provide in English fashion against such a winter as this, and the Capri fisherman prefers to regard it as something abnormal, exceptional, to be borne with "pazienza" and a shrug of the shoulders. When the storm-wind blows he lounges in the sunny corner of the Piazza; when the rain comes he smokes at home or mends his nets under the picture of the Madonna and the Bambino; when the cold comes he sits passive and numbed till the cold goes. But he knows that the cold will go, and that the rain will pass, and that peace will settle down again on the sunny bay; and so instead of making a fuss about winter he looks on it as a casual little parenthesis in the business of life, intensely disagreeable but luckily brief. He sees no poetry in it, no beauty of bare wold and folded mist; he hears no music in it like the music of tinkling icicles so dear to Cowper's heart. Christmas itself isn't much of a festa in the South, and has none of the mystery and home pathos which makes it dear to Englishmen. There is the "presepio" in the church, there is the procession of the Wise Men at Epiphany-tide, but the only real break to the winter's dulness is the Feast of the Coral-Fishers.

What with the poverty of the island and its big families it is hard to see how Capri could get along at all if it were not for the extra employment and earnings which are afforded by the coral-fishery off the African coast. Some hundred or two hundred young fellows leave the island every spring to embark at Torre del Greco in a detachment of the great coral fleet which musters at that port, at Genoa, or at Leghorn; and the Sunday before they start—generally one of the last Sundays in January—serves as the Feast of the Coral-Fishers. Long before daybreak the banging of big crackers rouses the island from its slumbers, and high mass is hardly over when a procession of strange picturesqueness streams out of church into the sunshine. At its head come the "Daughters of Mary," some mere little trots, some girls of sixteen, but all clad in white, with garlands of flowers over their veils and girdles of red or blue. Behind come the fishermen, young sailor-boys followed by rough grizzled elders bearing candles like the girls before them, and then the village Brotherhood, fishers too, but clad in strange garments of grey, with black hoods covering their faces, and leaving nothing but the bright good-humoured eye to guide one under this sepulchral figure to the Giovanni or Beppino who was cracking jokes yesterday till the Blue Grotto rang again. Then beneath a great canopy upborne by the four elder fishers of the island, vested in gowns of "samite, mystic, wonderful"—somewhat like a doctor of music's gown in our unpoetic land—comes the Madonna herself, "La Madonna di Carmela," with a crown of gold on her head and a silver fish dangling from her fingers. It is the Madonna of Carmel who disputes with San Costanzo, the Saint of the mother-church below, the spiritual dominion of Capri. If he is the "Protector" of the island, she is its "Protectress." The older and graver sort indeed are faithful to their bishop-saint, and the loyalty of a vinedresser in the piazza remains unshaken even by the splendour of the procession. "Yes, signore!" he replies to a sceptical Englishman who presses him hard with the glory of "the Protectress," "yes, signore, the Madonna is great for the fisher-folk; she gives them fish. But fish are poor things after all and bring little money. It is San Costanzo who gives us the wine, the good red wine which is the wealth of the island. And so this winter feast of the fishermen is a poor little thing beside our festa of San Costanzo in the May-time. For the image of our Protector is all of silver, and sometimes the bishop comes over from Sorrento and walks behind it, and we go all the way through the vineyards, and he blesses them, and then at nightfall we have 'bombi'—not such as those of the Madonna," he adds with a quiet shrug of the shoulders, "but great bombi and great fireworks at the cost of the Municipio."

On the other hand, all the girls go with the fisher-folk in their love of the Madonna. "Ah yes, signore," laughs a maiden whose Greek face might have served Pheidias for a model, "San Costanzo is our protector, but he is old and the Madonna is young, so young and so pretty, signore, and she is my protectress." A fisherman backs up the feminine logic by a gird at the silver image which is evidently the strong point of the opposite party. The little commune is said to have borrowed a sum of money on the security of this work of art, and the fisherman is correspondingly scornful. "San Costanzo owes much, many danari, signore; and it is said," he whispers roguishly, "that if they don't pay pretty soon his creditors at Naples will send him to prison for the debt of the Municipio." But the Madonna has her troubles as well as the Saint. Her hair which has been dyed for the occasion has unhappily turned salmon colour by mistake; but the blunder has no sort of effect on the enthusiasm of her worshippers; on the canons who follow her in stiff copes, shouting lustily, or on the maidens and matrons who bring up the rear. Slowly the procession winds its way through the little town, now lengthening into a line of twinkling tapers as it passes through the narrow alleys which serve for streets, now widening out again on the hill-sides where the orange kerchiefs and silver ornaments of the Caprese women glow and flash into a grand background of colour in the sun. And then comes evening and benediction, and the fireworks, without which the procession would go for nothing, catherine-wheels spinning in the Piazza, and big crackers bursting amidst a chorus of pretty outcries of terror and delight.

Delight however ends with the festa, and the parting of the morning is a strange contrast in its sadness with this Sunday joy. The truth is that coral-fishing is a slavery to which nothing but sheer poverty drives the fishermen. From April to October their life is a life of ceaseless drudgery. Packed in a small boat without a deck, with no food but biscuit and foul water, touching land only at intervals of a month, and often deprived of sleep for days together through shortness of hands, the coral-fishers are exposed to a constant brutality from the masters of their vessels which is too horrible to bear description. Measured too by our English notions the pay of the men seems miserably inadequate to the toil and suffering which they undergo. Enough however remains to tempt the best of the Caprese fishermen to sea. Even a boy's earnings will pay his mother's rent. For a young man it is the only mode in which he can hope to gather a sum sufficient for marriage and his start in life. The early marriages so common at Naples and along the adjoining coast are unknown at Capri, where a girl seldom weds before twenty and where the poorest peasant refuses the hand of his daughter to a suitor who cannot furnish a wedding settlement of some twenty pounds. Even with the modern rise of wages it is almost impossible for a lover to accumulate such a sum from the produce of his ordinary toil, and his one resource is the coral-fishery.

The toil and suffering of the summer are soon forgotten when the young fisherman returns and adds his earnings to the little store of former years. When the store is complete, the ceremonial of a Caprese betrothal begins with "the embassy," as it is termed, of his mother to the parents of the future bride. Clad in her best array and holding in her hand 'the favourite nosegay of the island, a branch of sweet basil sprinkled with cinnamon powder and with a rose-coloured carnation in the midst of it, the old fishwife makes her way through the dark lanes to the vaulted room where her friends await her with a charming air of ignorance as to the errand on which she comes. Half an hour passes in diplomatic fence, in chat over the weather, the crops, or the price of macaroni, till at a given signal the girl herself leaves the room, and the "ambassadress" breaks out in praise of her good looks, her industry, and her good repute. The parents retort by praise of the young fisherman, compliments pass quickly into business, and a vow of eternal friendship between the families is sworn over a bottle of rosolio. The priest is soon called in and the lovers are formally betrothed for six months, a ceremony which was followed in times past by a new appearance of the ambassadress with the customary offering of trinkets from the lover to his promised spouse. This old Caprese custom has disappeared, but the girls still pride themselves on the number and value of their ornaments—the "spadella," or stiletto which binds the elaborately braided mass of their ebon hair; the circular gold earrings with inner circles of pearls; the gold chain or lacetta, worn fold upon fold round the neck; the bunch of gold talismans suspended on the breast; the profusion of heavy silver rings which load every finger. The Sunday after her betrothal when she appears at High Mass in all her finery is the proudest day of a Capri girl's life; but love has few of the tenderer incidents which make its poetry in the North. There is no "lover's lane" in Capri, for a maiden may not walk with her betrothed save in presence of witnesses; and a kiss before marriage is, as "Auld Robin Gray" calls it, "a sin" to which no modest girl stoops. The future husband is in fact busy with less romantic matters; it is his business to provide bed and bedding, table and chairs, drawers and looking-glass, and above all a dozen gaudy prints from Naples of the Madonna and the favourite saints of the day. The bride provides the rest, and on the eve of the marriage the families meet once more to take an inventory of her contributions which remain her own property till her death. The morning's sun streams in upon the lovers as they kneel at the close of mass before the priest in San Stefano; all the boyhood of Capri is waiting outside to pelt the bridal train with "confetti" as it hurries amidst blushes and laughter across the Piazza; a dinner of macaroni and the island wine ends in a universal "tarantella," there is a final walk round the village at the close of the dance, and the coral-fisher reaps the prize of his toil as he leads his bride to her home.

THE END