divides the city into two portions, named respectively after St. Sebald and St. Lawrence. Tradition tells of a lurking rivalry between the shades of the two holy men, and of a preacher at St. Lawrence's who, having let fall some expressions depreciating St. Sebald, suffered a heavy visitation from the hand of the affronted saint, who refused to be pacified till the priest had publicly apologised for his indiscretion. From the bridge there is an exceedingly picturesque view of the city. On both sides the river is overhung by houses with carved wooden balconies, brown with age. The Pegnitz itself is only a narrow sluggish stream. It used to fill the moat in time of siege, but this service is no longer required of it, and its principal business now is to assist in supplying the Ludwig's-Canal that unites the Rhine and Danube by way of the Main. Charlemagne, with his far-seeing genius, planned this canal a thousand years ago, but it is only a little over thirty years since it was completed by the art-loving King Ludwig, of whom so much has been said in our account of Munich. The canal has been of great use in reviving the trade of Nuremberg.

The Königs-Strasse was once the centre of the commercial wealth and prosperity of Nuremberg. Immense warehouses of ponderous stone, with high-pitched roofs, hold the vast chambers that were once crowded with the treasures of the world. The velvet of Genoa, the glass of Venice, the lace of Flanders, the products of the Levant and of the distant Indies were gathered here; and here came the merchants of all nations to buy from the clever Nurembergers their armour, and guns, and paper, and printing-presses, and clocks, and watches. The best translation of the Bible before the time of Luther was printed and sold at Nuremberg.

The lovers of Gothic domestic architecture find in the streets of Nuremberg a rich treat. Picturesque dormer windows, pointed oriels, and carved balconies are everywhere. Very wonderful are the roofs, singularly diverse in character and outline-some of antique simplicity, high-pitched piles of tile-work, with two or three rows of tiny windows; others made elaborate with pinnacles, turrets, arcades, slender pillars, and arches. The grander mansions of the city are very picturesque-flamboyant tracery is lavished on the balconies and galleries; on the panels are carvings in deep relief, and fretted arches, and crockets, and statues adorn the gables. The sombre-hued stone-work is beautifully relieved by ivy and woodbine, and bright scarlet and purple flowers are trailed about the balconies and window-sills. In some of these mansions dwell families that can trace their direct ancestry up to the eleventh century.

Nuremberg carefully marks the houses in which her great men have dwelt. Tablets point out the homes of Krafft and other artists, and of Palm the bookseller, dragged from his house in the Winkel-Strasse, and shot at Brunau for publishing a pamphlet against Napoleon I.; but the two houses most worthy of notice for their associations are those in which dwelt the painter Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs, the cobbler-bard.

The home of Albrecht Dürer is still sacred to art, as the studio of a society of Nuremberg artists, who jealously guard it from any further alteration or injury. It is a plain stone house, cross-barred with timber, with a high projecting roof. Here worked the master whose paintings are seen in all the city churches; but they are mostly second-rate productions-his masterpieces must be sought elsewhere. "To tell the story of his life," says Miss Martin, "is to repeat the oft-told tale of patient, obscure labour, working slowly

towards the light, till crowned at last with the proudest laurels. The son of an obscure jeweller, the scorn and derision of his jealous companions, he struggled painfully through years of trial, till he won for himself not only imperial regard, but still prouder honour as the great master of art in Germany." Dürer was the last and greatest of the Franconian school of painters. His death marks the period of the temporary decline of both

poetry and art in Germany. The bards of the Niebelungenlied and the Minnesingers had given place to the guilds of the Master-singers, who, in the great Free Cities of South Germany, made poetry a civic institution. Their poetry was never worth much; but it is a striking fact that when upper and lower classes were alike wallowing in a slough of sensuality and ignorance, the craftsmen and burghers were devoting themselves to poetry and song as congenial recreations. These guilds met in town halls and churches to recite or sing their compositions, and receive the rewards of merit. At Nuremberg

the chief jewel (corresponding to a champion's belt in these days) was a heavy gold chain, bearing an image of King David with his harp. The poetical compositions were fettered by elaborate and complicated rules as to rhyme and rhythm. If they did little more, they developed artistic skill, and tended to improve the German language; but it is a significant fact that in his collected poems worthy Hans Sachs has included none of his "master poems." The Master-singers survived in Nuremberg till 1770. The house occupied by Hans Sachs, who was born in 1494 and died in 1576, is in the street that bears his name. There is a bronze statue of him by Kranse on the Spitalplatz, erected in 1874. He wrote 6,000 poems, and his satirical verses on Roman Catholic superstitions and intolerance were in great favour with the common people at the beginning of the Reformation. Longfellow sings of the house of Hans Sachs thus :

THE BEAUTIFUL FOUNTAIN.

"Vanished is the ancient splendour, and before my dreamy eye
Wave these mingling shapes and figures, like a faded tapestry.

"Not thy Councils, not thy Kaisers, win for thee the world's regard;
But thy painter Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs thy cobbler-bard."

There are many fountains adorned with statues in Nuremberg. Near the Lorenzo Kirche stands the beautiful bronze fountain cast by Wurzelbauer in 1580. In the Goose Market is a bronze figure of a peasant with a goose under each arm, from whose bills flow streams of pure water. This little smiling Gänse-männchen, as he is called, is a

great favourite with the peasants. It was executed in 1577, and is the very clever work of an artist named Panerdz Labenwolf.

But most renowned of all the Nuremberg fountains is the Schöne Brunnen (Beautiful Fountain), in the north-west angle of the Hauptmarkt, or market-place. It is an openwork Gothic spire, fifty-six feet in height, erected about the time of the Eleanor Crosses in England, and somewhat resembling them in general effect. It is adorned by twenty-four statues the "neun starken Helden" (nine stout heroes), Charlemagne, Godfrey de Bouillon, Clovis, Judas Maccabæus, Joshua, David, Cæsar, Alexander, Hector. With these are grouped the Seven Electors. Above are Moses and the Seven Prophets. It will be noticed that a truly catholic spirit of toleration has been observed in the above assemblage. It is a great gossiping-place for the damsels who come of an evening to draw water, and the citizens are very proud of their Beautiful Fountain. Many a rumour can be traced no farther than "I was told it at the Fountain."

The Rathhaus, or town hall, rebuilt in the Italian style in 1619, includes portions of an older edifice erected in 1322. The façade is adorned with sculptured Doric portals, conducting to a quadrangle, where portions of the older building may be seen. The walls of the great hall are decorated with paintings by Albrecht Dürer. "The Triumph of Maximilian" is the most noticeable. In one of the frescoes by Weyer (1521), a guillotine is represented, thus proving that instrument to be at least two centuries older than the French Revolution.

The old Rathhaus was the heart of the trading republic of Nuremberg, "whose pulsations, deep and powerful, once made themselves felt throughout the whole Germanic Empire." The chief ruler of the city was the Burgrave, acting as vice-regent of the Emperor, and assisted or controlled by the Senate. We cannot stay to trace the steps by which the Government of Nuremberg developed into a tyrannical oligarchy, working for selfish ends, and destroying with heedless cruelty every one that opposed it, or whose conduct aroused its suspicions. Beneath the Rathhaus are dungeons, with secret passages, leading to the town moat and to the private houses of the councillors. The dungeons are deep and horrible; in one chamber are rings and hooks and screws, and other remains of the frightful apparatus of torture. One of the passages that wind from these subterranean dens leads two miles beyond the town into the forest; another conducts to the Freithurm, near the Maxthor. Here is another "chamber of horrors," approached by a zig-zag passage with five or six doors, evidently intended to shut in the cries of the wretched victims. Here is the secret prison of the Senate, and the terrible Eiserne Jungfrau (iron virgin). This is a hollow figure, seven feet high, dressed like a Nuremberg girl of the seventeenth century. The victim who had been remorselessly doomed to the virgin's embrace was pushed towards it, when, by a secret spring, the front-consisting of two folding-doors, studded inside with spikes and blades-opened, and clasped the wretched man or woman in a deadly embrace. Presently the lacerated body was released, only to fall into an abyss below, in which an arrangement of vertical spear points and knife-armed wheels completed the horrible work of secret destruction.

The great hall of the Rathhaus has other memories having happily nothing in common with the ruthless work of its despotic rulers. Here, in 1648, was held a grand banquet, given by the city for joy at the close of the Thirty Years' War, by the signing of the

Treaty of Westphalia. The Count Palatine and General Piccolomini (who had negotiated the treaty), with a crowd of gentlemen and officers, sat down to a banquet of four courses of 150 dishes each, whilst out of doors the people feasted in the streets, and wine flowed freely for all comers. At midnight the banqueters, with the Count Palatine at their head, marched together up to the Castle, and fired a feu-de-joie, and then returned to the banqueting hall, and swore to maintain mutual peace and amity.

That Thirty Years' War had been a terrible time for Nuremberg, as for other German cities. The city which in a previous age had injured itself by driving out the Jews, and refusing an asylum to the expelled Protestant weavers of France and Flanders, was, like its sister city Augsburg, one of the earliest to adopt the Reformed Faith of Luther and his associates. It consequently, when war broke out, aided the Protestant cause, and for the first and only time in its history saw an enemy near its walls, when Wallenstein was encamping on the heights of Fürth, only five miles away, whilst Gustavus Adolphus was entrenched close to the city. Wallenstein's camp was seven miles round, and besides soldiers, contained 15,000 women, and nearly as many carters, suttlers, and For thirty miles round the country was ravaged for food and forage. Gustavus, with his 15,000 Swedes and 30,000 Nurembergers, had exhausted all his resources after a few months of anxious watching. He tried to storm the camp at Fürth; was, for once, repulsed with much slaughter, and led his army away. Five days afterwards, Wallenstein was compelled to take his great host to a new district, where there was a chance of getting supplies. For sixteen years longer the war went on, although it never again approached Nuremberg. But the city had crippled her resources to meet this emergency, and encumbered herself with a load of debt, that formed an oppressive burden for more than a hundred years. During the proximity of the two armies her citizens had died by thousands of disease and starvation, the surrounding country had been reduced to a desert, the neighbouring villages were heaps of ruins. In a word, the fortunes of Nuremberg did not recover till very recent times from the retrograde condition into which they had been plunged by the general prostration in which all Germany participated in consequence of the Thirty Years' War. Its commercial importance had also previously been declining owing to trade being diverted from its gates and passing through other cities.

On a slight elevation to the north-west of the city stands the Castle, a grim and massive edifice. The oldest portion is the Heathen Tower, said by some to date from the eighth century. In the lower portion are some dilapidated carvings, stated to be heathen idols. Within this tower are the two chapels of St. Margaret and St. Ottmar. In the Castle-yard stands a linden-tree, alleged to be 700 years old. For a long period the Castle was a favourite residence of the German Emperors. The city was very conveniently located near the centre of their dominions, and their revenues were materially benefited by its prosperity. And they were mindful also of the great body of soldiers which it could send to help them at a pinch. To Nuremberg for three centuries they entrusted the imperial regalia subsequently removed to Vienna. Frederick Barbarossa, one of the most famous of the emperors, enlarged the Castle to its present dimensions, and resided there four years, after settling the troubles raised by Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony. Twenty-nine German Emperors in all resided in this Castle, for longer or