Egidienkirche, or Church of St. Gilles, is an edifice in the Italian style, which took the place in 1718 of a very ancient chapel burnt down some years before, which had been originally founded in 1140 by the Emperor Conrad III., for some Scottish Benedictine monks. It is the most fashionable church in the town, but its Tuscan elevation, with its pilasters and cupolas, looks somewhat out of place in Nuremberg. The three side chapels escaped the fire in 1696, and are very ancient and interesting, especially that

of St. Eucharius, with its slender pillars and pointed arches of the Transition period. The church contains many pictures, among them an altar-piece by Vandyck; also some sculptured work by Peter Vischer and Adam Krafft. Close by the Church of St. Egidius is the important Gymnasium, or Grammar School, which is said to have been founded by Melancthon, whose statue rises in front of it.

Having said so much of the churches, we must now say a few words of one of the churchyards. The old burial-ground of St. John, on the north-west of the city, has been a burial-place for six centuries. It is rich in quaint sculptures, and curious epitaphs in German and Latin. The gravestones, 3,500 in number, lie very close together; they are all regularly numbered, and mostly decorated with bronze plates, bearing the coats-ofarms and devices appertaining to the deceased. The grave in which the chief interest of

the spot centres is No. 649, the grave of Albrecht Dürer. The stone is a flat slal on a moulded plinth, with the words PICTVRA and SCVLPTVRA engraved on the panels at the two sides; at the head, ARCHITEC.; at the foot, RENO. A.D. 1681. At the head is a raised bronze tablet, with the famous inscription—

It is to this inscription that Longfellow refers, in the poem on Nuremberg already alluded to

"Emigravit is the inscription on the tombstone where he lies.

Dead he is not, but departed-for the artist never dies."

It has been found on examination that the great artist's remains are no longer under the tombstone, but have been replaced by those of others. He died worn out with domestic sufferings, resulting from the outrageous conduct of the mediæval Xantippe of whom he had the misfortune to be the husband. For reasons best known to himself, he had married in an evil hour Agnes Frey, the daughter of a celebrated ivory-carver. As her portrait shows, she was no great beauty; she was quarrelsome, ill-natured, and passionate, and succeeded in making her husband's life a purgatory, till death released him from her persecutions. The graves of Hans Sachs and other noted Nurembergers are also to be found in this quiet burial-ground.

The way to the burial-ground from the city gate, called the Thiergartner Thor, is along the Seilersgasse. Some four hundred years ago it struck the imagination of one Martin Kötzel that the route was similar to the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, along which our Saviour is supposed to have passed in going from Pilate's House to Calvary. During a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, in 1477, Kötzel measured the distances between the spots alleged to have witnessed the closing scenes of the Passion. But on returning to Nuremberg the worthy burgher found he had lost the measurements. Accordingly, in order to accomplish his purpose, he undertook a second pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the suite of Otho, Duke of Bavaria. This time he brought his measurements home safely, and employed Adam Krafft to execute seven bas-reliefs, which were placed on pillars at the proper distances along the road to the cemetery. They commence with the house of Pilate, near the city gate, and terminate with a Calvary, with three crosses and stone figures, on a gentle eminence near the old Church of St. John. The bas-reliefs have been very much injured by time, neglect, and mischief, but the remains show something of the beauty of the ancient designs.

In olden times Nuremberg possessed pious relics of immense celebrity and wonderful miracle-working power, so that from all parts of the Continent crowds of pilgrims used to flock hither, "to the great honour" (as one of the old monks says) "of God and St. Dominic.” There was the spear that pierced the Saviour's side, a piece of the true cross, a strip of the

towel wherewith Christ was girded when He washed His disciples' feet, a portion of the table-cloth used at the Last Supper, a tooth of John the Baptist (this was of portentous size), the arm-bone of St. Anna, three links of St. Paul's chain, and so forth. At the present day the city contains several collections of genuine curiosities. The Germanic Museum is a justly celebrated storehouse of national antiquities and historic relics of Germany, including paintings, sculptures, arms, coins, furniture, books, MSS., etc. The painted glass, carving, and noted goldsmith's work of Nuremberg are illustrated by very fine specimens. Amongst the choicest treasures must be mentioned a painting by Albrecht Dürer of undoubted authority, and the only specimen of his best work now to be found in Nuremberg. It is a portrait of a friend of Dürer, the Burgomaster Hieronymus Holzschuter, and has remained as an heir-loom in the possession of Holzschuter's descendants ever since it was painted in 1526.

The City Library is located in an ancient Dominican monastery, on the eastern side of the Burgstrasse. Both within and without, the edifice is somewhat dark and gloomy; the life of the "blessed Saint Dominic" is seen duly set forth in coloured glass and distemper. The library was founded at the time of the Reformation by Jerome Pamgaertner, the friend of Luther and Melancthon, and was placed in the old monastery in 1538. It contains more than 40,000 volumes, amongst which are finely illuminated MSS. of the Gospels of the tenth, twelfth, and fifteenth centuries, and several specimens of the rare books which bibliographers call Incunabula—that is to say, books produced when the art of printing was, as it were, in its cradle, before the year 1500. Among the MSS. is half of the autograph copy of Albrecht Dürer's work on the proportions of the human figure; the other half is in the Royal Library at Dresden. A beautifully illuminated Latin breviary, executed between 1300 and 1360, bears the following inscription: "La Liver du Roy du France, Charles Dorie a Madame la Roigne Dengleterre." This Queen of England must have been either Isabella, wife of Edward II., or Katherine, wife of Henry V. Another interesting MS. is a satirical poem by Hans Sachs, referring to a certain pugnacious knight, the Markgraf Albrecht von Ansbach, who gave Nuremberg much trouble. Whilst the burghers were fighting against him, Hans Sachs wrote lampoons on the enemy, although the worthy cobbler well knew that it was by no means unlikely that at some time or other he would fall into the hands of this terrible Markgraf. The poem referred to is a fanciful description of a dream, in which the poet sees the Markgraf dragged to the infernal regions, amidst the execrations of thousands whom he has ruined. But the interesting contents of this library are far too numerous and varied to be particularised here; autographs of Gustavus Adolphus, Luther, Melancthon, the celebrated Ritter, Ulrich von Hutten, and others; drawings, portraits, and curiosities; Luther's silk cap, and his drinking-cup, given him by Dr. Jonas; an ancient globe, showing a channel through the Isthmus of Panama: all these, together with many more remarkable things, are exhibited here.

Although the chief attractions of Nuremberg are associated with the past, it is by no means a dead city. At the beginning of the present century it had sunk to a dull provincial town, but during the last forty years commercial enterprise has again raised Nuremberg to a prominent position among German cities. It must be confessed that the

city is to some extent being modernised, but not as yet to such a degree as to spoil its quaint mediæval aspect. Outside the walls, beautiful suburbs, with handsome houses and shady gardens, have sprung up, and in the older parts, amidst the ancient mansions and towers, are abundant signs of home comfort and luxury. A stream of busy life perpetually ebbs and flows around the Beautiful Fountain and over the adjacent bridge; brown-cheeked women of portly figure, whose heads are surmounted by black satin helmet-like bonnets, garrulously offer their wares; and country people from the outside villages, with scarlet kerchiefs for head-dresses, nod and chatter over their baskets of fruit and vegetables. The manufactures of Nuremberg are, again, very considerable. One establishment

employs 4,000 men in making railway carriages; and here we may remark, in passing, that the first railway in Germany was opened in 1836, between Nuremberg and Fürth, 33 miles distant. Amongst other manufactures are ultramarine mirrors, children's toys, leadpencils, brass, bronze wares, etc. The wood and ivory carving is good, and of moderate cost. Nuremberg gingerbread, as everybody knows, is the nonpareil of gingerbread. The toys of Nuremberg, mostly produced by the peasants of the Thuringian Forest, are sold under the misnomer of "Dutch toys" throughout the world. Faber and the other lead-pencil makers produce 220,000,000 of lead-pencils per annum, worth £240,000; so that again, as in its ancient days, "Nuremberg's hand goes through every land."

Although the distance the distance between Munich and Nuremberg is only 120 miles, many hundreds of years may be said to lie between the two cities. Munich is the least poetical town in the map of Europe. "Munich the spick and span, the clean, the bare, the white, the bran-new. No mystery, no romance is here; few local relics or antiquities, nothing to give fancy the spur. A roomy city of stone, plaster, respectability, regularity, glare, and space." Nuremberg is not only old as the hills it stands upon, but having been built by fits and starts, is quite wanting in fashionable uniformity of architecture. The rising, falling, winding streets are everywhere as crooked, irregular, broken, and angular as possible, and it is easy for fancy to re-people them with wealthy burghers, foreign merchants, and quaintly-clad peasants to call back the pompous burgomaster, the sedate senators, turbulent robbers, and other figures in the masque of bygone days. Everywhere there is a pervading picturesqueness almost unique: the superb churches, the ancient impregnable Castle; the dry tangled

moat, with its seventy-five remaining Gothic towers; the narrow serpentine river and curious bridges-these would kindle the sleepiest imagination; while the beauty of the common houses is in its way nearly as striking. Nuremberg has been called the Venice

of Germany-as famous a centre

of commerce in the past, as original and picturesque to-day, as the Queen of the Adriatic herself. "But there," says Ambrose Heath, "the likeness ends. Venice is a fairy tale, Nuremberg a romance; Venice a lovely faded bride, Nuremberg a patriarch knight, hoary, stern, and venerable. And well are these two characters embodied in the works of their two native artists, who arose both at the same timeboth men to immortalise their city. All Venice lies in Titian; all Nuremberg in Albrecht Dürer."

"When the traveller enters the free cities of Augsburg, Ratisbon, and above all Nuremberg," says a modern art-critic, "despoiled though they now are of wealth and of commerce, and denuded of art, he naturally strives to master the historic and geographic, not to say the geological, situation. He is placed in the midst of hills guarded by castles, and at his feet run rapid rivulets which drive the clattering mill; he is at the half-way house where commerce halted on its road from the East; a high path among the mountains leads to Venice, and the stream of the Danube conducts to Vienna and Constantinople.

Such a region, not lovely like the South, but rugged and austere as the Northern arts of which it was the cradle-such a hill-girt country, dear as other hill-countries to its people, where freedom had to endure a hard fight, when the Reformation first asserted liberty of thoughtwas the fitting birth-place of Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries."