Chapter VII: Part 7

One day, when on an excursion to the back slums of the town of Elsinore, I came on a small narrow lane, dignified with the appellation--in honour, I suppose, of the royal marriage--of Anna Queen Street.

Having finished with pompous pageants and royal nuptials, we come to a sadder period of Kronborg story. Scotland still mourns the fate, and proclaims the innocence of Mary Stuart, the murdered Queen; had she not been a Papist, England--yes, intolerant England--would have long since done her justice. France, who, in the last century, vented her venom, her calumny, against the Autrichienne, now exalts the memory of Marie Antoinette to that of a saint and martyr. So, in Denmark, all voices proclaim together the innocence, and deplore the fate, of the youthful Queen of Christian VII., our English princess Caroline Matilda. Here in Kronborg she was confined a prisoner, torn from her palace in Copenhagen, half-dressed, in the middle of the night, expecting daily to suffer the fate of Struensee and Brandt, until the arrival of a fleet from England effected her liberation. Accompanied by the Commandant one morning (General Lunding, the hero of Fredericia--military men will tell you all about it), I visited the apartments in which she was confined on her arrival--two small rooms on the ground-floor, one overshadowed by the bastion, the other looking on the courtyard of the castle. Later, I believe, the Commandant placed his own apartment at her disposal; and in the small octagon closet of the lighthouse turret, which terminates the apartments of Christian IV., it is related how the captive queen passed hours and days with anxious brow and straining eye, gazing at the waters of the Sound, in momentary expectation of the appearance of the fleet from England, she having received some secret tidings of its coming. No relics of her incarceration here remain: the ancient furniture of the palace was unluckily removed, destroyed, and neglected in Frederic VI.’s reign. He detested Kronborg, and never visited Elsinore; these recollections of his mother’s imprisonment were odious to him, and the royal apartments fell into decay.

The ramparts of Kronborg are charming: before them the fishers everlastingly ply their trade--flounders, and a fish called “green-bone,” a horn-fish, are their prey. Had Shakespeare searched the world round he never could have selected so fitting a locality for the ghost-scene. I can see the ghost myself--pale moon, clouds flitting o’er her, frowning castle, and the space necessary to follow him; but the romance of Kronborg is over; her bastions are redolent with deep purple violets, and the roseate buds of a statice--Krigskarl, or the Warrior, they here call it--which looks as if it should be something better, but will, I dare say, turn out common thrift after all. When the fishing-boats return at sunset, a little girl runs down to the shore side, and waits; as they pass by, a small flounder is thrown to her from each boat; she gathers them up in her apron, and then returns to the castle.

CHAUMONT SUR LOIRE

JULES LOISELEUR

Those whose natures are sufficiently artistic to seek that intimate and sympathetic accord that exists between human monuments and their natural surroundings will do well to visit Chaumont on a fine summer’s day under the rays of a scorching sun. Those strong towers built to withstand a siege, and those towers still so white after four centuries, should stand out strongly against the deep blue of a July sky in order to produce their full effect. Then that gleaming mount from which the ancient castle took its name, those great trees that frame it, and that lazy stream sleeping at its feet attain their full value. There is no discordant tone, nor any noise of man or beast, to disturb the majestic unity of this beautiful spectacle.

Seated on the opposite bank, on that embankment of the Loire that goes back to the time of Louis le Débonnaire, at one glance the traveller sees a picture that would enchant a painter, from the Loire that ripples at his feet, the white houses of the little village of Chaumont extending like a boa at the foot of the castle, pressed in as it is between the hill and the river, and the stone stairway which by a hundred and sixty steps ascends the side of the hill that broadens towards its summit to give room for the little church of the bourg as well as for the giant elm planted by Catherine de’Medici, to the castle terrace hanging two hundred feet above the gorge, the carved buttresses of the chapel in which George Amboise dreamed of the papacy, and the vanes of the tower from which the widow of Henry II. questioned the stars. At this noon-day hour when all nature is silent, the sun that turns the sands of the stream into beds of gold, and picks out ruby aigrettes in the rose windows of the chapel, casts the silhouettes of pilasters that support it on the wall of the gallery that terminates the courtyard of the castle, giving an infinite charm to the semi-gloom of that gallery and to the beneficently shaded steps that must be mounted to arrive there.

Those who love to arrange effects and not include an entire monument in a single glance but allow it time to some extent to present itself to the view and successively reveal the various features of its physiognomy, will do well to avoid the rude stone stairway cut in the rock and rather take the verdurous avenue that leaves the road and leads by a lessened though still steep slope to the platform on which the castle stands. By this means, they will see it rise progressively through the openings of a clump of ancient elms called the Queen’s Mall.

Approached on this side, Chaumont presents itself at an angle and spreads out in the form of a fan. At the extremity of each of the two ribs of this fan rises a great tower, and the bottom of the fan which is cant-shaped is guarded by two somewhat smaller towers between which is the main entrance.

From this disposition, it results that from the angle occupied by this gateway the visitor may include the four towers of the castle in one field of vision: to the left is the Amboise tower, which is the highest and the best preserved; to the right is that of Catherine de’Medici, with its battlements still imprinted with cabalistic signs; and in front are the two towers of the gateway. On these towers and on the walls that connect them, about one-third of the way up, is a belt of carving alternately framing a mountain with flames issuing from its top and two C’s back to back, ϽC. These carvings present a somewhat curious archæological puzzle.

The outer moat, at the present day largely filled up and replaced by a flowery sward, somewhat relieves the heavy character of the drawbridge that defends the entrance to the castle. We must halt upon this drawbridge to examine the details of the thick oaken door, on which are carved the Twelve Apostles, and the stone medallion that decorates the archway. This medallion, which has recently been restored, offers a remarkable exception to the rule generally followed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century, when it was customary to carve above the principal gateway the arms of the family to whom the castle belonged, and sometimes the statue of its founder. Here, framed by delicate ornamentation, we see the initials of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, his second wife: the L on a ground sewn with _fleurs de lis_ and the A among the arms of Brittany. On a level with this medallion, arms are incrusted on the towers guarding the gateway: on that on the right are the arms of Georges d’Amboise surmounted by the cardinal’s hat; on the tower on the left are those of his nephew, Charles of Chaumont, Admiral and Grand Master of France. It is doubtless the latter to whom all these sculptures should be attributed. It is presumable that on his return from Nantes, where he had just espoused the widow of Charles VIII., Louis XII. stopped at Chaumont in company with his new wife and his minister, and that the Maréchal de Chaumont, to do honour to his uncle and the royal pair, had this medallion and these arms carved on the gateway and towers, and therefore they date from the year 1499.

We pass the drawbridge and the gate, leaving on our left a painted gallery full of luminous shadow, and find ourselves in a vast quadrilateral court of honour surrounded on three sides by bodies of buildings and having the fourth open on immensity. Like the others, this fourth side was once enclosed by buildings and flanked by two towers commanding the Loire. These constructions were razed four hundred years ago by a counsellor of the Parliament of Paris, named Bertin de Vaugien, who at that time was the owner of the Castle. This man did an intelligent thing in this, but probably without suspecting it: by chance it happened that vandalism had good taste for once.

Leaning on the iron railing that has taken the place of this fourth body of buildings, the visitor gazes over an immense horizon line and a landscape “made for the delight of the eyes.” In the foreground are terraces thick with flowers; a little lower down, through the stunted trees that have thrust themselves through the clefts in the rock, peep the sharp and symmetrical roofs of the little village of Chaumont; behind this village is the Loire; behind the Loire stands the hamlet of Escures; farther away is the railroad, the black and wearisome lines of which lengthen out on their gravel bed; in the background appear the church of the large town of Onzain and the ruins of the old castle in which Voltaire wrote _La Pucelle_. There is no monument, however fairy-like it might be imagined, that would not be crushed by such a frame. Therefore Chaumont suffers by being viewed close at hand, from the height of this magic balcony whence the work of divinity reveals itself with a splendour that effaces the finest conceptions of man.

The great hall that comes after the anteroom contains nothing remarkable but a long chest of carved wood set against the wall, and a niche around which are reproduced the names or arms of all the lords of Chaumont from Eudes I., Count of Blois, who lived at the close of the Tenth Century and who consequently had no arms, to Vincent Walsh, whose arms are three lance-heads.

A curtain over a door is raised and we are in the bedchamber of Catherine de’Medici. Here the work of restoration is happy and sufficiently complete. Here is the bed of the ambitious Florentine, a bed with torso columns the carved top of which supports a royal crown. On one side is the Queen’s _prie-dieu_ with her Hours open; on the other is her toilette-table with her opiate boxes; the whole is framed in tapestries of high gloss which give to this chamber the sombre and somewhat sinister character that befits it. These curious tapestries were certainly made for Chaumont, since we see the Castle reproduced in one of their panels. We suppose that they date back to Charles d’Amboise who rebuilt Chaumont towards the end of the reign of Louis XI., or at least to his son, Marshal Chaumont, the friend and companion of Louis XII.

Catherine was in possession of Chaumont for nine years, from 1550 to 1559, that is to say, during almost the entire reign of her husband. This was the difficult and humiliating period of her life; that of her struggle with the Constable Montmorency and Diana of Poitiers. The curious _bahut_ that is admired in this chamber must have had many state secrets concealed in its innumerable drawers, including many plots, baffled or prepared, and many formidable projects. This chamber, in which Catherine nursed her troubles as a queen and an outraged woman, possessed one great advantage for her. She had at hand her two guides, her two customary consolations,--Astrology and Religion. By that door she could penetrate into the tower where she cast horoscopes in company with Ruggieri; by the other one she could enter directly into the chapel.

This pretty chapel forms a striking contrast with its neighbouring tower. Just in proportion as the chamber in the tower is deaf, cold and dumb, and admits a sinister light by its single window, pierced in a wall of more than three metres’ thickness, to the same degree is the chapel elegant, coquettish and smiling. Windows of bold contours pour a flood of rosy light upon the choir, tiled with white faïence sewn with blue crosses, producing a charming effect. Pretty bas-reliefs in oak upon a gold background form the base of the altar. A tall and fine oak chair, carved and emblazoned, which is said to have belonged to Georges d’Amboise, stands beside the sanctuary. A red cardinal’s hat, attached to the vault, hangs above this arm-chair.

This chapel terminates the edifice most happily. The apartments that precede it have seen many masters pass through; they recall many perfidies, struggles, and illustrious and unfortunate existences. After all this tumult of glorious or withered memories, our mind, like our eyes, finds grateful repose in the smiling and calm sanctuary. It reaches God by an insensible and natural law of contrast as the sole master who has not changed in this abode, the sole guest who has never left behind him anything but good memories and consolation.

The Castle of Chaumont, as it has come down to us, is a building of the Fifteenth Century. It was erected by Charles Amboise on the ruins of a more ancient fortress razed by order of Louis XI. and which itself had been built about 1159 on the remains of a strong castle destroyed by Thibault V., Count of Blois and Champagne. The first and most ancient of these constructions had been built about 908 by Eudes I., Count of Blois, the eldest son of the celebrated Thibault the Trickster.

WINDSOR CASTLE

THE MARQUIS OF LORNE

From out the dimness of England’s ancient story, Windsor and Winchester, and Camelot and Caerleon are raised aloft, lit with the light of the romance of Arthur. Warwick, Dover, and Belvoir, and Alnwick and Conway and Caernarvon, the tower of London and again Windsor, rise from the times of the Norman dominion. Edinburgh, Kenilworth, Penshurst, and Naworth; Carisbrooke, and again Windsor, remain in our sight to recall most forcibly the period when “our loyal passion for our temperate kings” began to make these castle-landmarks of our story scarcer in the land.

Through all the long review of points of time that challenge observation, Windsor stands the most enduring and the most majestic of the places around which gather the memories of all ages of England’s greatness.

In the valley of England’s famous river the Normans built two strong towers, that of London and that of Windsor. This stream nursed the cradle of Norman power, and saw the renewed birth of English liberty, when the stranger-barons, whose fathers subdued England, wrung from their king the great charter of the rights of the subject.

No wonder William found the hill a good place, for there is no fairer view in England. That from Richmond is not so extensive; and at Windsor he possessed besides, a grand forest country for his sports. His men could put off their chain-mail and pointed helmets with the straight face-guards, and give chase to the red deer, which then abounded all over the country, the hunters having no metal about them except the sharp, plain Norman spur on their heels, and the iron on the tips of their arrows.

Now the distant smoke of the mightiest city in the world can be descried on the horizon. In those days so rarely was smoke visible, that signals were transmitted by kindling fires at market-places, and the clear air knew not the fumes that make the white river-fogs dark-yellow in colour, and stifling to breathe. The chequered appearance of the nearer landscape, divided by hedgerow and field to the north and east, is modern; but to the south and west the woods of oak must present much their appearance of the olden days. No engineer has altered the river, or been able even to abate its occasional winter floods, which turn the banks above Windsor into a shallow lake. The further landscape is still what it was. It is still a wooded land. There are no sterile patches, no ugly intervals, no naked tracts of sand or earth. All is green, and better than in the early days in this--that the cheerfulness of peace is on it, and the “stately homes” are more frequent, and the villages need no rampart, but expand in security, and, it must be added, often with a system of architecture to which distance alone can lend enchantment.

The Castle was very strong. These keeps were built so that there was no chance of a surprise. Massive gates placed in security beyond deep ditches were let into the walls, well defended by battlement and flanking towers. Drawbridges and portcullises might be forced, but there the enemy only found himself at the beginning of his work.

Narrow passages led to other defences, and the keep itself was reached by a stair so narrow that one man only could enter at a time.

The walls of the lowest story showed only tiny shot- or loopholes. The second story showed more of these, but so narrow that no torch could be thrown in. The third story had windows so high in the wall that arrows or bolts shot from below could only hit the arch of the opening, to fall back harmless.

The top stories were filled with weapons that could throw darts, stones, and heavy balls, so assailants could not easily take a Norman keep.

The Normans had taste as well as strength, and gradually the whole neighbourhood was made more beautiful. During reign after reign the kings showered favours on their finest possession.

Around the Keep arose a Central Ward--that is the space outside was enclosed with towers and walls and gardens. Then lower down the ridge another king built a church, and beyond it again other great towers, as the town arose, under the Castle’s shelter and protection. This part was again flanked and made strong, and called the Lower Ward. The church was dedicated first to St. Edmond, and then to St. George.

But on the other side of the Keep the monarchs built themselves something in the way of lodging far better than the small rooms of the Keep, for a wide range of palace apartments existed there before even the days of the Tudors. These were extended and improved from the days of Queen Elizabeth to the days of Queen Victoria. These buildings formed the Upper Ward.

The effect of this mass of buildings, dominated by the Round Tower, is very fine, and no better example exists of the feudal fortress. Whether seen from the river, with the red-roofed houses of the town clustered below the great white walls, or from the park, where Windsor rises like an enchanted castle above the wide greensward, which is varied with the groves of ancient oak and beech, there is nothing to compare with it.

All who speak the English tongue may be equally proud of the palace strength of their great forefathers.

Chambers built over castle gateways were often used as prisons for those whose lot was not to be made too hard. For the unfortunates who were to be severely dealt with, a far more horrible prison was provided in the shape of a dungeon with a narrow orifice above, through which the victim was let down with cords into a vault, having often no windows. Places like this must have soon become foul and fatal to the captives.

At Windsor there is a very fair prison above the gateway, through which you must pass before entering the great stair that climbs the mound of the Keep. Although the windows are narrow they give light enough, and on the walls are the names of the men who here, in their durance vile, amused themselves by writing their name or making their mark by scratches on the stone. Sometimes they added a little tracing of their arms.

These small rooms are among the few which remain exactly as they existed in the Middle Ages. In other apartments there has been much alteration. Most of the ceilings of Verrio are gone, the ancient tapestries have been removed, the heavy ornamentation of the times of the Georges, and almost all the still ponderous yet better decorations of Jacobean times, have disappeared.

But the towers which held celebrated prisoners of State are yet pointed out. The two most notable are just under the hill on which the great round Keep is built. One of these has been raised high, and a very narrow stair communicates with each of its little rooms. Here King John of France had many a long hour in which to repent of his bad generalship at Poitiers, where the young Black Prince took him prisoner. Here he was brought after that ride through the streets of London, which must have been to him so humiliating, although he was shown much courtesy by his captor.

It was the opposite tower across the Upper Ward, with better accommodations that Henry V. of England assigned to the use of the young King of Scotland, who had been illegally captured during a time of truce. Young James of Scotland’s uncle, the old Duke of Albany, was not supposed to be particularly sorry to have his sovereign and nephew kept in England, for it gave Albany all power in Scotland. So at Windsor James remained for nearly twenty years, becoming expert in literature and in knightly exercises.

The English were kind to him, and it was from this building of his captivity, now called Edward the Third’s Tower, that he saw his future Queen, a daughter of the House of Beaufort, walking in the garden at the base of the Keep.

His long residence in England was beneficial to James in many ways, and when he was at last allowed to return to his northern kingdom, he entered it the most accomplished knight of his time. He was much beloved by the English, with whom he managed, when on the throne, to keep on fair terms. His reign was illustrious, and worthy of a better close than that of the tragic assassination by which it was ended.

We need not think of all the terrible things that have happened at Windsor Castle--of prisoners dying by inches in dark dungeons; of men mutilated for treason, like the Earl of Eu; of the rare attacks the Castle has been called to endure; of the ruin wrought in glorious chapel and halls by Cromwell’s soldiery. For Windsor has chiefly been associated with the brighter and more cheery events of the national life.

Here, more often than in any other royal home, were the joy-bells rung for the births and marriages of our princes; although here, too, the funeral knell has also been often heard; for it is the tomb, as it is the dwelling-place, of the monarchs of England.

The most daring and most romantic of the Constables of the Round Tower, the fiery Prince Rupert, made his rooms beautiful with pictures, with tapestry, and with ornament. At once an artist and a warrior, such as few countries have produced, he lived to see the palace a prey to the spoiler.

Earlier as well as later days are recalled by the buildings below, which are now devoted to the library. They overlook the Thames and England’s great school of Eton. From their windows one gazes across the river far below, on the roofs and towers of the college founded by Henry VI.

Between the groups of houses and the thickly-scattered trees one may catch glimpses of bands of boys in the distance playing football or cricket, or rowing on the Thames. The poet Gray, looking on the same cheerful scene, wrote gloomily, “Alas! regardless of their doom, the little victims play.” Well, they are fortunate victims, and the men who have been at school there would gladly live over again the years they spent at Eton.

It was in this part of the Castle that Queen Elizabeth lived and moved and had her imperious being. It was in a little chamber in a turret here that Queen Anne received the despatch from Marlborough wishing her joy on the victory of Blenheim. He wrote on a scrap of paper from the field, “Your Majesty’s troops have had a great victory, and Marshall Tallard is in my coach.” He had, with Prince Eugene, achieved one of the most fruitful successes of that reign of victories.

The old look of a fortress has given way to that of the palace, fearing no foeman; and long may this be so! But the Castle could be made strong against everything save long-range artillery. The walls could contain a large force, and its underground apartments have the solidity of bomb-proof. Sentries pace its ramparts, and a regiment of guards is also at hand.

Nor is it dependent for water on river or outside supply. Not long ago a room in the Round Tower was complained of as always cold. The floor was taken up, and there lay a vast circular stone with great iron rings. By these it was lifted, and a deep, carefully-constructed Norman well was discovered, going down to the level of the Thames itself.

The interior of the group of rooms extending from the north side of the Norman Gate to the angle at which the red-coated porters await visitors, now devoted to a fine library, is not always shown. But for those who have leave, a most interesting collection of medals, illuminated manuscripts, ancient buildings, and Oriental miniatures, is displayed. Handsome Elizabethan chimney-pieces, on one of which the great Queen herself is represented, warm the north wall. The windows on the other, embayed in presses full of well-arranged literature, look out towards that far-off church, the spire of which is easily recognised through glass, where Gray wrote his immortal _Elegy_. One little room is that in which Queen Anne was sitting when Marlborough’s despatch announcing the victory of Blenheim was brought to her.

Where the library ends is the first of a set of splendid apartments, used only by the public and the greatest sovereigns. Paintings by Zuccarelli, who, at his best, is always most pleasing, are hung over cabinets containing very beautiful porcelain. Onwards, on the north side, room after room can be most profitably examined, for the pictures are of particular interest, either on account of their history or their art. Formerly the Sovereign’s family lived in this part of the Castle. Now they live on the southern side of the Upper Ward, where dwelt in other days the great officers of state.

THE PALACE OF URBINO

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS

The sunset was almost spent, and a four days’ moon hung above the Western Apennines, when we took our first view of the palace. It is a fancy-thralling work of wonder seen in that dim twilight; like some castle reared by Atlante’s magic for imprisonment of Ruggiero, or palace sought in fairy-land by Astolf winding his enchanted horn. Where shall we find its like, combining, as it does, the buttressed battlemented bulk of mediæval strongholds with the airy balconies, suspended gardens, and fantastic turrets of Italian pleasure-houses? This unique blending of the feudal past with the Renaissance spirit of the time when it was built, connects it with the art of Ariosto--or more exactly with Boiardo’s epic. Duke Federigo planned his palace at Urbino just at the moment when the Count of Scandiano had begun to chaunt his lays of Roland in the Castle of Ferrara. Chivalry, transmuted by the Italian genius into something fanciful and quaint, survived as a frail work of art. The man-at-arms of the Condottieri still glittered in gilded hauberks. Their helmets waved with plumes and bizarre crests. Their surcoats blazed with heraldries; their velvet caps with medals bearing legendary emblems. The pomp and circumstance of feudal war had not yet yielded to the cannon of the Gascon or the Switzer’s pike. The fatal age of foreign invasions had not begun for Italy. Within a few years Charles VIII.’s holiday excursion would reveal the internal rottenness and weakness of her rival states, and the peninsula for half a century to come would be drenched in the blood of Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, fighting for her cities as their prey. But now Lorenzo de’Medici was still alive. The famous policy which bears his name held Italy suspended for a golden time in false tranquillity and independence. The princes who shared his culture and his love of art were gradually passing into modern noblemen, abandoning the savage feuds and passions of more virile centuries, yielding to luxury and scholarly enjoyments. The castles were becoming courts, and despotisms won by force were settling into dynasties.

It was just at this epoch that Duke Federigo built his castle at Urbino. One of the ablest and wealthiest Condottieri of his time, one of the best instructed and humanest of Italian princes, he combined in himself the qualities which mark that period of transition. And these he impressed upon his dwelling-house, which looks backward to the mediæval fortalice and forward to the modern palace. This makes it the just embodiment in architecture of Italian romance, the perfect analogue of the “_Orlando Innamorato_.” By comparing it with the castle of the Estes at Ferrara and the Palazzo del Te of the Gonzagas at Mantua, we place it in its right position between mediæval and Renaissance Italy, between the age when principalities arose upon the ruins of commercial independence and the age when they became dynastic under Spain.

The exigencies of the ground at his disposal forced Federigo to give the building an irregular outline. The fine façade, with its embayed _loggie_ and flanking turrets, is placed too close upon the city ramparts for its due effect. We are obliged to cross the deep ravine which separates it from a lower quarter of the town, and take our station near the Oratory of S. Giovanni Battista, before we can appreciate the beauty of its design, or the boldness of the group it forms with the cathedral dome and tower and square masses of numerous outbuildings. Yet this peculiar position of the palace, though baffling to a close observer of its details, is one of singular advantage to its inhabitants. Set on the verge of Urbino’s towering eminence, it fronts a wave-tossed sea of vales and mountain summits towards the rising and the setting sun. There is nothing but illimitable air between the terraces and loggias of the Duchess’s apartments and the spreading pyramid of Monte Catria.

A nobler scene is nowhere swept from palace windows than this, which Castiglione touched in a memorable passage at the end of his _Cortegiano_. To one who in our day visits Urbino, it is singular how the slight indications of this sketch, as in some silhouette, bring back the antique life, and link the present with the past--a hint, perhaps, for reticence in our descriptions. The gentlemen and ladies of the court had spent a summer night in long debate on love, rising to the height of mystical Platonic rapture on the lips of Bembo, when one of them exclaimed, “The day has broken!” “He pointed to the light which was beginning to enter by the fissures of the windows. Whereupon we flung the casements wide upon that side of the palace which looks towards the high peak of Monte Catria, and saw that a fair dawn of rosy hue was born already in the eastern skies, and all the stars had vanished except the sweet regent of the heaven of Venus, who holds the border-lands of day and night; and from her sphere it seemed as though a gentle wind were breathing, filling the air with eager freshness, and waking among the numerous woods upon the neighbouring hills the sweet-toned symphonies of joyous birds.”

Duke Frederick began the palace at Urbino in 1454, when he was still only Count. The architect was Luziano of Lauranna, a Dalmatian, and the beautiful white limestone, hard as marble, used in the construction, was brought from the Dalmatian coast. This stone, like the Istrian stone of Venetian buildings, takes and retains the chisel mark with wonderful precision. It looks as though, when fresh, it must have had the pliancy of clay, so delicately are the finest curves in scroll or foliage scooped from its substance. And yet it preserves each cusp and angle of the most elaborate pattern with the crispness and the sharpness of a crystal. When wrought by a clever craftsman, its surface has neither the waxiness of the Parian, nor the brittle edge of Carrara marble; and it resists weather better than marble of the choicest quality. This may be observed in many monuments of Venice, where the stone has been long exposed to sea-air. These qualities of the Dalmatian limestone, no less than its agreeable creamy hue and smooth dull polish, adapt it to decoration in dull relief. The most attractive details in the palace at Urbino are friezes carved of this material in choice designs of early Renaissance dignity and grace. One chimney-piece in the Sala degli Angeli deserves special comment. A frieze of dancing Cupids, with gilt hair and wings, their naked bodies left white on a ground of ultramarine, is supported by broad flat pilasters. These are engraved with children holding pots of flowers; roses on one side, carnations on the other. Above the frieze another pair of angels, one at each end, hold lighted torches; and the pyramidal cap of the chimney is carved with two more, flying, and supporting the eagle of the Montefeltri on a raised medallion. Throughout the palace we notice emblems appropriate to the Houses of Montefeltro and Della Rovere: their arms, three golden bends upon a field of azure: the Imperial eagle, granted when Montefeltro was made a fief of the Empire: The Garter of England, worn by the Dukes Federigo and Guidobaldo: The ermine of Naples: the _ventosa_, or cupping-glass, adopted for a private badge by Frederick: the golden oak-tree on an azure field of Della Rovere: the palm-tree, bent beneath a block of stone, with its accompanying motto, _Inclinata Resurgam_: the cipher, FE DX. Profile medallions of Federigo and Guidobaldo, wrought in the lowest possible relief, adorn the staircases. Round the great courtyard runs a frieze of military engines and ensigns, trophies, machines, and implements of war, alluding to Duke Frederick’s profession of Condottiere. The doorways are enriched with scrolls of heavy-headed flowers, acanthus foliage, honey-suckles, ivy-berries, birds and boys and sphinxes, in all the riot of Renaissance fancy.

This profusion of sculptured _rilievo_ is nearly all that remains to show how rich the palace was in things of beauty. Castiglione, writing in the reign of Guidobaldo, says that “in the opinion of many it is the fairest to be found in Italy; and the Duke filled it so well with all things fitting its magnificence, that it seemed less like a palace than a city. Not only did he collect articles of common use, vessels of silver, the trappings for chambers of rare cloths of gold and silk, and such-like furniture, but he added multitudes of bronze and marble statues, exquisite pictures, and instruments of music of all sorts. There was nothing but was of the finest and most excellent quality to be seen there. Moreover, he gathered together at a vast cost a large number of the best and rarest books on Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, all of which he adorned with gold and silver, esteeming them the chiefest treasure of his spacious palace.” When Cesare Borgia entered Urbino as conqueror in 1502, he is said to have carried off loot to the value of 150,000 ducats, or perhaps about a quarter of a million sterling.

The impression left upon the mind after traversing this palace in its length and breadth is one of weariness and disappointment. How shall we reconstruct the long-past life which filled its rooms with sound, the splendour of its pageants, the thrill of tragedies enacted here? It is not difficult to crowd its doors and vacant spaces with liveried servants, slim pages in tight hose, whose well-combed hair escapes from tiny caps upon their silken shoulders. We may even replace the tapestries of Troy which hung one hall, and build again the sideboards with their embossed gilded plate. But are these chambers really those where Emilia Pia held debate on love with Bembo and Castiglione; where Bibbiena’s witticisms and Fra Serafino’s pranks raised smiles on courtly lips; where Bernardo Accolti, “the Unique,” declaimed his verses to applauding crowds? Is it possible that into yonder hall, where now the lion of S. Mark looks down alone on staring desolation, strode the Borgia in all his panoply of war, a gilded glittering dragon, and from the daïs tore the Montefeltri’s throne, and from the arras stripped their ensigns, replacing those with his own Bull and Valentinus Dux? Here Tasso tuned his lyre for Francesco Maria’s wedding-feast and read _Aminta_ to Lucrezia d’Este. Here Guidobaldo listened to the jests and whispered scandals of the Aretine. Here Titian set his easel up to paint; here the boy Raphael, cap in hand, took, signed and sealed credentials from his Duchess to the Gonfalonier of Florence. Somewhere in these huge chambers, the courtiers sat before a torch-lit stage, when Bibbiena’s _Calandria_ and Castiglione’s _Tirsi_, with their miracles of masques and mummers, whiled the night away. Somewhere, we know not where, Guiliano de’Medici made love in these bare rooms to that mysterious mother of ill-fated Cardinal Ippolito; somewhere, in some darker nook, the bastard Alessandro sprang to his strange-fortuned life of tyranny and license, which Brutus-Lorenzino cut short with a traitor’s poignard-thrust in Via Larga. How many men, illustrious for arts and letters, memorable by their virtues or their crimes, have trod these silent corridors, from the great Pope Julius down to James III., self-titled King of England, who tarried here with Clementina Sobieski through some twelve months of his ex-royal exile! The memories of all this folk, flown guests and masters of the still-abiding palace-chambers, haunt us as we hurry through. They are but filmy shadows. We cannot grasp them, localize them, people surrounding emptiness with more than withering cobweb forms.

It is easier to conjure up the past of this great palace, strolling round it in free air and twilight; perhaps because the landscape and the life still moving on the city streets bring its exterior into harmony with real existence. The southern façade, with its vaulted balconies and flanking towers, takes the fancy, fascinates the eye, and lends itself as a fit stage for puppets of the musing mind. Once more imagination plants trim orange-trees in giant jars of Gubbio ware upon the pavement where the garden of the Duchess lay--the pavement paced in these bad days by convicts in grey canvas jackets--that pavement where Monsignor Bembo courted “dear dead women” with Platonic phrase, smothering the Menta of his natural man in lettuce culled from Academe and thyme of Mount Hymettus. In yonder loggia, lifted above the garden and the court, two lovers are in earnest converse. They lean beneath the coffered arch, against the marble of the balustrade, he fingering his dagger under the dark velvet doublet, she playing with a clove carnation, deep as her own shame. The man is Giannandrea, broad-shouldered bravo of Verona, Duke Guidobaldo’s favourite and carpet-count. The lady is Madonna Maria, daughter of Rome’s Prefect, widow of Venanzio Verano, whom the Borgia strangled. On their discourse a tale will hang of a woman’s frailty and a man’s boldness--Camerino’s Duchess yielding to a low-born suitor’s stalwart charms. And more will follow, when that lady’s brother, furious Francesco Maria della Rovere, shall stab the bravo in torch-litten palace-rooms with twenty poignard strokes ’twixt waist and throat, and their Pandarus shall be sent down to his account by a varlet’s _coltellata_ through the midriff. Imagination shifts the scene, and shows in that same loggia Rome’s warlike Pope, attended by his cardinals and all Urbino’s chivalry. The snowy beard of Julius flows down upon his breast, where jewels clasp the crimson mantle, as in Raphael’s picture. His eyes are bright with wine; for he has come to gaze on sunset from the banquet-chamber and to watch the line of lamps which soon will leap along that palace cornice in his honour. Behind him lies Bologna humbled. The Pope returns, a conqueror to Rome. Yet once again imagination is at work. A gaunt, bold man, close-habited in Spanish black, his spare, fine features carved in purest ivory, leans from that balcony. Gazing with hollow eyes, he tracks the swallows in their flight, and notes that winter is at hand. This is the last Duke of Urbino, Francesco Maria II., he whose young wife deserted him, who made for himself alone a hermit-pedant’s round of petty cares and niggard avarice and mean brained superstition. He drew a second consort from the convent, and raised up seed unto his line by forethought, but beheld his princeling fade untimely in the bloom of boyhood. Nothing is left but solitude. To the mortmain of the Church reverts Urbino’s lordship, and even now he meditates the terms of devolution. Jesuits cluster in the rooms behind, with comfort for the ducal soul and calculations for the interests of Holy See.

Filippo Visconti, with a smile on his handsome face, is waiting for us at the inn. His horses sleek, well-fed, and rested, toss their heads impatiently. We take our seats in the carriage, open wide beneath a sparkling sky, whirl past the palace and its ghost-like recollections, and are half-way on the road to Fossombrone in a cloud of dust and whir of wheels before we think of looking back to greet Urbino. There is just time. The last decisive turning lies in front. We stand bareheaded to salute the grey mass of buildings ridged along the sky. Then the open road invites us with its varied scenery and movement.

ALNWICK CASTLE

CUTHBERT BEDE

Alnwick is built on the summit of the southern bank of the Aln, on a plateau of five acres of ground, walled round with strong fortifications, defended by sixteen towers, and divided into two large courtyards, with the Keep in the midst. The Keep is polygonal in form, faced by nine towers, and is built round a third, or inner court. We have the northern side of the second courtyard, with the Round (or Record) Tower; next to that is the abutment, called the Ravine Tower, in whose recess is the stone seat called “Hotspur’s Chair,” and between which and the Record Tower is “the Bloody Gap,”--a name given to that part of the curtain-wall from a breach being there made by the Scots during some Border war, in a vain effort to capture the castle. Three hundred Scots are said to have fallen there, and the extent of “the Bloody Gap” is plainly to be discerned from the variations in the masonry. We then come to the Constable’s Tower, and the Postern Tower, or Sally Port, and then to the Keep itself, which was protected by a low curtain-wall, carried in a semicircle to the Armourer’s Tower and the Falconer’s Tower. These are the two towers lately swept away (together with their curtain-wall) in order to accommodate the arrangements consequent upon the erection of the Prudhoe Tower, for which also the two north-western round towers of the Keep were also destroyed. One of these towers contains the ancient banqueting-hall of the Percies; and the successive sacrifice of these four towers with their many interesting evidences of feudal times, in order that the modern Italian interior of the castle might not be interfered with, has raised a storm of discussion among such distinguished architects as Scott, Cockerell, Donaldson, Godwin, Pocock, Ferguson, and Salvin, under whom the recently completed works have been carried out, chiefly from the designs of Commendatore Canina. These works have been hailed with applause, and hailed upon with disapprobation. It is an example of one of those Sir Roger de Coverley cases, where much may be said on both sides. In the last six years these works have magically transformed the interior of the feudal castle of the chivalrous Earls of Northumberland (much debased, it is true, by Batty-Langley and Strawberry-Hill Gothic) into a Roman palazzo, with the most gorgeous and costly decorations of the Renaissance. For six years have two hundred workmen been employed in these alterations; much has been done at Rome, and much on the spot, especially by the twenty-seven native wood-carvers. There are no shams in the decorations; the ceilings and cornices are carved, and not cast or moulded: the walnut and maple-woods are what they pretend to be; and, to such an extent has this Ruskinism “conscientiousness of art” been carried that, in this age of _papier-mâché_, _carton-pierre_, gutta-percha, and the like, there are several _miles_ of the egg-ornament laboriously carved by hand, while a door panel has occupied its carver four months, and a shutter-panel, a twelvemonth. This modern sumptuousness of decoration is a remarkable contrast to that peculiar species of economy imposed upon the proud Percies of three centuries back, when Clarkson’s report (in 1567) advised the taking out of the glass windows whenever my lord and his friends were not there, and laying them up in safety until their return, justifying this economical act by the “decaye and waste” of the windows “throwe extreme winds.”

Next to these now destroyed Armourer’s and Falconer’s Towers, comes the Abbot’s Tower (the large corner one), where the abbot had apartments, whenever choice or necessity caused him to leave his abbey, snugly situated down in the wooded valley by the river-side. Beyond this is seen the West Garret, and the outer of “Utter Ward,” with its square and octagonal towers, and its advanced barbican, forming a picturesque mass of great size and strength, and a noble entrance to a noble castle.

Walking along the parapets from the Round Tower, we pass East Garret. Beginning at the left hand, we first come to the Guard House, and the Auditor’s Tower, which flank the southern gate. The south wall is then continued to the Middle Ward, which, as being the second great entrance to the castle, is a building of great size and strength. Over it was the chapel, approached from the library,--a noble room that occupied the greater part of this block of building--but which has now been converted into the private apartments of the Duke and Duchess. This block of building divides the two courtyards, and is terminated in the Keep, whose two semi-octagonal towers were added, in advance, to the old square Norman tower, by the second Lord Percy, about the year 1350.

A series of escutcheons on the upper part of the towers helps us to the date of their erection; and though we know not their architect, we have full proof that he did his work well, for the towers have not needed repairs up to this day, and even a rector’s legal adviser would experience some difficulty in awarding dilapidations. The moat and drawbridge that guarded the entrance to the Keep have long since passed away; but, at the time of my visit, a field-piece, backed up by a pyramidal pile of cannon balls, did harmless duty on either side of the gateway, and playfully menaced the Auditor’s Tower and the Guard House on the opposite side of the courtyard.

The ground-floor of the octagonal towers of the Keep is lighted by long arrow slits that admit a thin wedge of light to the wine-cellar, on the left hand, and to the chief dungeon, on the right. Each of the lodges at the various gates was furnished with dungeons; but this was the chief dungeon for the State offenders. Its size is eleven feet four inches, by ten feet four inches. In the floor is an iron grating, over a pit; and, a light being lowered into this for the depth of eleven feet, discloses a horrible grave (worthy of Naples and the dark ages) nine feet by eight, into which the wretched prisoner was lowered, or shot like a sack of coals. Let us thank Heaven that such a place can now only be shown as a curiosity. The breakfast-room was over the gateway: we see one of its windows over the mound of the Keep. The windows in the first round tower, and the windows in the flat wall to the left, lighted the old dining-room. The next round tower contained the old drawing-room whose interior shape was that of the ace of clubs. A portion of the low curtain-wall is seen at the base of the Keep mound; and then, immediately on the right is the postern tower, or sally-port. In the lower part was a laboratory; in the upper part, a collection of old armour, and a museum of miscellaneous antiquities; Roman remains; small cannon, used at the first invention of gunpowder; and the old standard bushel of Northumberland, and a chain of several links, that could be bound around an arm, like an iron chain, and was carved out of a solid block of stone.

Let us now pass between those two great octagonal towers, and up the long dark tunnel that will lead us into the heart of the Keep, the third, or inner court; the carriages rattle under that dark archway with a peculiar dull sound, for its pavement is of wood, as is also the pavement of the inner court. It is a polygon, having nine sides of various dimensions, besides other little angles, and it is about a hundred feet across from the one side to the other; and, as it is walled in with high towers on every side, it has somewhat of a well-like aspect. Its two great architectural and antiquarian curiosities are the Saxon (or Norman, if you are a great stickler for this point) mouldings on the inner face of the archway, presenting a great diversity of enrichments--and the old draw-well, for the use of the castle during a siege. This is built in the thickness of the wall, with three pointed arches, surmounted by one large discharging arch, on the point of which is a humorous-looking corbel, supporting the figure of a priest, who is in the attitude of blessing the water. The old axle, with its pegged hand-wheels, still remains, and this interesting draw-well has not been interfered with in the recent alterations, though the aspect of the Inner Court has been altered by the addition of the covered drive.

The limits of this paper do not allow me to say more of Alnwick Castle, or to touch upon the varied events that have befallen it and its owners, from those early Percy days when--

“in the Conqueror’s fleet
Lord William shipp’d his powers,”

(as one of the family has told us in his ballad of the _Hermit of Warkworth_) down to those later times of handsome Hugh Smithson, the London apothecary, and his descendants, when, as the American poet Halleck sings in that ballad, which is not so well known (in its entirety) as it deserves to be:--

“The present representatives
Of Hotspur and his gentle Kate,
Are some half-dozen serving-men,
In the drab coats of William Penn--”

who will bow you

“From donjon vault, to turret wall,
For ten-and-sixpence sterling.”