valry banished brutal crime, and introduced refined vice, which ate into the very heart of Europe, and killed her old barbarian earnestness. It meant well, but the truth is, the Church is sufficient for all these things. Leave the burden upon her; for she has aid to bear it. But Francis I. did not seek to revive chivalry as connected with the Church. Nor could he have done so. Francis was the first modern Frenchman. He spoiled that fine nation. His main characteristic was the want of the calm moral restraint which we call good sense, or plain sense: the want of which seems to have been national during the revolution, as witnessed in the almost childish use of old classical history and names; and to have been prevalent in one large section of the French people lately, as witnessed in the ludicrous phrenzy of dislike exhibited towards us, and the sensible writhings of pain at our success in commerce and diplomacy. Francis I., as I have said before, shares with Henry IV. and Louis XIV. the disgrace of having much deteriorated the noble and virtuous character of the French nation; and his revival of chivalry, which seems the solitary note of his greatness, was only upon an immense scale what a modern tournament might be, and Charles V., the cool matter-of-fact sheriff, who would suggest the possible legal penalties, and take advantage of them. So much for reflections on the field of Pavia.

About five miles from Pavia, on one side of the road, stands the Certosa of Chiaravalle, beneath the

walls of which the battle of Pavia was fought. It certainly is a most gorgeous church; but it looked desolate and forlorn, and in want of worshippers. The suppression of the monastery in this particular spot is to be regretted. It was one of the wholesale reforms of Joseph II., the Austrian Henry VIII.; but a better and honester man, and a wiser sovereign. This house of Carthusian monks was begun by one of the Visconti, Dukes of Milan, in the fourteenth century, as an expiation for his sins, which were in truth many and onerous. The building of it occupied a hundred years. The whole of the interior, which is spacious and in the form of a Latin Cross, is one mingled mass of marble, precious stones, brass, bronze, fresco-painting and stained windows, most dazzling and costly. We observed much elaborate work in very precious materials, in more than one place where it could scarcely be seen by any human eye. This is always delightful. It is very contrary to our spirit. We would as soon throw ourselves from our own steeples as do anything elaborate or beautiful or costly, where it would never meet the eyes of men. How the spirit of the Middle Ages dwarfs this selfish, unventuresome meanness. What a refreshment it is, how grateful a reproof to wander up and down, within and without, the labyrinth of roofs in an old cathedral, as we did at Amiens, and see the toil and the cost of parts to which the eye can scarcely travel, so isolated are they in the air,— tracery, exquisitely-finished images, fretwork, and

the like; and all an offering of man's toil and intellect and cost to the Holy Trinity. The Certosa is a signal instance of this spirit. It is one heap of riches and of earth's most magnificent things, wrought by the deep and fertile spirit of Christian art into a wondrous symbolical offering to God, shaped after the Cross of His Son. Once indeed it had a continual voice, a voice of daily and nightly liturgies, which rose up from it before the Lord perpetually. But the fiat of an Austrian Emperor went forth, and from that hour there was so much less intercession upon the earth. The Certosa is now a silent sacrifice of Christian art. It is, as it were, a prayer for the dead, rising with full though speechless meaning up to Heaven.

I came out from the church, and loitered about the tranquil collegiate quadrangle in which it is situated. I remembered Petrarch's letter to some Carthusian monks with whom he had stayed. "My desires are fulfilled. I have been in Paradise, and seen the Angels of Heaven in the form of men. Happy family of Jesus Christ! How was I ravished in the contemplation of that sacred hermitage, that pious temple, which resounded with celestial psalmody! In the midst of these transports, in the pleasure of embracing the dear deposit I confided to your care, (his brother, who had taken the habit) and in discoursing with him, and with you, time ran so

" Mémoires pour la Vie, &c.—Engl. Trans. p. 60.

rapidly that I scarcely perceived its progress. I never spent a shorter day or night. I came to seek one brother, and I found a hundred. You did not treat me as a common guest. The activity and the ardor with which you rendered me all sorts of services, the agreeable conversations I had with you in general and particular, made me fear I should interrupt the course of your devout exercises. I felt it was my duty to leave you, but it was with extreme pain I deprived myself of hearing those sacred oracles you deliver. I did purpose to have made you a short discourse; but I was so absorbed, I could not find a moment to think of it. In my solitude I ruminate over that precious balm which I gathered, like the bee, from the flowers of your holy retreat."

O kings and queens! how swiftly runs the pen through the letters of your signature, and what power is allotted by Heaven to the prince's written name to humble or elevate the world! Some tranquil morning at Schönbrunn, it may be, the Kaiser was detained one moment from the elmi-tree walk beneath the windows, and, ere the sentinel would have time to change guard, that Carthusian world of peaceful sanctity, of king-protecting intercession, of penitence and benediction, of Heaven realized below, was signed away, swept from the earth by a written name. It was as though the Kaiser had stopped the fountains of one of the Lombard rivers. Yet are those royal pens in their swift movements guided invisibly, as a master diverts the fingers of the child,

to the well-being of the Church, a well-being attained one while by depression, another while by exaltation. Therefore let the king's name be reverenced and feared, and let churchmen uncover themselves before it.

near.

Our fellow-traveller from the Middle Ages came He looked round the grass-grown quadrangle with a slow, searching gaze, till his eyes rested upon the west front of the church. The door was open, and I could see his look travel upwards to the cold and desolate and dusty Altar. The calm sadness of his countenance seemed to pass away, his eye lighted up, and his features were compressed as though he were keeping back a burst of indignation. I heard him say in a low voice, deep, yet troubled, and with his eyes closed and his face turned downwards, "Dreadful." No words can describe his aspect and demeanor when he uttered this. It did not seem like the judgment of a child of earth, with such collected severity was it spoken, with such undoubting confidence of rectitude pronounced, and still with a yearning sadness as though the heart were embracing in its capacious sympathies all the mortal affections which sacrilege had ever wronged. Yet was his mien so full of prayer, such a consciousness of some High Presence which he was adoring stood like a sweet, awful shade upon his face, that I could have deemed it was an Archangel who had been wont to minister at that Altar, who now stood before me in human shape, giving utterance to a judgment that