fair child; be that as it may, he asked her father for a letter for the Duke of Silesia, to whose court he resolved to betake himself. Before his face a letter was written, such as one of the bravest warriors of his time might have been proud to deliver; but behind his back another was penned, and the writing he carried to the Silesian Duke was such as should threaten his liberty, nay, even his life!

The villany was discovered, and Otho planned revenge. He arrived in Bamberg. The Emperor was sick, and his physicians had recourse to bloodletting:

"More must be let still," said darkly Otho; and, with his sword drawn, he entered Philip's chamber.

"The Emperor," says an old chronicler, "begged him to sheathe his sword, since a royal bed-chamber was no fitting place for such rude toys. Otho replied that it was the most fitting place, the place where falsehood and treachery might be punished as they deserved, and therewith he plunged his sword up to the hilt in the Emperor's body."

I have almost the same feeling about Bamberg that I have about a certain closet at Holyrood, and a certain gallery at Fontainebleau, where, in one, the name of Rizzio, and in the other that of Monaldeschi whisper to you out of the very walls.

But, ere you have had time to forget the rash deed of the subject against the Emperor, the phantom of the empire itself rises up before you in the form of Othmar's frowning keep—

The Kaiserburg of Nuremberg! there it stands, with its huge round towers, the home of the Emperors-a glorious old fastness-meet eyrie for such an eagle.

CHAPTER IX.

NUREMBERG.

THIS is again a town completely sui generis-as little Bavarian as Leipsick is Saxon. It is, however, of a totally different species from the latter, and may, indeed, be called its antipodes. It is as still as Leipsick is stirring, as old-fashioned and quaint as the other is self-sufficient and greedy of novelty, and, above all, as orderly and well-behaved as the home of Brander and Frosch,* is unruly and turbulent. Even when the price of beer is raised, it fails to produce a row in Nuremberg; and during all the bouleversements of the year '48, it would have been ashamed to let a paving-stone be disturbed. Some of its inhabitants think this is owing to the fact of no Jews being permitted to reside in the town; they have a town of their own close by, and Fürth is the

*The students of the Faust.

Ghetto of this part of the country. The Nurembergers are essentially what is termed "well to do;" they are industrious, rich, and still attached as ever to their patriarchal habits. Foreigners rarely stay more than a day or two in this curious city, and the fact of a stranger ever having fixed his abode in it, or penetrated into the close circles of its society, is altogether unheard of. No English family ever pitched its tent within these walls, where what are commonly denominated gaieties are unknown. As to establishing anything like an intimacy, or even making an acquaintance based upon a mutual interchange of civilities, with a Patrician of this sealed city, you might sooner dream of entering into the crême de la créme in Vienna, with no help save your visiting-card.

In those odd, funny-looking old houses, with each of them an emblem of some sort over their door, and each of them after that emblem, called like inns, the White Rose, or the Stork, or the Lion, or the Lamb, or whatever it may be, there live on the staid, wealthy, and obscure descendants of families, who in their allies would require five hundred years of pure blood. Volkammers, Holzschuhers, Pirkheimers, they are there still, the untitled patricians, whose uncoronetted shields cover the walls of every public building and every church. Burghers of

Nuremberg! it was a proud title. A free burgher of Nuremberg or Augsburg was as good as a Count any day, and the Emperors were wont to pay loving attention to petitions, and even advice of their faithful Rathsherrn.* Nuremberg was said to be the brightest jewel in the Imperial Crown; and when one sees all that adorns the fair city, one is inclined to agree to the denomination.

If Cologne is the Venice, Nuremberg is the Florence of Germany. Her artists, painters, sculptors, and architects, give to her, in the Teutonic corporation, the same splendour that had in Italy the capital of the Medici. There is, too, between the rich merchants, and the men whose lives are devoted to art, the same sympathy which exists so seldom elsewhere. Florence, Genoa, and Venice, Augsburg and Nuremberg, are perhaps the only places where this feeling has ever been manifested in all its force. Between Lorenzo and the illustrious artists who surrounded him, the distance was hardly greater, and certainly the sympathy was not more sincere, than that which bound Dürer to Willibald Pirkheimer, or Peter Vischer to the head of the House of Volkammer.

Nuremberg does not look like a town in which to

*The Common-councillors.