Part 11

How rapid is the progress of oblivion, with respect to those who are no more! How many a quadrille shall we see, this winter, exclusively made up from the ranks of inconsolable widows! Widows of this order exist only in the literature of the tombstone. In the world, and after the lapse of a certain period, there is but one sort of widows inconsolable--those who refuse to be comforted, because they can't get married again!

One of our most distinguished sculptors was summoned, a short time since, to the house of a young lady, connected by birth with a family of the highest grade in the aristocracy of wealth, and united in marriage to the heir of a title illustrious in the military annals of the Empire.

The union, formed under the happiest auspices, had been, alas! of short duration. Death, unpitying death, had ruptured it, by prematurely carrying off the young husband. The sculptor was summoned by the widow.

He traversed apartments silent and deserted, until he was introduced into a bed-room, and found himself in presence of a lady, young and beautiful, but habited in the deepest mourning, and with a face furrowed by tears.

"You are aware," said she, with a painful effort and a voice half choked by sobs, "You are aware of the blow which I have received?"

The artist bowed, with an air of respectful condolence.

"Sir," continued the widow, "I am anxious to have a funeral monument erected, in honour of the husband whom I have lost."

The artist bowed again.

"I wish that the monument should be superb, worthy of the man whose loss I weep, proportioned to the unending grief into which his loss has plunged me. I care not what it costs. I am rich, and I will willingly sacrifice all my fortune to do honour to the memory of an adored husband. I must have a temple--with columns--in marble--and in the middle--on a pedestal--his statue."

"I will do my best to fulfill your wishes, Madam," replied the artist; "but I had not the honour of acquaintance with the deceased, and a likeness of him is indispensable for the due execution of my work. Without doubt, you have his portrait?"

The widow raised her arm, and pointed despairingly to a splendid likeness by Amaury Duval.

"A most admirable picture!" observed the artist; "and the painter's name is sufficient guarantee for its striking resemblance to the original."

"Those are his very features, Sir; it is himself. It wants but life. Ah! Would that I could restore it to him at the cost of all my blood!"

"I will have this portrait carried to my studio, Madam, and I promise you that the marble shall reproduce it exactly."

The widow, at these words, sprung up, and at a single bound throwing herself towards the picture, with arms stretched out as though to defend it, exclaimed:

"Take away this portrait! carry off my only consolation! my sole remaining comfort! never! never!"

"But Madam, you will only be deprived of it for a short time, and--"

"Not an hour! not a minute! could I exist without his beloved image! Look you, Sir, I have had it placed here, in my own room, that my eyes might be fastened upon it, without ceasing, and through my tears. His portrait shall never leave this spot one single instant, and in contemplating that will I pass the remainder of a miserable and sorrowful existence."

"In that case, Madam, you will be compelled to permit me to take a copy of it. But do not be uneasy--I shall not have occasion to trouble your solitude for any length of time; one sketch--one sitting will suffice."

The widow agreed to this arrangement; she only insisted that the artist should come back the following day. She wanted him to set to work on the instant, so great was her longing to see the mausoleum erected. The sculptor, however, remarked that he had another work to finish first. This difficulty she sought to overcome by means of money.

"Impossible," replied the artist, "I have given my word; but do not distress yourself; I will apply to it so diligently, that the monument shall be finished in as short a time as any other sculptor would require, who could apply himself to it forthwith."

"You see my distress," said the widow; "you can make allowance for my impatience. Be speedy, then, and above all, be lavish of magnificence. Spare no expense; only let me have a masterpiece."

Several letters echoed these injunctions, during the few days immediately following the interview.

At the expiration of three months the artist called again. He found the widow still in weeds, but a little less pallid, and a little more coquettishly dressed in her mourning garb.

"Madam," said he, "I am entirely at your service."

"Ah! at last; this is fortunate," replied the widow, with a gracious smile.

"I have made my design, but I still want one sitting, for the likeness. Will you permit me to go into your bed-room?"

"Into my bed-room? For what?"

"To look at the portrait again."

"Oh! yes; have the goodness to walk into the drawing-room; you will find it there now."

"Ah!"

"Yes; it hangs better there; it is better lighted in the drawing-room, than in my own room."

"Would you like, Madam, to look at the design for the monument?"

"With pleasure. Oh! what a size! What profusion of decorations! Why, it is a palace, Sir, this tomb!"

"Did you not tell me, Madam, that nothing could be too magnificent? I have not considered the expense; and by the way, here is a memorandum of what the monument will cost you."

"Oh, Heavens!" exclaimed the widow, after having cast an eye over the total adding-up. "Why, this is enormous!"

"You begged me to spare no expense."

"Yes, no doubt, I desire to do things properly, but not exactly to make a fool of myself."

"This, at present, you see, is only a design; and there is time yet to cut it down."

"Well, then, suppose we were to leave out the temple, and the columns, and all the architectural part, and content ourselves with the statue? It seems to me that would be very appropriate."

"Certainly it would."

"So let it be, then--just the statue alone."

Shortly after this second visit, the sculptor fell desperately ill. He was compelled to give up work; but, on returning from a tour in Italy, prescribed by his physician, he presented himself once more before the widow, who was then in the tenth month of her mourning. He found, this time, a few roses among the cypress, and some smiling colours playing over half-shaded grounds.

The artist brought with him a little model of his statue, done in plaster, and offering in miniature the idea of what his work was to be.

"What do you think of the likeness?" he inquired of the widow.

"It seems to me a little flattered; my husband was all very well, no doubt; but you are making him an Apollo!"

"Really? well, then, I can correct my work by the portrait."

"Don't take the trouble--a little more, or less like, what does it matter?"

"Excuse me, but I am particular about likenesses."

"If you absolutely must--"

"It is in the drawing-room, yonder, is it not? I'll go in there."

"It is not there any longer," replied the widow, ringing the bell.

"Baptiste," said she to the servant who came in, "bring down the portrait of your master."

"The portrait that you sent up to the garret, last week, Madam?"

"Yes."

At this moment the door opened, and a young man of distinguished air entered; his manners were easy and familiar, he kissed the fair widow's hand, and tenderly inquired after her health.

"Who in the world is this good man in plaster?" asked he, pointing with his finger to the statuette, which the artist had placed upon the mantel-piece.

"It is the model of a statue for my husband's tomb."

"You are having a statue of him made? The devil! it's very majestic!"

"Do you think so?"

"It is only great men who are thus cut out of marble, and at full length; it seems to me, too, that the deceased was a very ordinary personage."

"In fact, his bust would be sufficient."

"Just as you please, Madam," said the sculptor.

"Well, let it be a bust, that's--determined!"

Two months later, the artist, carrying the bust, encountered on the stairs a merry party. The widow, giving her hand to the elegant dandy who had caused the statue of the deceased to be cut down, was on his way to the Mayor's office, where she was about to take a second oath of conjugal fidelity.

If the bust had not been completed, it would willingly have been dispensed with. When, some time later, the artist called for his money, there was an outcry about the price; and it required very little less than a threat of legal proceedings, before the widow, consoled and remarried, concluded by resigning herself to pay for this funeral homage, reduced as it was, to the memory of her departed husband.

RAMBLING RECORDS.

THE GENTLE ARLESIANS.

**With one exception, however, I gleaned nothing of information that is not already chronicled in the guide-books; and that one piece of information I only set down, because I think it contains a hint that may be made practically useful in certain enterprising circles of New York.

We were in the Arena at Arles. It was a splendid day--barring the Mistral, that windy nuisance, which, as it eddied through the antique and ample Roman corridors, brought to my recollection certain North-Westers experienced on a fine March day in Union Square. In fact, it was far too cold for sentimentalizing or tracing measurements. But the guardian, it seemed, had not latterly had much chance of exercising his vocation, and his tongue was too nimble to be frozen. And so at it he went. Only, being himself more interested in certain proceedings that had lately taken place within a boarded fence that now encloses the arena, than in historical or legendary lore, his subject was by many centuries more fresh than the ruins whereon we stood, sunning ourselves and crouching out of the wind's way. Arles, it appeared, had been favoured with a bull fight, real Spanish matadors doing the beastly honours; but to the credit of the city, be it said, the spectacle was received with intense disapprobation. The gentle Provencals, whose tastes are more Italian than Spanish, could not brook the sport dear to their fair Empress who sets fashions in Paris. Indeed, the beauteous Eugénie, I fear, will hold them to be the merest milk-sops, for when the grand climax of a disembowelled horse was exhibited before them, the Arlesians, male and female--in place of shouts of triumphant approval--gave vent to loud cries of shame and execration, and in short hissed the Spanish heroes incontinently from the scene of their performance.

But what has all this to do with the future of New York, it may be asked by any reader of these rambling reminiscences. Stay, a moment; I am only at the commencement. I, too inquired if this were all. "By no means, Sir," was the reply. "We had then the real _courses aux taureaux_, and excellent they were." Now I must own that my notions of this branch of the tauromachia were somewhat indistinct. I knew it was not precisely the same thing as buffalo-hunting on the prairies, or as a steeple-chase in Warwickshire or Yorkshire; but I could not have defined it to save my life. "Perhaps, Monsieur, has never seen one" was the next appropriate suggestion, and it led very naturally to my enlightenment. Briefly, then, after the torture of the quadrupeds, and the indignant dismissal of the Spanish matadors, the young gentlemen of the town took the place of the latter, and began a diversion, which must have been infinitely amusing, and which, I humbly submit, might be adopted on a different soil. A lively young bull was turned into the arena, and was followed by a number of lively youths, armed only with light staves whereon fluttered blood-red pennons. The fun consists in provoking the excitable animal by the red flags thrust before his face, and eluding the consequences by a run, a dodge, or a jump. The fence, which was a barrier for the bull, could easily be vaulted by a nimble-footed youth--and none but such would venture upon the field. There was just enough danger to make the game piquant; scarcely enough to make it objectionable. One indiscreet young fellow did indeed narrowly escape a catastrophe on the occasion described to me; but the fault was entirely his own. He had been breakfasting at some Arlesian Delmonico's, and had partially lost his wits before coming to the encounter, while retaining all his courage. Therefore it happened--and I only tell the story as it was told me--that the youth, when pursued by the bull, tripped and fell, and the horns of the brute were immediately thrust into the fullest part of his peg-top trousers. A great sensation among the spectators! The bull succeeded in raising and throwing over his head the object of his attack, but by no means in disentangling himself therefrom. His frantic efforts to bring about a summary toss were for some minutes unsuccessful; and the reader may conceive the mingled sense of the ludicrous and the fearful, that pervaded the assembly. Finally--for even French cassimere will give way in the end--he, the bull that is, achieved his aim, and threw his unconscious tormentor a summerset, being diverted from ulterior measures of vengeance by fresh attacks made upon him, while the crest-fallen hero of the adventure was promptly bundled over the paling. To sum up this sketch of the sport, in the humane and pithy words of the guardian of the Amphitheatre--"it does no harm whatever to the bull, and very little to the young gentleman."

Now then, Mr. Niblo; why should you not establish a Tauro-drome in the centre of civilization? The leaning of the day is toward athletic exercise. In England, at present, there is a run upon rifle-corps; and the boldest riders are all bent upon becoming the crackest shots. In New York, I have read since my absence in Europe, that the great English Eleven have begotten a very rage for cricket. An excellent move this; but then the climate is against it, and the summer is short, and the game is utterly incomprehensible to the gentler sex, who are always prompt to encourage the manly prowess of their admirers. Besides, for lack of a permanent Bude light of adequate strength, we have not yet achieved the desideratum of playing cricket during those special hours when the youth of a commercial community finds itself prone to relaxation. The _courses aux taureaux_ might just as well take place by gas-light and in a New York circus, as amid Roman ruins and under the blaze of sunshine. The dandies of Broadway have the two main requisites for brilliant success in this suggested entertainment. Their pluck may not be doubted; and who that has seen them, agile and unwearied in the German or the _valse à deux temps_, could question their ability to outfoot the fleetest bull that Andalusia itself could supply? I commend the matter then to the serious consideration of Managers in search of novelties, and to belles who would discover what stuff their beaux are made of.

AT NUREMBURG.

For these thirty-eight years past, the _Albion_ hath been protesting once a week, in the Latin tongue, that they who skip over the water change only their sky, not their mental existence. Nor did I ever doubt--indeed I ought to have faith therein--the truth of this motto, until I found myself yesterday in one of the streets of this old city of Nuremburg, with no promenaders at the moment save myself. There was not a man in sight, tiled with a black beaver chimney-pot; nor a woman redolent of the Rue de la Paix or Regent Street. Then it was that I incontinently asked myself if I were truly a Briton by birth and an Anglo-American by local ties; or whether I were not in fact a German burgher of the middle ages. I should scarcely have been surprised at sight of grave Albert Durer himself coming round the corner, or at hearing Hans Sachs, the cobbler poet, trolling one of his six thousand ditties.

To say this, is simply to add the testimony of another witness to that which has set down Nuremburg as the city of all Europe least changed with changing times. The very little that has been done of late years in the way of repairing and rebuilding, within the walls, has been done in strict accordance with the prevalent mediæval style. The result is that--whereas elsewhere, when you stumble upon a private dwelling of moderate proportions showing plainly that it was built some two or three or four or five centuries ago, you congratulate yourself upon having discovered a curiosity (as such a one really would be in Paris, for instance)--here the difficult search would be for a house, modern and spruce. Not that a rectangularly-ornamented gable-end is the quintessence of architectural beauty, or that a basement front of low iron-barred windows suggests an agreeable or hospitable interior. By no means. If this were all, there would be considerable quaintness, and nought beyond. But it is otherwise. Some of the decorative bits that catch the eye right and left, are absolute gems in their way--whether oriel windows, or fantastic turrets, or figures and devices embossed and sculptured. Taste, generally for the Gothic, but diverging at a later date into the Renaissance style, seems to have run riot here in wilful playfulness.

Of the regular sights set down in the hand-books, and explored by conscientious Englishmen with their Murrays under their arms, it would not be appropriate to speak at length. I may however indulge in an allusion to the different material, whereof are constructed two of the most highly-laboured marvels, here exhibited. Now the city itself is divided into two nearly equal parts by the small river Pegnitz, these parts bearing the names respectively of the principal church that stands in either. The one is dedicated to St. Sebald, the other to St. Lawrence. The former, as its chief curiosity, contains the shrine of its patron Saint, an elaborate and most exquisitely wrought fretwork canopy, about fifteen feet in height, beneath which repose his remains. The design is in a measure architectural, and Gothic of course; but the ornamentation is its great glory, though one is staggered somewhat at the irreverent juxtaposition of the twelve Apostles with Cupids and Mermaids, and at sundry Fathers of the Church disporting themselves amid clusters of fruit and bouquets of flowers. This monument of artistic skill was the work of Peter Vischer, one of the worthies of Nuremburg, and has been completed three hundred and forty years. The able worker, having dispensed with consistency in the admixture of Christian and Pagan accessories, as I have mentioned, was at least justified in introducing a figure of himself as one of the human animals; and a very fine statuette he makes, with chisel in hand and his working apron about him. Now mark, if you please, O attentive reader, this shrine of St. Sebald is entirely cast in bronze. To say that the effect is beautiful, is too limited praise. It is harmonious; thoroughly satisfying to the eye; perfect.

Cross with me now, if you be not weary, one of the dozen picturesque bridges over the Pegnitz, and let us see what Adam Krafft, another great Nuremburger of that same age, has done in the same line of Gothic decoration for the Church of St. Lawrence. His work is a shrine, or I should rather say a repository for the sacramental wafer of the Roman Catholic rite. It is an open-work spire, tapering to the height of sixty feet, with an infinity of graceful detail, and rare sculptures in high and low relief. One fantasy is, I think, unique of its kind. The roof is a little too low to admit the crowning summit fairly; and the top, therefore, has been made to bend over. The effect--purposely designed, I cannot doubt--is odd; nor can I agree with the fantastic remark of Murray's Handbook, that it "has the air of a plant which is chocked in its further growth." Spires and plants are not endowed with equal pliability, and the idea of one of the former waving about, or nodding gracefully, suggests an immediate "stand from under." And this all the more in this instance, because--which brings me thus round-aboutedly to my main point--the material hereon employed is stone, a clean and white-toned stone, that looks as though its excellent carvings and mouldings had been completed only for the last Crystal Palace Exhibition. The apparent newness is downright provoking; and if Adam Krafft could peep at it from his honoured grave, he would never dream that he has lain therein three centuries and a half. Let me say further--having thus stumbled upon personalities--that he too made himself as durable as his work. And with more modesty than Master Peter Vischer above named, who moulded for himself a niche in his monument corresponding, in size and position, to the one assigned to the patron Saint, though being at the opposite end of the shrine, the glorifier and the glorified could not be taken into one glance and a comparison forced. There was more modesty, I say, in Adam Krafft's mode of travelling down the stream of Time as showman of his show, though he was not methinks without a dash of _craft_, as befits the bearer of his name. Down upon their marrow-bones (as the school boys have it) with rounded backs grope Adam and his two apprentices, the three backs forming a base of operations, or in plainer words upholding the sixty-feet structure, and doing for it that which is done beneath his rival's shrine by a snail at each of the four corners. Perhaps, after all, the sculptor-architect was wiser than the bronze-caster, in his mode of identifying himself with his work. Amid a multitude of figures and emblems, Peter Vischer, as well as St. Sebald, may be overlooked, for they are small in size; but you can scarcely avoid asking "who are these three?" when you note how lofty is the edifice that the large quasi-Atlases bear.

Enough, touching these minor differences. The essential one, whereof I intended to speak, is the material in which the pair wrought respectively. I have said that the bronze entirely satisfied my critical eye, which is tantamount to saying that it charmed me. Not so with the stone. It is obviously ill-adapted for detached ornamentation, needing the solid adjunct of buttress, window, wall, or pillar, just as ivy needs the oak, or (may I utter such a term?) lace the woman. Indeed, with all my admiration for sundry mediæval specimens of Gothic architecture, wherein I scarcely yield to John Ruskin himself, I confess that the famous Eleanor's Crosses in England never quite pleased me, because therein the tracery and dainty delicacies of the design are not backed by anything massive. The greater part of my readers will not agree with me. I am sorry, but can't help it. Only, I don't want to see any more open-work baskets in stone. Give me the most fantastical of Gothic devices, as many as you please, so long as they have something to cling to.