where the spectator
could put his hat; there was a smaller shelf for his stein of the beer
passed constantly throughout the evening; and there was a buffet
where he could stay himself with cold ham and other robust German
refreshments.

It was "The Wedding Journey to Nuremberg" upon which they had oddly
chanced, and they accepted as a national tribute the character of an
American girl in it. She was an American girl of the advanced pattern,
and she came and went at a picnic on the arm of a head waiter. She
seemed to have no office in the drama except to illustrate a German
conception of American girlhood, but even in this simple function she
seemed rather to puzzle the German audience; perhaps because of the
occasional English words which she used.

To the astonishment of her compatriots, when they came out of the
theatre it was not raining; the night was as brilliantly starlit as
a night could be in Germany, and they sauntered home richly content
through the narrow streets and through the beautiful old Damenthor,
beyond which their hotel lay. How pretty, they said, to call that
charming port the Ladies' Gate! They promised each other to find out
why, and they never did so, but satisfied themselves by assigning it
to the exclusive use of the slim maidens and massive matrons of the old
Nuremberg patriciate, whom they imagined trailing their silken splendors
under its arch in perpetual procession.

XLV.

The life of the Nuremberg patriciate, now extinct in the control of the
city which it builded so strenuously and maintained so heroically, is
still insistent in all its art. This expresses their pride at once and
their simplicity with a childish literality. At its best it is never so
good as the good Italian art, whose influence is always present in its
best. The coloring of the great canvases is Venetian, but there is no
such democracy of greatness as in the painting at Venice; in decoration
the art of Nuremberg is at best quaint, and at the worst puerile.
Wherever it had obeyed an academic intention it seemed to March poor and
coarse, as in the bronze fountain beside the Church of St. Lawrence. The
water spins from the pouted breasts of the beautiful figures in streams
that cross and interlace after a fancy trivial and gross; but in
the base of the church there is a time-worn Gethsemane, exquisitely
affecting in its simple-hearted truth. The long ages have made it even
more affecting than the sculptor imagin