d themselves round
the corners reckless of the passers, who escaped alive by flattening
themselves like posters against the house walls. There were peasants,
men and women, in the costume which the unbroken course of their country
life had kept as quaint as it was a hundred years before; there were
citizens in the misfits of the latest German fashions; there were
soldiers of all arms in their vivid uniforms, and from time to time
there were pretty young girls in white dresses with low necks, and bare
arms gloved to the elbows, who were following a holiday custom of the
place in going about the streets in ball costume. The shop windows
were filled with portraits of the Emperor and the Empress, and the
Prince-Regent and the ladies of his family; the German and Bavarian
colors draped the facades of the houses and festooned the fantastic
Madonnas posing above so many portals. The modern patriotism included
the ancient piety without disturbing it; the rococo city remained
ecclesiastical through its new imperialism, and kept the stamp given it
by the long rule of the prince-bishops under the sovereignty of its King
and the suzerainty of its Kaiser.

The Marches escaped from the present, when they entered the cathedral,
as wholly as if they had taken hold of the horns of the altar, though
they were far from literally doing this in an interior so grandiose.
There area few rococo churches in Italy, and perhaps more in Spain,
which approach the perfection achieved by the Wurzburg cathedral in the
baroque style. For once one sees what that style can do in architecture
and sculpture, and whatever one may say of the details, one cannot deny
that there is a prodigiously effective keeping in it all. This interior
came together, as the decorators say, with a harmony that the travellers
had felt nowhere in their earlier experience of the rococo. It was,
unimpeachably perfect in its way, "Just," March murmured to his wife,
"as the social and political and scientific scheme of the eighteenth
century was perfected in certain times and places. But the odd thing is
to find the apotheosis of the rococo away up here in Germany. I wonder
how much the prince-bishops really liked it. But they had become rococo,
too! Look at that row of their statues on both sides of the nave! What
magnificent swell! How they abash this poor plain Christ, here; he would
like to get behind the pillar; he knows that he could never lend himself
to the baroque style.