ulpture at one corner of the cemetery, where the anguish of the Christ
had long since faded into the stone from which it had been evoked, and
the thieves were no longer distinguishable in their penitence or
impenitence; but she parted friends with them when she saw how much they
seemed taken with the votive chapel of the noble Holzschuh family, where
a line of wooden shoes puns upon the name in the frieze, like the line of
dogs which chase one another, with bones in their mouths, around the
Canossa palace at Verona. A sense of the beautiful house by the Adige was
part of the pleasing confusion which possessed them in Nuremberg whenever
they came upon the expression of the gothic spirit common both to the
German and northern Italian art. They knew that it was an effect which
had passed from Germany into Italy, but in the liberal air of the older
land it had come to so much more beauty that now, when they found it in
its home, it seemed something fetched from over the Alps and coarsened in
the attempt to naturalize it to an alien air.

In the Germanic Museum they fled to the Italian painters from the German
pictures they had inspired; in the great hall of the Rathhaus the noble
Processional of Durer was the more precious, because his Triumph of
Maximilian somehow suggested Mantegna's Triumph of Caesar. There was to
be a banquet in the hall, under the mighty fresco, to welcome the German
Emperor, coming the next week, and the Rathhaus was full of work-people
furbishing it up against his arrival, and making it difficult for the
custodian who had it in charge to show it properly to strangers. She was
of the same enthusiastic sisterhood as the vergeress of St. Lawrence and
the guardian of the old cemetery, and by a mighty effort she prevailed
over the workmen so far as to lead her charges out through the corridor
where the literal conscience of the brothers Kuhn has wrought in the roof
to an exact image of a tournament as it was in Nuremberg four hundred
years ago. In this relief, thronged with men and horses, the gala-life of
the past survives in unexampled fulness; and March blamed himself after
enjoying it for having felt in it that toy-figure quality which seems the
final effect of the German gothicism in sculpture.

XLVI.

On Sunday Mrs. March partially conformed to an earlier New England ideal
of the day by ceasing from sight-seeing. She could not have understood
the sermon if she had gone to church, but she appe