sh novels,
what is there left?

* * * * *

=_Charles Godfrey Leland,[57] 1824._=

From "Meister Karl's Sketch-book."

=_242._= ASPECT OF NUREMBERG.

There is a picturesque disorder--a lyrical confusion about the entire
place, which is perfectly irresistible. Turrets shoot up in all sorts of
ways, on all sorts of occasions, upon all sorts of houses; and little
boxes, with delicate Gothic windows, cling to their sides and to one
another, like barnacles to a ship; while the houses themselves are
turned round and about in so many positions that you wonder that a few
are not upside down or lying on their sides by way of completing the
original arrangement of no arrangement at all. It always seemed to me as
if the buildings in Nuremberg had, like the furniture in Irving's tale,
been indulging over night in a very irregular dance, and suddenly
stopped in the most complicated part of a confusion worse confounded.
Galleries, quaint staircases, and towers with projecting upper stories,
as well as eccentric chimneys, demented door-ways, insane weather-vanes,
and highly original steeples, form the most common-place materials in
building; and it has more than once occurred to me that the architects
of this city, even at the present day, must have imbibed their
principles; not from the lecture-room, but from the most remarkable
inspirations of some romantic scene-painter. During the last two
centuries men appear to have striven, with a most uncommendable zeal,
all over Christendom, to root out and extirpate every trace of the
Gothic. In Nuremberg alone they have religiously preserved what little
they originally had in domestic architecture, and added to it....

Nuremberg, like Avignon, is one of the very few cities which have
retained in an almost perfect state, the feudal walls and turrets with
which they were invested by the middle ages. At regular intervals along
these walls occur little towers, for their defence, reminding one of
beads strung on a rosary; the great watch-tower at the gate, with its
projecting machicolation, forming the pendent cross,--the whole serving
to guard the town within from the dangers of war, even as the rosary
protects the city of Mansoul from the attacks of Sin and Death--though,
sooth to say, since the invention of gunpowder and the Reformation, both
the one and the other appear to have lost much of their former efficacy.
Directly through the center of the town