h the place was so dull), I recalled the
spot where I had first read them and where I had read them again and yet
again, wondering whether it would ever be my fortune to visit the church
of Brou. The spot in question was an armchair in a window which looked
out on some cows in a field; and whenever I glanced at the cows it came
over me--I scarcely know why--that I should probably never behold the
structure reared by the Duchess Margaret. Some of our visions never come
to pass; but we must be just--others do. "So sleep, for ever sleep, O
princely pair!" I remembered that line of Matthew Arnold's, and the
stanza about the Duchess Margaret coming to watch the builders on her
palfrey white. Then there came to me something in regard to the moon
shining on winter nights through the cold clere-storey. The tone of the
place at that hour was not at all lunar; it was cold and bright, but
with the chill of an autumn morning; yet this, even with the fact of the
unexpected remoteness of the church from the Jura added to it, did not
prevent me from feeling that I looked at a monument in the production of
which--or at least in the effect of which on the tourist-mind of
to-day--Matthew Arnold had been much concerned. By a pardonable licence
he has placed it a few miles nearer to the forests of the Jura than it
stands at present. It is very true that, though the mountains in the
sixteenth century can hardly have been in a different position, the
plain which separates the church from them may have been bedecked with
woods. The visitor to-day cannot help wondering why the beautiful
building, with its splendid works of art, is dropped down in that
particular spot, which looks so accidental and arbitrary. But there are
reasons for most things, and there were reasons why the church of Brou
should be at Brou, which is a vague little suburb of a vague little
town.

[The Church of Brou]

The responsibility rests, at any rate, upon the Duchess
Margaret--Margaret of Austria, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian and
his wife Mary of Burgundy, daughter of Charles the Bold. This lady has a
high name in history, having been regent of the Netherlands in behalf of
her nephew, the Emperor Charles V., of whose early education she had had
the care. She married in 1501 Philibert the Handsome, Duke of Savoy, to
whom the province of Bresse belonged, and who died two years later. She
had been betrothed, as a child, to Charles VIII. of France, and was kept
for