the fair prospect of the Euganean hills, immortalized by the verse of Shelley, of the Istrian mountains rising above the Adriatic, and of the Alps. Strangely enough, of all the multitudinous canals of Venice, but one was visible.

The other great detached towers of Italy have each its own distinction and it is most interesting to compare them as representatives of their times and peoples with this Venetian building. The next to be begun, of the more famous ones, is the Campanile at Pisa, and though it was 176 years in the building its design may be fairly reckoned to the good or ill credit of Pisa in the last generation of the twelfth century. It was begun in 1174, nearly half a century after the original bell tower of Venice had been completed, and was the last of the great group of buildings of which it forms a part. The cathedral had been finished in 1118, the baptistery begun in 1152. It was the crowning effort of a period of greatness and wealth, of ostentatious prosperity. We have no square-browed tower here, no strength of sharp ascending line, no rugged brick bespeaking a purposeful sacrifice, but all is softly curved, gracious, one would almost say dainty, though the height is 179 feet. It is all marble, too; just the thing to imitate in a paper-weight or for a mantel ornament. We feel that the diminished circumference of the last story gives to the whole its fit

crown.

The tower leans some 13 feet, 8 inches, but it was not originally intended to do so, and it should be judged architecturally as though it were perpendicular.

Before this Campanile was finished two others had been begun and completed. The first of these was the Torrazzo at Cremona, noteworthy only for its height, 397 feet, the greatest, as indeed its name implies, of the Campanili of Italy. This belongs entirely to the thirteenth century; it was begun in 1261 and finished in 1284. To the same century belongs the inception of that superb challenge of the mason to the powers of the air, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, begun in 1298, two years before Dante says he made his "descent into hell." It was a period of intense municipal life, when men's brows lowered on each other even as the battlements of their city hall seem to glower over the Piazza della Signoria. The building, begun, as we said, in 1298, was finished, so far as we are concerned with it, in 1314, and thus it accords in date with the experience and the writing of Dante's "Divine Comedy." The tower itself rises 308 feet and is thus slightly lower than the completed St. Mark's, but higher than that building was originally. There is in all the world no tower so tremendous with impending fate as this. It was felt to be so by those who built it and Dante has immortalized the impression in his verse. It speaks for itself, but it speaks also of the Florence of the Bianchi and the Neri as no other building does and as the seat of the government of the republic ought, above all other buildings, to have spoken.

And now turn from this to the Florentine Campanile. "The characteristics of power and beauty," says Ruskin, "occur more or less in different buildings, some in one, some in another. But altogether, and all in their highest possible relative degree, they exist, so far as I know, only in one building in the world, the Campanile of Giotto." The superlative is extreme, but it is not far from the truth.

This building was begun in 1334. Giotto died in 1336. The tower was not finished till 1387 but it was practically completed by 1350. It is not altogether clear precisely how far the very great architectural honor of this building belongs to Giotto, how far Taddeo Gaddi and others modified it. It was once proposed to crown it with a pyramid like the Venetian Campanile, but that design was happily abandoned, and we have to compare it not with the tower that fell the other day, but with that part of this Venetian tower designed by the builders of the twelfth century and rebuilt five years before the Florentine tower was begun. This stood as a monument of Florentine splendor and of Florentine liberty, that had been rescued for a time from party strife and was not yet fallen, as it began to fall even before the last stone of this building was laid, under the dominance of the house of Medici.

The younger building is the glorification of the older, strength has flowered into beauty. Something of the glorious uplifting power of the perpendicular lines is lost, yet wonderful art has made the building seem to contribute to its own upbearing, each superimposed story impressing the eye as lighter than the last and so reassuring the mind's sense of the

building's stability even after the vision has swept upward well nigh three hundred feet to the buttressed cornice. Never has ornament so interpenetrated structure and so rationalized its emotional appeal. But one feels that something of the stern sturdiness is lost for which the elder Campanile stood. Amenity has come with prosperity, yet one cannot long fix one's thought on this Florentine gem, without some clouding fear of fate which the vigor of the old Venetian Campanile never suggested. This showed the vigor of Italian architecture's early summer, the Florentine Tower its full-fruited autumn, which was so much the nearer to the nipping frost of the paganized Renascence.

How, as England's sons and daughters, can we help her to respond to that touch? By doing our little bit to discern England's tasks and responsibilities, and to discharge them; her dangers and temptations, and to resist them. The danger of prosperity to a nation as to a man is that it breeds complacency and content with things as they are. "To-morrow shall be as this day and much more abundant." Yet for a nation as for a man this is the very opposite of the temper which God approves, and which makes the salt of godly life. For a nation as for a man that temper is one of godly fear. It does not take for granted that all is well; it knows that much is ill and is on the lookout for a remedy. It is ill-content with

itself. There is, no doubt, a discontent which is only sour, and bitter, and destructive; the less we have of it the better. But there is a discontent which has been rightly called "divine." Such discontent is the very salt of public life. It will not let men's minds be blinded, or their consciences lulled, so that they either do not see what is wrong, or have no courage or energy to work for its remedy. Public opinion may be generous, and even trustful, and yet strong, stimulating, and exacting. . . . For a true Christian there can be no fear of false content; for he is a follower-nay, he is bound to be a lover of the Cross of Jesus Christ. It stands for him against the luxury and self-indulgence of a soft and easy time, against the power of gold, and the worship, as it has been called ironically, of the golden calf; against the forgetfulness, which may easily become practical atheism; against the ungodliness of many, high and low, rich and poor, whose god is their belly, or their profit, or their pleasure. It stands a witness for lowliness against pride; for self-denial against for zeal for the right extravagance; against indifference; for God against the Its world. sorrow is wrought by the world's evil; the heart of its meaning is the love that will not "let ill alone," but will contend, attack, plead, and recover.

"The Hand of God."

W

E have indeed lived together through a memorable week, said Bishop Talbot alluding to the sudden illness of the King, a week never to be forgotten by ourselves; and probably always to be remembered upon the page of English history. To have shared it together is a great experience. It has drawn us closer to one another and to Our Sovereign. It has made us more conscious of the national life in which he and we are one. . . .

The heart of the nation has felt the touch of the hand of God. It has bent its head before the act of His providence, the more visibly His, because man had no part in it at all. So it is that we are right in taking gravely this check, this sudden interruption of our pageantry and pleasure, this suffering to our King, and our own anxiety on his behalf. We are right to see in it the chastening hand of our God upon us, a quiet, solemn teaching, a call to soberness. But still we have to see to it that we are teachable, and learn. God gives us ears, and He speaks; but the listening He leaves to us. . . The irony of disappointment or its pathos; the abrupt change from excitement to dismay; the tense anxiety; even the splendor of the three days' weather, as though earth and sky themselves were draped in glory for a great ceremony, in which, by a strange paradox, only the central and necessary figure was wanting, all this goes to make action that is most dramatic, like that of a theatre, only on a larger scale, and with the keener interest of reality. We may watch that drama, follow and share it, feel its high-wrought excitement, and moralize upon it without being really influenced by it. But if we are to learn from it, two things more are needed: the heart's ear must listen for the message of it, and the will must turn the thoughts to result.

Let the experience of the Coronation,

* A Southwark, on Sunday, June 29, by the Rt. Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester.

sermon preached in St. Saviour's,

L

Became a Fortress.

ET every patriotic citizen of this country who admires deeds of bravery and self-sacrifice, make a pilgrimage to that historic shrine-the Alamo Mission, in the city of San Antonio, Texas, where a few old stone walls enclose hallowed ground sanctified to the heroism of men who could die for a principle.'

One hundred and eighty-four years have elapsed since the grim, fortress-like walls were erected by the Franciscan friars who had gone forth into the unexplored wilderness to found missions, by means of which they hoped to Christianize and civilize the ignorant savages. Its early history would, no doubt, be filled with the interest of tradition and romance, were it not that one glorious deed of sacrifice dwarfs all that went before.

It was here, in March, 1836, during the

struggle of the Texans to throw off the yoke of the Mexican Government, that one hundred and eighty-one citizen soldiers, untrained in military tactics, fought more than twenty times their number, and, realizing their feeble hopes of cape from the beleaguered church-fortress, scorned to retreat, and deliberately chose death instead of disgrace.

In those days the mission establishment had other buildings in connection with the church. East of the latter building stood the convent, 191 feet in length There was an enclosure north of the con vent yard; and outside the mission wer? houses occupied by Christianized Indians. who abandoned them when the Terens took possession of the Alamo. It was in these houses that the latter found eighty or ninety bushels of corn, which were a welcome addition to their stores. The