The dinner was simple and nourishing.  The wine was what they call the white wine of Austria:  rather thin and acid.  It still continued to rain.  Our friends told us that, from the windows of the room in which we were eating, they could, in fair weather; discern the snow-capt mountains of the Tyrol:—­that, from one side of their monastery they could look upon green fields, pleasure gardens, and hanging woods, and from the other, upon magnificent ranges of hills terminated by mountains covered with snow.  They seemed to be proud of their situation, as they had good reason to be.  I found them exceedingly chatty, pleasant, and even facetious.  I broached the subject of politics—­but in a very guarded and general manner.  The lively Librarian, however, thought proper to observe—­“that the English were doing in India what Bonaparte had been doing in Europe.”  I told him that such a doctrine was a more frightful heresy than any which had ever crept into his own church:  at which he laughed heartily, and begged we would not spare either the bouille or the wine.

We were scarcely twenty minutes at our meal, being desirous of seeing the CHURCH, the PICTURE GALLERY, and the SALOON—­belonging to the monastery.  It was not much after three o’clock, and yet it was unusually dark for the hour of the day.  However, we followed our guides along a magnificent corridor—­desirous of seeing the pictures first.  If the number of paintings, and of apartments alone, constitute a good collection of pictures, this of Saint Florian is doubtless a very fair specimen of a picture gallery.  There are three rooms and a corridor (or entrance passage) filled with paintings, of which three fourths at least are palpable copies.  The subjects of some of the paintings were not exactly accordant with monastic gravity; among these I regret that I am compelled to include a copy of a Magdalen from Rubens—­and a Satyr and Sleeping Nymph, apparently by Lucas Giordano.  Nevertheless the collection is worth a second and a third examination; which, if time and circumstances had allowed, we should in all probability have given it.  A series of subjects, fifteen in number, illustrative of the LIFE OF ST. FLORIAN,[97] (the great fire-extinguishing Saint,—­to whom the Monastery is dedicated, and who was born at Ens, in the neighbourhood) cuts a most distinguished figure in this collection.  There is a good, and I think genuine, head of an old woman by Rubens, which I seemed to stumble upon as if by accident, and which was viewed by my guides with a sort of apathy.  Mr. Lewis was half lost in extacies before a pretty little sketch by Paolo Veronese; when, on my observing to him that the time was running away fast, M. Klein spoke aloud in the English language—­“Mister Louise, (repeating my words) teime fleis.”  He laughed heartily upon uttering it, and seemed to enjoy the joke full as much as my companion, to whom the words were addressed.  There were several specimens of the old German masters, but I suspect most of them were copies.