it is difficult to reproduce the impression on paper.  Who can describe the narrow and intricate ways; the odd houses with many little gables; great roofs breaking out from eaves to ridgepole, with dozens of dormer-windows; hanging balconies of stone, carved and figure-beset, ornamented and frescoed fronts; the archways, leading into queer courts and alleys, and out again into broad streets; the towers and fantastic steeples; and the many old bridges, with obelisks and memorials of triumphal entries of conquerors and princes?

The city, as I said, lives upon the memory of what it has been, and trades upon relics of its former fame.  What it would have been without Albrecht Durer, and Adam Kraft the stone-mason, and Peter Vischer the bronze-worker, and Viet Stoss who carved in wood, and Hans Sachs the shoemaker and poet-minstrel, it is difficult to say.  Their statues are set up in the streets; their works still live in the churches and city buildings,—­pictures, and groups in stone and wood; and their statues, in all sorts of carving, are reproduced, big and little, in all the shop-windows, for sale.  So, literally, the city is full of the memory of them; and the business of the city, aside from its manufactory of endless, curious toys, seems to consist in reproducing them and their immortal works to sell to strangers.

Other cities project new things, and grow with a modern impetus:  Nuremberg lives in the past, and traffics on its ancient reputation.  Of course, we went to see the houses where these old worthies lived, and the works of art they have left behind them,—­things seen and described by everybody.  The stone carving about the church portals and on side buttresses is inexpressibly quaint and naive.  The subjects are sacred; and with the sacred is mingled the comic, here as at Augsburg, where over one portal of the cathedral, with saints and angels, monkeys climb and gibber.  A favorite subject is that of our Lord praying in the Garden, while the apostles, who could not watch one hour, are sleeping in various attitudes of stony comicality.  All the stone-cutters seem to have tried their chisels on this group, and there are dozens of them.  The wise and foolish virgins also stand at the church doors in time-stained stone,—­the one with a perked-up air of conscious virtue, and the other with a penitent dejection that seems to merit better treatment.  Over the great portal of St. Lawrence—­a magnificent structure, with lofty twin spires and glorious rosewindow is carved “The Last Judgment.”  Underneath, the dead are climbing out of their stone coffins; above sits the Judge, with the attending angels.  On the right hand go away the stiff, prim saints, in flowing robes, and with palms and harps, up steps into heaven, through a narrow door which St. Peter opens for them; while on the left depart the wicked, with wry faces and distorted forms, down into the stone flames, towards which the Devil is dragging them by their stony hair.