You see, it is easy to grumble, and especially in a cheerful, open, light, and smiling city, crammed with works Of art, ancient and modern, its architecture a study of all styles, and its foaming beer, said by antiquarians to be a good deal better than the mead drunk in Odin’s halls, only seven and a half kreuzers the quart.  Munich has so much, that it, of course, contains much that can be criticised.  The long, wide Ludwig Strasse is a street of palaces,—­a street built up by the old king, and regarded by him with great pride.  But all the buildings are in the Romanesque style,—­a repetition of one another to a monotonous degree:  only at the lower end are there any shops or shop-windows, and a more dreary promenade need not be imagined.  It has neither shade nor fountains; and on a hot day you can see how the sun would pour into it, and blind the passers.  But few ever walk there at any time.  A street that leads nowhere, and has no gay windows, does not attract.  Toward the lower end, in the Odeon Platz, is the equestrian statue of Ludwig, a royally commanding figure, with a page on either side.  The street is closed (so that it flows off on either side into streets of handsome shops) by the Feldherrnhalle, Hall of the Generals, an imitation of the beautiful Loggia dei Lanzi, at Florence, that as yet contains only two statues, which seem lost in it.  Here at noon, with parade of infantry, comes a military band to play for half an hour; and there are always plenty of idlers to listen to them.  In the high arcade a colony of doves is domesticated; and I like to watch them circling about and wheeling round the spires of the over-decorated Theatine church opposite, and perching on the heads of the statues on the facade.

The royal palace, near by, is a huddle of buildings and courts, that I think nobody can describe or understand, built at different times and in imitation of many styles.  The front, toward the Hof Garden, a grassless square of small trees, with open arcades on two sides for shops, and partially decorated with frescoes of landscapes and historical subjects, is “a building of festive halls,” a facade eight hundred feet long, in the revived Italian style, and with a fine Ionic porch.  The color is the royal, dirty yellow.

On the Max Joseph Platz, which has a bronze statue of King Max, a seated figure, and some elaborate bas-reliefs, is another front of the palace, the Konigsbau, an imitation, not fully carried out, of the Pitti Palace, at Florence.  Between these is the old Residenz, adorned with fountain groups and statues in bronze.  On another side are the church and theater of the Residenz.  The interior of this court chapel is dazzling in appearance:  the pillars are, I think, imitation of variegated marble; the sides are imitation of the same; the vaulting is covered with rich frescoes on gold ground.  The whole effect is rich, but it is not at all sacred.  Indeed, there is no church in Munich, except the old cathedral, the Frauenkirche, with its high Gothic arches, stained windows, and dusty old carvings, that gives one at all the sort of feeling that it is supposed a church should give.  The court chapel interior is boastingly said to resemble St. Mark’s, in Venice.