“A box where sweets compacted lie;”

and I felt, as I left his little chapel and the parsonage which he rebuilt as a free-will offering, as a pilgrim might feel who had just left the holy places at Jerusalem.

Among the places which I saw in my first visit was Longford Castle, the seat of the Earl of Radnor.  I remembered the curious triangular building, constructed with reference to the doctrine of the Trinity, as churches are built in the form of the cross.  I remembered how the omnipresent spire of the great cathedral, three miles away, looked down upon the grounds about the building as if it had been their next-door neighbor.  I had not forgotten the two celebrated Claudes, Morning and Evening.  My eyes were drawn to the first of these two pictures when I was here before; now they turned naturally to the landscape with the setting sun.  I have read my St. Ruskin with due reverence, but I have never given up my allegiance to Claude Lorraine.  But of all the fine paintings at Longford Castle, no one so much impressed me at my recent visit as the portrait of Erasmus by Hans Holbein.  This is one of those pictures which help to make the Old World worth a voyage across the Atlantic.  Portraits of Erasmus are not uncommon; every scholar would know him if he met him in the other world with the look he wore on earth.  All the etchings and their copies give a characteristic presentation of the spiritual precursor of Luther, who pricked the false image with his rapier which the sturdy monk slashed with his broadsword.  What a face it is which Hans Holbein has handed down to us in this wonderful portrait at Longford Castle!  How dry it is with scholastic labor, how keen with shrewd scepticism, how worldly-wise, how conscious of its owner’s wide-awake sagacity!  Erasmus and Rabelais,—­Nature used up all her arrows for their quivers, and had to wait a hundred years and more before she could find shafts enough for the outfit of Voltaire, leaner and keener than Erasmus, and almost as free in his language as the audacious creator of Gargantua and Pantagruel.

I have not generally given descriptions of the curious objects which I saw in the great houses and museums which I visited.  There is, however, a work of art at Longford Castle so remarkable that I must speak of it.  I was so much struck by the enormous amount of skilful ingenuity and exquisite workmanship bestowed upon it that I looked up its history, which I found in the “Beauties of England and Wales.”  This is what is there said of the wonderful steel chair:  “It was made by Thomas Rukers at the city of Augsburgh, in the year 1575, and consists of more than 130 compartments, all occupied by groups of figures representing a succession of events in the annals of the Roman Empire, from the landing of AEneas to the reign of Rodolphus the Second.”  It looks as if a life had gone into the making of it, as a pair or two of eyes go to the working of the bridal veil of an empress.