-when Valentinian II. was slain, and the old rites
were restored, at the end of the fourth century; but it was a mere flash
in the pan. The tendencies of the times were too strong to be resisted,
and presently the new creed rode down the old. Then it was that Vienne
was called Vienne the Holy--because, while losing nothing of her
splendours temporal, she gained great store of splendours spiritual:
whereof the culmination was that famous Council, at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, which crushed the Templars and gave over their
possessions to the Crown. While the Council deliberated, Philip the Fair
"watched his case," as the lawyers would put it, from the village of
Sainte-Colombe--across the river--where he was quartered with his court
in the convent of the Cordeliers; and in Sainte-Colombe, the next year,
he built the tower that was to safeguard the royal domains against the
aggressions of the Archbishops: whose too-notorious holiness was making
them overbold.

And nowadays Vienne is a mean little town; a withered kernel in the
shell of its former grandeur; a mere sousprefecture; scarcely more than
a manufacturing suburb of Lyons. In the tower of Philip the Fair are a
cheap restaurant, and a factory of macaroni, and a carpenter-shop. It is
enough to make the spirits of the Roman emperors indignant and the bones
of the Archbishops rattle dismally in their graves. No longer either
strong, or beautiful, or holy, they call it Vienne the Patriotic, now. A
city must be something, of course--and patriotism is an attribute that
may be had for the claiming, in these days.

But the saving grace of poetry, at least of the love of poetry, still
abides in Vienne: as was proved in a manner mightily tickling to our
self-complacency as we swept past the town. Taking the place of the
stone bridge that was built in Roman times--and so well built that it
was kept in service almost down to our own day--a suspension bridge here
spans the stream: and the poets and the poet-lovers of Vienne were all
a-swarm upon it, their heads and shoulders rising in an animated
crenellation above its rail, in waiting for our galley to go by. While
we still were a hundred yards away up stream there was a bustling
movement among them; and then a bouquet, swinging at the end of a light
line, was lowered away swiftly--the bright flowers flashing in the
sunlight as they swayed and twirled. Our brethren had calculated to a
nicety where our boat would p