"From the devil we come, and to the devil we go," said Richard. In spite
of the luckless restoration to which their effigies have been
submitted--and no sight makes us long more ardently that the "Let it
alone" of Lord Melbourne had wandered from politics into archaeology--it
is still easy to read in the faces of the two King-Counts the secret of
their policy and their fall. That of Henry II. is clearly a portrait.
Nothing could be less ideal than the narrow brow, the large prosaic
eyes, the coarse full cheeks, the sensual dogged jaw, that combine
somehow into a face far higher than its separate details, and which is
marked by a certain sense of power and command. No countenance could be
in stronger contrast with his son's, and yet in both there is the same
look of repulsive isolation from men. Richard's is a face of cultivation
and refinement, but there is a strange severity in the small delicate
mouth and in the compact brow of the lion-hearted king which realizes
the verdict of his day. To an historical student one glance at these
faces as they lie here beneath the vault raised by their ancestor, the
fifth Count Fulc, tells more than pages of chronicles; but Fontevraud is
far from being of interest to historians alone. In its architectural
detail, in its Romanesque work, and in its strangely beautiful
cinque-cento revival of the Romanesque, in its cloister and Glastonbury
kitchen, it is a grand study for the artist or the archaeologist; but
these are merits which it shares with other French minsters. To an
English visitor it will ever find its chief attraction in the Tombs of
the Kings.

CAPRI.

I.

We can hardly wonder at the love of artists for Capri, for of all the
winter resorts of the South Capri is beyond question the most beautiful.
Physically indeed it is little more than a block of limestone which has
been broken off by some natural convulsion from the promontory of
Sorrento, and changed by the strait of blue water which now parts it
from the mainland into the first of a chain of islands which stretch
across the Bay of Naples. But the same forces which severed it from the
continent have given a grandeur and variety to its scenery which
contrast in a strangely picturesque way with the narrowness of its
bounds. There are few coast-lines which can rival in sublimity the
coast-line around Capri; the cliff wall of sheer rock broken only twice
by little dips which serve as landing-places for the island,