nkling lights, and listening to the distant chants of the priests
performing the service, when a sweet chorus from the organ-loft broke
out behind me overhead, and I turned round. My friend the drum-major
ecclesiastic was down upon me in a moment. "Do not turn your back to the
altar during divine service," says he, in very intelligible English. I
take the rebuke, and turn a soft right-about face, and listen awhile
as the service continues. See it I cannot, nor the altar and its
ministrants. We are separated from these by a great screen and closed
gates of iron, through which the lamps glitter and the chant comes by
gusts only. Seeing a score of children trotting down a side aisle,
I think I may follow them. I am tired of looking at that hideous old
pulpit with its grotesque monsters and decorations. I slip off to the
side aisle; but my friend the drum-major is instantly after me--almost
I thought he was going to lay hands on me. "You mustn't go there," says
he; "you mustn't disturb the service." I was moving as quietly as might
be, and ten paces off there were twenty children kicking and clattering
at their ease. I point them out to the Swiss. "They come to pray," says
he. "YOU don't come to pray, you--" "When I come to pay," says I, "I
am welcome," and with this withering sarcasm, I walk out of church in
a huff. I don't envy the feelings of that beadle after receiving point
blank such a stroke of wit.

LEO BELGICUS.--Perhaps you will say after this I am a prejudiced critic.
I see the pictures in the cathedral fuming under the rudeness of that
beadle, or at the lawful hours and prices, pestered by a swarm of shabby
touters, who come behind me chattering in bad English, and who would
have me see the sights through their mean, greedy eyes. Better see
Rubens any where than in a church. At the Academy, for example, where
you may study him at your leisure. But at church?--I would as soon ask
Alexandre Dumas for a sermon. Either would paint you a martyrdom very
fiercely and picturesquely--writhing muscles, flaming coals, scowling
captains and executioners, swarming groups, and light, shade, color most
dexterously brilliant or dark; but in Rubens I am admiring the performer
rather than the piece. With what astonishing rapidity he travels over
his canvas; how tellingly the cool lights and warm shadows are made to
contrast and relieve each other; how that blazing, blowsy penitent in
yellow satin and glittering hair carries down