Moreover, the cities of La Rochelle, La Charité, Montauban, and Cognac were to be held by the Princes of Béarn and Condé for two years as securities for the performance of the terms. The treaty was signed at St Germain en Laye in August 1570, and was again called a halting peace, and indeed it was the third within seven years.

The Huguenots took advantage of it to hold a great synod at La Rochelle, at which were present the two young Princes of Béarn and Condé, and Count Louis of Nassau. It condemned the doctrines of Socini, and very impertinently admonished the English Bishops to examine and condemn Les Tables de Couzain, namely, a work of Richard Cosin, Dean of Arches, called Ecclesiæ Anglicana Politicia in Tabulas Digesta, which told strongly against Presbyterianism. It also gave the Queen of Navarre a very wholesome admonition against selling magistracies and other offices, according to the frequent custom in France. The Count de Montgommeri took refuge in England, and Catherine desired to have him either put to death, or delivered up, but Elizabeth would do neither, saying she had no mind to become hangman to the King of France, and Montgommeri became a pirate, with Jersey for his chief haven.

This year of peace was also a year of marriages. Good man as Maximilian II. was, papal dispensations prevented him from having any scruple in giving his eldest daughter Anna, to her uncle, Philip II. as his fourth wife. The second, Elizabeth, was promised to Charles IX., and his first gentleman of the bedchamber, Albert de Gondi, Count of Retz, was sent to Spain to fetch the bride. She was one of the softest and gentlest of beings, and Brantôme says that the pair were like fire and water together, for the young king was violent in all his ways, full of strange oaths and furious gestures, passionately fond of the chase, active and clever in all manly sports, and even able to forge armour and weapons.

The queen also wished her next son, Henri, Duke of Anjou, to wed Queen Elizabeth, and a long and very ridiculous courtship on his behalf was carried on by La Mothe Fenélon. Elizabeth highly enjoyed his civilities, and was the more ready to keep him in play that this negociation was the best security against the French taking up the cause of Mary of Scotland. So she exchanged letters and presents, chattered a great deal in a foolish unguarded way to the ambassador, and took him with her in great state to dine with Sir Thomas Gresham on the occasion of the opening of the Royal Exchange.

Marguerite, the king's youngest sister, and Henri, Duke of Guise, were deeply in love with each other, but the Queen Mother and the King had made up their minds that Marguerite should marry the Prince of Béarn. When she persisted in her promises to Guise, Charles flew into a passionate state of fury, and even talked of having Guise assassinated at a hunting party. He was overheard, Guise was told, and his mother persuaded him to espouse in great haste, Catherine

of Cleves, widow of the Prince de Porcienz-by way of saving his life; but it was always an unhappy, unloving marriage.

At the same time, Guise's sister married Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Montpensier, head of a fiercely Roman Catholic branch of the house of Bourbon; and Marie of Cleves, a Huguenot lady of the same family as Madame de Guise, was given to the young Prince of Condé.

The most curious wedding was, however, that of the Admiral. He had been three years a widower, when he received a letter from a great lady in Savoy, Jacqueline de Montbel, daughter of the Count d'Entrémont, a widow of thirty years old, who wrote that she desired to marry a hero and a saint, and that hero and saint was the Admiral! Coligny, who was sixty-two, replied that he was only a tomb; but the lady persisted. The Duke of Savoy, who disapproved of his vassals marrying out of his duchy, was not likely to make an exception in favour of the Huguenot leader; but Jacqueline was not to be daunted. She escaped secretly from her castle, went down the Rhone in a boat, rode from Lyons-escorted by five friends, and arrived at La Rochelle. Coligny's friends overpowered his reluctance in consideration of her lands, but the Duke of Savoy confiscated them all, and she actually brought the Admiral no treasure but the diamond buttons of the cloth of silver robe she wore at her wedding.

This marriage came soon after the tidings of the death of Coligny's brother, the married Cardinal, Odet de Chatillon, who was living at the Savoy palace under the protection of Queen Elizabeth. His death was, of course, attributed to poison, and his body was placed in a sarcophagus against the wall of Canterbury Cathedral, waiting to be carried to the family vault at Chatillon, and there it still waits.

THE BASILICA.

BY THE REV. R. ST. JOHN TYRWHITT.

PART XI.

THE SCRIPTURAL CYCLES OF THE CATACOMBS.

THE observation was made at the end of our last paper that it might have been better if our subjects of Church decoration and symbolism had been limited to the Biblical Cycle of the Catacombs, or at all events to subjects taken from Holy Scripture. Between historical painting of events, and symbolic illustrations of doctrine; between representations of facts symbolic in themselves, and imaginations of the foretold things that shall be-it seems that such limitation would not be too narrow for the invention of the painter, and that the mind of the worshipper would not be in danger of wandering too far from Church service, or the theme of his meditations, in the congregation or by himself.

Such restrictions are, I suppose, out of the question, like all other control in these days; but it ought to be always remembered that they were the natural and general order of the first four centuries. Almost, all the rules we know of, as the XXXVI. Canon of the Council of Elvira, were restrictive and against pictures rather than in their favour; and by Eusebius's confiscation of the embroidered curtain at Anablatha, it seems that no distinction was made at first between coloured work on the flat and relieved sculpture. The Church by no means invented decoration of any kind; but had to adopt it as a matter of course, because nine rooms out of ten in a dwelling-house were decorated; and every tomb in a cemetery had its device, even in the Hebrew Catacombs, where one would have thought both poverty and religion would interpose prohibition. To the Pauline or Gentile school of converts the graven or painted images were nothing at all-insignificant in the literal sense. It was not worth while to notice whether walls were painted or not, when such grave things were heard and done within them. I have been many years interested in Church decoration; but it has always seemed to me that those have best learned to appreciate it who remember that it is, after all, a matter of no great importance by comparison.

The transition from purely ornamental to significant decoration was easily made, of course; but it seems to have been made gradually, and in some instances it scarcely took place at all. For example, the chapel or cubiculum of the Ocean, in the Callixtine Catacomb, takes its name from a large head of Oceanus, which is in the centre of the vaulted roof. The remainder of the roof and the walls are done in rectilinear panels, with subjects in their centres, exactly as in Pompeii, and the date of the whole lies somewhere in the third century; but the subjects are all birds (the peacock in particular), flowers, and flying genii. And in another chamber (De Rossi, vol. i. pl. x.) Orpheus occupies the centre above, surrounded by dishevelled genii, and supported by eight oblong panels, two Shepherds, two female Orantes, and four genii bearing crooks. The walls are covered with arabesques, combining doves, peacocks, and other birds, with dolphins and sea

monsters.

But one unmistakably Christian emblem seems to decide the character of all. The Lamb is there, bearing the Bread; and the whole may be an instance of highly symbolic painting, with implied meanings, sacred to the brethren, though apparently trivial to the unbeliever. It may have been done in dubious or threatening times, when Pagan workmen had to be employed, or had access to the cemetery. Perhaps the two best examples of very early ceilings, with full Christian ornament, are in the tomb of S. Domitilla, in her cemetery on the Appian Way, and the chapel of S. Callistus, in his Catacomb. Both have a special characteristic of the earliest ornament, in being partly adorned with landscapes, and entirely subject to decorative system. And, as

Canon Venables observes, both possess the cheerfulness of the first Christian work. The artists may not have been Christians, but have executed subjects to order in their own style; at all events, allowing for some roughness or hurry of execution, the work is like other second, or even first-century work. 'There are the same geometrical divisions of the roof,' says the Dean of Chichester,† 'the same general arrangement of the subjects, the same fabulous animals, the same graceful curves, the same foliage, fruit, flowers, and birds; only that the Good Shepherd, or some Scriptural subject, as Jonah or Daniel, or some unmistakable symbol, is there to clear up doubt as to the religion of the art before us.'

But it is clear that in the earliest time Christian people looked on death with great happiness, as the door of eternal life. It must be remembered that persecution was, at all events, sporadic, and that in Rome, it was often, and for long intervals, intermitted. There seems to have been no regular or imperial cruelty from Nero's onslaught to the time of Decius; so that although pictures of martyrdoms certainly existed, there were probably very few before the latter half of the third century. The earliest pictures yet speak of a time when Christians put ornamentation in its proper order of importance -that is to say, as a subsidiary means of expressing what they had in their hearts. It was intended that all should dwell on the same ideas and beliefs, held with joy and faith in substance, and prior to formulation; and that men of all nations and language meeting in a cemetery service should know, and confess to each other without words, the Lord as their common Shepherd and the Vine of their souls. The days of extreme affliction from without, and of yet more searching inner dissension, were not yet come; nor was the time arrived which Eusebius (Eccl. Hist., bk. viii., ch. i.) so touchingly acknowledges to have preceded the greater and fiery trials of his days when by reason of our full liberty, our ways (rà кa0' ïμaç) fell into vanity and sloth, some envying and reviling others in different ways; when we ourselves were almost at open war with each other, if occasion took place; and prelates were falling foul of prelates, and people all in faction against people; and unspeakable hypocrisy and disguise of thought were drawing towards extreme of wickedness.'

The first and second centuries were the spring sowing of the word; and for a time it grew with little molestation, before the burning of summer and thick undergrowth of thorns.

The cemetery of S. Domitilla is Professor Mommsen's chosen example of an ancient burial chamber, and of the development of such a tomb into a regular Catacomb; either by extension underground,

* 'Fresco,' Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, p. 693. + Letters from Rome, p. 250. Northcote, p. 190.

Prudentius (A.D. circ. 405) of S. Cassianus: Historiam pictura refert; and of the martyrdom of S. Hippolytus, Peristeph. Hymn ix. v. 5 and xi. v. 141 sq.

or by other subterranean additions till a Catacomb was established. Its primitive name is after its foundress or first occupant, and it has since borne the names of SS. Petronilla, Nereus, and Achilles. S. Domitilla was, in fact, a granddaughter of Vespasian; a heathen inscription, says Professor Mommsen, mentions her as the donor of the crypt; and dated tiles found in it belong to the times of Hadrian and Ant. Pius, 117–161. The former date is just twenty-one years from the death of Domitian in 96; and the year 95 is marked in Christian history as the year of the death of a Christian Consul. This was T. Flavius Clemens, Domitilla's husband. He may have been a man of too retiring or indolent a character; but I should not think, after Juvenal's fourth Satire about the 'last Flavius' (Domitian), that any kinsinan of his was far wrong in keeping out of the way while he could. At all events, Flavius Clemens undoubtedly underwent death for atheism and Jewish superstition, as a Christian martyr (Suetonius, Domit : 15, and Dion Cassius, lxvii. 14); and was contemptuously spoken of by Heathendom in consequence. By some he is thought to be Clemens Romanus himself, Bishop of Rome at the end of the first century, and it is quite possible. He died, and Domitilla was sent, after his death, to the island of Ponza, where she probably ended her days in exile. The rooms she occupied there, says Mommsen, were still visited by pious persons in the fourth century. Nereus and Achilles are said to have been members of her household. Her own tomb, or the special crypt of her bestowing, still retains some of its original frescoes, of which the Vine on the ceiling is the most beautiful; but Noah and Daniel, the Dove and the Good Shepherd, with an Agape, are on the walls, and are pronounced by the Professor to be of the same date. The Chapel of Callixtus has Daniel (he stands between the lions in both instances), with Moses and the Rock, Lazarus, and David with his sling.

A proper list of the Old and New Testament Cycles of pictures in the Catacombs is given by Canon Venables (Smith's Dict. Fresco, p. 700), and he refers to a most learned and comprehensive book, by the Danish Bishop, Dr. Fred. Münter, called Sinnbilder u. Kunstvorstellungen der alten Christen, Altona, 1825, which I beg to commend to all who can find it in libraries.