helps and comforts of Scripture should be set aside for the aggrandisement of a powerful craft! Much had been done here by architects and masons since our former visit. Much money had been collected and expended, and many men are still at work on this vast building; and yet the stranger’s eye discovers from without only small changes to have been effected during the past ten years. Here and there, as he walks around it, a white pillar, or a less discoloured arch, tells him where the workmen have been busy; but the several portions of the work are so massive, and proceed of necessity so slowly, that the progress of years produces advances which seem almost microscopic when compared with the whole. While they satisfy us, however, that generations will still come and go, leaving the growing cathedral still immature, yet they give us at the same time a far grander idea both of the vastness of the work which has already been accomplished, and of the original greatness of the conception, which so many centuries have failed to embody fully in durable stone. At eleven in the forenoon we had already crossed the Rhine to Deutz, had taken our seats on the Winden railway, and at the blowing of the official trumpet had begun to move along the rich flat land which here borders the Rhine. The walls and river-face of Cologne, now spread out before us, carried back our musings to the times of the historical grandeur of this ancient city. During the period of Roman greatness, emperors of the world were born and proclaimed within its walls; centuries later, a king of the Franks was chosen in Cologne; and still six hundred and fifty years later began that bright period of its commercial prosperity, which for three hundred years made it the most flourishing city of Northern Europe. Thirty thousand fighting men, from among its own armed citizens, could then march defiantly from its gates. Its whole population is now but ninety thousand, and its trade comparatively trifling. But the cause of this decline interests an Englishman more than the actual decay. Commerce, it is true, had begun in the seventeenth century to find new channels, and this circumstance, had the city been merely abandoned to supineness, might have gradually affected its prosperity. But it was positive measures of repression that forced it to decline. It fell under the dominion of the Roman priesthood, which first drove out the Jews, afterwards banished the weavers, and finally, in 1618, expelled the Protestants. From this time, for nearly two hundred years, it became a nest of monks and beggars, till at the Revolution the French changed everything, drove out the two thousand five hundred city clergy, seized their revenues, and turned to other uses their two hundred religious buildings. Hand over Liverpool or London to the same clerical dominion, and the same depressing consequences would most certainly follow.