He who will see the churches of Naples must rise betimes, since ancient custom closes them, for unknown reasons, from eleven o'clock till four. Some say the poor man will get nothing for his pains. But this is not so. It is indeed impossible that sacred buildings in a city so old and famous as Naples should be devoid of interest. Here, as elsewhere, they reflect the strong emotions of the citizens, their sorrows and their aspirations; and though it is true that many a once noble building has been daubed over with unmeaning ornament so freely that one has trouble in discovering the pure taste with which the builders wrought it, yet there is not a church in Naples which does not set vibrating some chord either of beauty or poignant association. No man can know the city or its people if he neglect the churches. Past and present jostle each other perpetually there, and the effigies of kings look down with fine grave eyes on the filthy peasant women lifting up their children to kiss the feet of the dead Christ. I have paused in the Strada Quercia opposite the Gesù Nuovo, once, as I have said before, the palace of the San Severini, Princes of Salerno. It was on that fine doorway that the Prince affixed the inscription "An old sparrow does not enter into the cage," as he stood beneath his ancestral gateway listening for the mule team with its jingling bells which gave him his chance of life and safety. Perhaps he waited under this old archway till he saw the beasts with high-piled burdens coming up this way from the Mercato, and slipped in silently among the swarthy knaves who led them, and so forth from the city and away to France, where he hatched a scheme of vengeance which destroyed the King, his enemy. The tinkling of those mule-bells as they went up this narrow street in the night fell on no ears that heeded them, yet in truth and earnest they were ringing the dirge of the House of Aragon. The interior of the Gesù is among those which arouse the citizens of Naples to enthusiasm. It is not without grandeur, but over-decorated, and on my mind it leaves but little sense of pleasure. But from this archway where I stand I can see a church far older and more interesting, one indeed which yields in fame to none in Naples. It is Santa Chiara, whose dignified façade rears itself with twin towers in the cool shadow of the courtyard, a name famous not only in the ecclesiastical history of Naples, but in the legal also, having given its title to a great body of state councillors which once met here. It was the royal chapel of King Robert the Wise, third among the monarchs of his house, and the only prosperous one out of the whole number, though even he was pursued by sorrows, and by remorse too, unless the constant suspicions of the centuries have erred.