When we pass the threshold of the two buildings we see that their fate in modern times has been very different. St. Sabinus has suffered much as Bitonto has suffered. The upper part of the building is hidden in just the same fashion, and ugly tricks have been played with the columns and their capitals. St. Nicolas, on the other hand, has been left comparatively alone. The chief changes which it has undergone must have taken place not very long after the original building. The original plan was much the same as that of Bitonto--three arches from columns, a massive pier, then three more arches from columns. But this arrangement was disturbed at an early time by throwing three spanning arches across the nave. The effect is so striking that we can hardly regret their presence; but it is perfectly easy to see that they are insertions, and, though they are essentially of the same style, yet they differ in their details from the original columns. These last all approach more or less to the Corinthian type; in the under-church the patterns are more varied. Here are still the wonder-working relics of St. Nicolas, and the balsam or "manna" which flows from them may still be drunk. In the _duomo_ the under-church has been restored out of all ancient character, but it still keeps an ancient Byzantine picture. As so often happens, the secondary church of Bari altogether surpassed the mother church in historic fame and local honour. To ourselves the fact in its history which comes home most nearly is that it was here that Urban held his Council, here that Anselm, to the satisfaction of all Western minds, refuted the creed of the East, here that he interceded with the Pontiff and the assembled fathers on behalf of the king who had wronged him. Here too it was that the keen eye of English Eadmer spied out on the shoulders of the Archbishop of Beneventum the splendid cope which is no longer to be seen at Beneventum. Such little touches in those days often brought the ends of the world together in a way to which, in our days of more general intercourse, nothing answers. When French was the polite language alike at Dunfermline and at Jerusalem, when the Latin-speaking clerk was at home in any corner of the West, when the few men of the West who had learned Greek spoke it so that a Greek could understand them, when men passed to and fro between the civil services of England and Sicily, communication between distant parts of Europe was in some ways easier than it is now. Bari, one of the chief places for setting out on crusades, must for a long time have been a thoroughly cosmopolitan city. We do feel that the ends of the earth have combined to meet at Bari, when we find the place of honour in the church of St. Nicolas at Bari held by a princess of Bari, who became Queen of the greatest Slavonic kingdom. Emblematic figures of Bari and Poland support the tomb of Queen Bona, and her epitaph describes her husband Sigismund, the first of that name, as not