Tulln, seldom visited by the traveller on account of the superior attractions of Vienna, has more than one relic which repays careful examination and study. Adjoining the much-restored church stands a small decagonal Byzantine baptistery, with circular interior not over twenty feet in diameter. An Early Gothic doorway grafted on the original edifice, and a complete restoration of the whole as late as 1873, have not essentially altered its general appearance, for the naïve irregularity of its plan, the noble proportion of its sides, and the purity of its characteristic ornamentation survive all the eccentricities of ancient as well as modern tinkering. The great church has been distorted by successive additions and rebuildings during several centuries, and little remains of its original Byzantine dignity. As for the little dull town itself, the name, familiar to us in poetry as well as in the recorded events of history, is the chief proof to the casual observer that it is one of the oldest, and was for a long time one of the most important, towns on the Danube. Many of the houses are probably built out of material quarried from the ancient palaces and fine old mediæval churches which, ruined in the severe sieges and conflagrations, had yielded up the treasures of stone and marble which the wanton destruction of Roman temples had contributed to their erection. Little of the spirit of that ancient architecture has survived the change and destruction, for modern Tulln is as plain and meagre of invention as stone and mortar can make it. Of all the great Roman buildings which once stood here, a single broken altar, moss-grown and neglected, in the shadow of the baptistery, remains as a monument to the early splendor of this provincial town. By what chance it has escaped the stone-mason’s hammer no one can tell. Perhaps the delicate lines of its mouldings and the grace of its shattered figures may have secured it a place among the paraphernalia of the Byzantine church, and thus it had lost its identity as a relic of heathen worship. Would that the mute eloquence of its pathetic beauty had the voice of a brazen trumpet to denounce the modern restorer, whose touch is death to the charms of all art!