In France I always reckon that a town of less than fifty thousand people is likely to retain untouched its medieval character, or at any rate its atmosphere of the sixteenth or seventeenth century. Exceptions of course occur--I make one in the case of Aix-en-Provence, which seems to have been mostly rebuilt, though in very delightful fashion, as late as the eighteenth century. Mere modern watering-place growths, again, like Biarritz or Vichy, must also be eliminated--they had obviously no character to lose. But apart from towns like these, my general proposition will be acceptable, I think, to anyone who dwells, on the one hand, on places like Beauvais, or Cambrai, or Chartres, or, on the other, on bigger cities, such as Angers, or Orleans, or Tours. In Switzerland, which appears to me, much more than France, to be bursting with prosperity and redundant population, it seems on the whole harder to suggest a general rule. Neuchâtel, for example, with twenty-five thousand people, is virtually a handsome modern town. Berne, on the contrary, with a population of over ninety thousand, preserves its ancient aspect in remarkable degree. Luckily Lucerne, in a middle position, with a population of forty-one-odd thousand souls, leans more to the example of Berne than to that of Neuchâtel or Lausanne. The immediate front to the lake, of course, just as at Geneva, is blatantly new of mode--it is largely, in fact, a conglomerate of palatial modern hotels. But immediately behind--immediately you quit the broad sweep of quays and promenades, and plunge almost anywhere at random into the network of ancient streets--you are able to forget at once, whether you linger in the shadow of the fifteenth-century church of the Bare-foot Friars (the Barfüsserkirche, or Church of the Franciscans); or bask in open sunlight on the narrow quay, at the back of the sixteenth-century Rathhaus, by the side of the green and rushing Reuss; or climb the steep pitch of hill behind the town to the line of ancient walls, with their long line of stately watch-towers (like those at Fribourg and Morat) that stretches with so much picturesque dignity across the base of the blunt angle--so blunt as scarcely to be an angle at all--between the river and the lake; or seek shelter from the glare in the long galleries of the two old wooden bridges, with their mellow red-tiled roofs, that manage to survive across the river--plunge, I repeat, where you will into this labyrinth of old thoroughfares, with their plastered and painted house-fronts, and gaily splashing fountains in courts and corners, and broad eaves that project far across the street, and you are reminded at every step, not of the modern tourist resort of world-wide reputation that is visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year, but of that old Lucerne that grew up gradually round the Benedictine monastery that was founded here in the year 750, or thereabouts, by the abbots of Murbach in Alsace, and that gets its