"Death stepp'd tacitly and took them Where men never see the sun"; but the Death of the _danse macabre_ at Hexham, as perhaps always, so far from stepping tacitly, is a grinning and grisly contortionist, writhing his repulsive anatomy into a dozen different shapes of derision. The victims alone have dignity, whilst Death is merely the jester or buffoon. Different, indeed, is the shadowy Death of the Apocrypha--"And I saw, and behold, a pale horse, and he that sat upon him, his name was Death"; or the mysterious, shrouded, blood-sprinkled figure (to couple small images with great) of the Masque of the Red Death. These particular paintings at Lucerne are necessarily small in scale, and perhaps not very legible in the dim recesses of the roof. I have never had the patience to decipher them, nor do they perhaps conform, since so unusually late in date, to the stereotyped convention of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. [Illustration: THE GUTSCH, FROM LUCERNE.] There is just one other spot in Lucerne which ought not to be neglected, and this, though sufficiently far removed from Death in his merely antic aspect--from the Death of "graves, of worms, and epitaphs"--has also to do with Death in his nobler guise, for it is the monument of the twenty-six Swiss officers, and seven hundred and sixty Swiss Guards, who fell in defending the Tuileries and their King on August 10, 1792. "Honour to you, brave men," writes Carlyle, "honourable pity, through long times! Not martyrs were ye; and yet almost more. He was no King of yours, this Louis; and he forsook you like a King of shreds and patches; ye were but sold to him for some poor sixpence a day; yet would ye work for your wages, keep your plighted word. The work now was to die; and ye did it." The monument is fitly a lion, and was hewn out by Lukas Ahorn of Constance, after the model of Thorwaldsen, from a face of living rock; he is pierced by a broken lance and already at point of death, one paw hangs forward limp and helpless, but the other, with claws outstretched, still clutches and guards the Bourbon lilies--a monument of faithfulness to death. The attitude and face of the great lion, "having the most touching expression of broken strength, subdued pain, and courageous self-surrender," are both very grandly conceived. It is sad indeed that the rock itself, though the sculpture is boarded up to protect it from winter frosts, is badly cracked in more than one direction. Closely adjacent to this fine monument, and certainly worth a visit, is the very curious Gletscher Garten, with its wonderful "pot-holes," or "glacier-mills," some of which retain their "mill-stones" still in situ. IV