Nuremberg--with its long, narrow, winding, involved streets, its precipitous ascents and descents, its completely gothic physiognomy--is by far the strangest old city I ever beheld; it has retained in every part the aspect of the middle ages. No two houses resemble each other; yet, differing in form, in colour, in height, in ornament, all have a family likeness; and with their peaked and carved gabels, and projecting central balconies, and painted fronts, stand up in a row, like so many tall, gaunt, stately old maids, with the toques and stomachers of the last century. In the upper part of the town, we find here and there a new house, built, or rebuilt, in a more modern fashion; and even a gay modern theatre, and an unfinished modern church; but these, instead of being embellishments, look ill-favoured and mean, like patches of new cloth on a rich old brocade. Age is here, but it does not suggest the idea of dilapidation or decay, rather of something which has been put under a glass-case, and preserved with care from all extraneous influences. The buildings are so ancient, the fashions of society so antiquated, the people so penetrated with veneration for themselves and their city, that in the few days I spent there, I began to feel quite old too--my mind was _wrinkled up_, as it were, with a reverence for the past. I wondered that people condescended to talk of any event more recent than the thirty years' war, and the defence of Gustavus Adolphus;[21] and all names of modern date, even of greatest mark, were forgotten in the fame of Albert Durer, Hans Sachs, and Peter Vischer: the trio of worthies, which, in the estimation or imagination of the Nurembergers, still live with the freshness of a yesterday's remembrance, and leave no room for the heroes of to-day. My enthusiasm for Albert Durer was all ready prepared, and warm as even the Nurembergers could desire; but I confess, that of that renowned cobbler and meister-singer, Hans Sachs, I knew little but what I had learnt from the pretty comedy bearing his name, which I had seen at Manheim; and of the illustrious Peter Vischer I could only remember that I had seen, in the academy at Munich, certain casts from his figures, which had particularly struck me. Yet to visit Nuremberg without some previous knowledge of these luminaries of the middle ages, is to lose much of that pleasure of association, without which the eye wearies of the singular, and the mind becomes satiated with change.