mere symbols, but all is symbol, and it is hard not to be a sentimental traveller when you wander in such haunts of Destiny as these.

6

If anything could grind us young again it would be the wheels of a postchaise,' Leigh Hunt declared; and they were wheels of fortune and gaiety often. If I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a postchaise with a pretty woman,' said Dr. Johnson-even he! And these are sighs often breathed in connection with touringcars to-day; they are the renewed and perpetuated utterance of the romantic and the vagabondish in us-and a plague on it that they so seldom are realised. Even virtue like Dr. Johnson's may flex and budge when it thinks of how the Marquis of Steyne went driving briskly in a postchaise' up to the 'Aquila d'Oro' at Mantua, say, with two or three pretty women, and three or four fourgons in his train filled with old paintings, marqueterie panels, majolica, and shocked wooden saints of the fifteenth century, the spoils of his purse; all bought (the pretty women also) 'for a song.'

The romance of the road is unending, but I think' mine ease at mine inn' is best found beside some more silent highway, to wit a gently moving river that conveys the babble and bubble of the wake and the plash of the oar to your ear. What rest and quiet you may have of an evening at your inn by the river's edge! The moon streams silver upon the Moselle, the Garonne, or the Indre for you, and the stars peep down at themselves in that long mirror tremblingly, as if shy to see or be seen. O gleams more brilliant than any diamond studs of any munching Herr from Prussia! 0 nap and napery of moonlit water more white than any damask! O silence of twilight (that pretty woman), under the kiss of night! Dining late, upon the terrace, in the open, the candles near you make darker the immediate bank of the Loire, the Adige, or the Ebro; and out of that rapt gloom strolling voices reach you, half heard, half mystical, as if from couples who wander in dream.

Give me the inn by the water, some stream almost as placid as a lake: I was born too late in the annals of travel-why could not I have voyaged in the coche or the bateau de plaisance upon French rivers, or have drawled along in the passenger-barge upon the Brenta; stepping ashore in the moonrise, at the twinkling, welcoming inn? But something of that delight of eighteenthcentury travel one may capture still. If, making a pilgrimage to

the shrines of the wonderful wooden saints that Tilman Remenschneider sculptured four hundred years ago, you come to Wurzburg, do not put up at the ' Deutscher Kaiser' or other modern inn near the dusty, noisy railway-station, but deep in the old city rather, at the 'Schwan' on the silent quay beside the flowing Main. For a certain empty grandeur dignifies this old hostel; its past still communes with it, and the hill, the river, and the statued old bridge give beauty and nobility to its situation; from the other bank the shadow of the Marienberg softly falls, a triangle of umber laced by amber ripples; a great peony of sunset blossoms presently, beyond the bridge; and skiffs drift past, and soon all is black and yellow, for the moon comes up to grin at you, and the voices of moonstruck lovers strolling are softly gay; so that there you rest, in a peace that passeth all understanding, not needing to be explained or justified, but simply to be enjoyed. Somehow, too, one always dines well at an inn beside a river; as you do at Cochem, or, for another German instance, at Wertheim on the Main.

It must be a simple, old-fashioned hostel, however; not a place for rich junkers and Yankees, but such as the postchaise and the milord knew. The fool hath said in his heart I will stop at the "Terminus" or the "Grand" or the "Splendid "only'; it is not the termini, but the intermediate, the seldom visited places that can charm you best-it is not the grand nor the splendid, but the homely, that can give you joy. And I protest that the sundry inns zum Kopf,'Hôtel de Bordeaux,' and 'Schwan' for instance-are khans on the wandering route which no standard of refinement or comfort need shun.

AN OLD HERBALIST: FUCHS OF THE FUCHSIA.

BY JOHN VAUGHAN, M.A.,

CANON RESIDENTIARY OF WINCHESTER.

ONE morning, a few years since, I was working in the botanical department of the British Museum of Natural History at South Kensington, when the Keeper of Botany came to where I was sitting and whispered that when I was disengaged he had an old book to show me. Crossing over into one of the window recesses, he produced a folio copy of the first edition of Fuchs' History of Plants,' published at Basle in the year 1542. It was, he said, the most magnificent herbal ever published, and placing it on a desk he proceeded to show me the exquisite woodcuts. I had never seen the work before, and was naturally delighted with its beauty and interest. Mr. Britten suggested that I should write an article on the herbal, to which, he said, adequate justice had never been done.

It was difficult, however, to write an appreciation of a folio volume of nine hundred pages, enriched with over five hundred fullpage illustrations, without some further opportunity for careful study, and at the time such opportunity did not present itself. The book is a very scarce one, and probably but few copies are to be found in England; and the suggestion, therefore, of the Keeper of Botany for the time fell to the ground.

It came to pass, however, that some years later I was appointed to a Residentiary Canonry at Winchester, and ferreting one winter's afternoon in the dark recesses of the Cathedral library, which contains little beyond ponderous works of theology, I discovered, to my amazement and delight, a copy of the same herbal which had excited my admiration in the British Museum some years before. How it came to be in such strange and solemn company there was nothing to show. But there it was, resting against an obsolete tome of seventeenth-century theology-Fuchs' botanical masterpiece, De Historia Stirpium, the first edition, in folio, written in Latin, and containing the same magnificent illustrations. The recollection of Mr. James Britten's suggestion at once came back to me; and lifting up the heavy volume, bound in the original oak boards, I carried it across the Close to my Prebendal quarters.

AN OLD HERBALIST: FUCHS OF THE FUCHSIA. 223

No wonder that Mr. Britten praised it. The work is, beyond question, the most splendid, by reason of its superb and original woodcuts, of the many herbals which appeared in Germany, in England, in Switzerland, in Italy, in the Low Countries, during the revival of learning in the sixteenth century.

Leonhard Fuchs was born at Membdingen, in Bavaria, in the year 1501, and at the early age of thirteen is said to have graduated as B.A. at the University of Erfurt. He afterwards studied at Ingolstadt, where he took a doctor's degree, and eventually became Professor of Medicine in the University. At Ingolstadt he fell under the influence of Luther's writings, and became, like so many of the Renaissance botanists, a stout Protestant. During a terrible epidemic which swept over Germany in 1529 he became widely known for his successful treatment of the disease; and it is interesting to remember that this fame even extended to our shores, for later on there was published in London a little work of instructions against the plague, entitled 'A worthy practise of the moste learned Phisition Maister Leonerd Fuchsius, Doctor in Phisicke, most necessary in this needfull tyme of our visitation, for the comforte of all good and faythfull people, both olde and yonge, both for the sicke and for them that woulde avoyde the daunger of contagion.' In the year 1535 he was appointed to a professorship at the University of Tübingen, which had just adopted the Reformed Faith, and there he remained until his death in 1566. In spite of his untiring activity, alike as a professor and as a physician, he yet found time for botanical studies; and in 1542 his great Latin Herbal appeared from the well-known printing-press of Michael Isingrin of Basle. It was followed in the succeeding year by a German edition, also in folio, and with the same woodcuts, over 500 in number, of which about 400 are illustrations of indigenous German plants and 100 of foreign species. Shortly afterwards, in 1545, Isingrin printed an octavo edition of the Herbal with the same illustrations on a reduced scale. It is interesting to call to mind that, in honour of our botanist, the name of Fuchsia has been given to one of the handsomest of garden flowers.

No doubt it is the beauty of the illustrations that has rendered Fuchs' Herbal so justly famous. Indeed their superlative merit is generally recognised. 'Fuchs' splendid figures,' says Professor Von Sachs, remain unsurpassed.' They represent,' writes Mrs. Agnes Arber in her fascinating book on 'Herbals,'' the high-water mark of that type of botanical drawing which seeks to express

the individual character and habit of each species.' While not remarkable for their minute scientific accuracy, such as we should expect to find in modern drawings-though even in this respect they often reach a high botanical level- they probably surpass in artistic quality,' says Mr. Miall, any long series of botanical figures that has ever been published.' It is this artistic quality that renders the figures so attractive. Even such a prosaic species as the wild cabbage is seen to possess an intrinsic beauty. Sometimes, as in the case of the hop, the bryony, and the wild pea, the figures are arranged in a highly decorative manner so as to cover the entire folio sheet. Other woodcuts, such as those of the herbparis, the two hellebores, the wild peony, the cyperus or galingale, the wild garlic, and the yellow horned-poppy, are of quite extraordinary beauty. It is interesting, too, to know not only the names but the appearance of the artists who produced such excellent work. Very rarely is such information vouchsafed in works of this kind, but Leonhard Fuchs was clearly not unmindful of the assistance he had received from those who produced the illustrations. In addition to a fine full-paged portrait of the author, represented as holding a spray of veronica in his hand, which forms the frontispiece, there will be found at the end of the volume the named portraits of his three assistants-viz. the two draughtsmen, Heinricus Fullmauret and Albertus Mayer-who are seen copying a plant from nature, and the engraver, Vitus Rudolphus Specklin or Speckle, who cut the wood-blocks. In the preface to his Herbal Fuchs thus generously acknowledges their labours: Vitus Rudolphus Specklin, by far the best engraver of Strasburg, has admirably copied the wonderful industry of the draughtsmen, and has with such excellent craft expressed in his engraving the features of each drawing that he seems to have contended with the draughtsmen for glory and victory.'

The drawings are in outline only, with little or no shading, the work of colouring being left, as was mostly the case in similar works of this period, to the owner of the volume. The beauty of the woodcuts was at once recognised, and succeeding publishers were not slow to make use of them. Indeed the illustrations of the octavo edition were freely pirated, and became familiar in England through their reproduction in the Herball' of Dr. Turner, Dean of Wells, the Father of English Botany,' and also in Lyte's 'Niewe Herball,' published a few years later.

But while the main glory of Fuchs' Herbal is to be found in