Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/120

112 began the restoration in 1515, and in 1554, on the day of St. Benedict, the first mass was again said. This restoration is celebrated by an inscription over the entrance of the convent choir:

In twenty years after this, the Reformation came, and the abbey was secularised, with the exception of a short interval of time, during which the Benedictine order, under the protection of Imperialist troops, occupied it in the Thirty Years’ war. From this time the abbey fell into decay. The original and restored portions are easily distinguished by the architecture, the former being Byzantine, the latter Gothic proper. The handsome tower still standing belongs to the restored part. In a gallery half way up it, were formerly placed statues of Conrad II. and St. Benedict, and in the back-ground of this gallery are still found traces of a sculpture in relief, representing the principal façade of the convent. The top of the tower was decorated with figures of the four Evangelists, with their attributes. To the east of the church is a well 300 feet deep, mostly hewn out of the rock. Lying on the side of a high hill in the valley below, we see that castle of Hartenburg which worked all the mischief to the Convent of Limburg, and which, in just retribution, a similar fate of ruin has overtaken. We seem to pass from a temple of taste, intellect, learning, and piety, to some den of human wild beasts, in passing from the convent to the castle. The exterior remains of the castle cover a labyrinth of vaults, dungeons, and subterranean passages, whose gloom and coldness even now makes the visitor shudder. We can well conceive the impression they produced on the captive in those days, when, except in those oases of civilisation the religious establishments and the free towns, the whole of Germany was a wilderness of howling savages, whose multitudinous and internecine feuds and wars find their best counterpart in geological illustrations of the saurian period, where each gigantic lizard is making a lunge and a snap at its neighbour. The castle is said to have been built by Count Frederick of Saarbrücken, greatly to the disgust of the Abbot of Limburg. A permanent feud arose between the castle and the abbey. It is said that the Count once invited the Abbot to the castle with a view to the peaceable arrangement of the difference; an invitation which the good man unsuspectingly accepted. The Abbot was splendidly entertained, but as even under the influence of the Count’s good cheer, he dermurred to surrendering the rights of the convent, the Count’s men-at-arms suddenly appeared in the hall, and conducted the Abbot to the dungeon. The retainers of Limburg came and attacked the castle to rescue their master, but found it too strong for them, and the Abbot was at length fain to yield. He was then released, followed by the laughter of the castle servants. The event is supposed to be commemorated by a monk’s head turned in the direction of Limburg, carved on the tower which leads to the hall of the knights.

This castle reached its greatest pitch of splendour at the end of the sixteenth century under Emich XI., who beautified its grounds and gardens as a residence for his wife, a Countess Palatine of Zweibrücken. It was little harmed by the Thirty Years’ war, and in 1674 it resisted the troops of Turenne, but in the Orleans war, 1689, the French managed to set it on fire and blow up the tower under which the powder magazine lay. After the removal of the residence of the counts of Leiningen to the town of Dürkheim, the castle began to fall into decay, till part of it was again restored about 1780, by the Count Charles William, who was created a prince. Its final ruin was consummated in consequence of the following event. At the beginning of the French Revolution, a burgher of Dürkheim had shot a tame stag in the park of Hartenburg, and was imprisoned for a long time in the dungeon by the Prussians, who occupied these parts in 1793. When the French appeared in Dürkheim, the inhabitants instigated them to set the castle on fire, and all its historic memorials perished. Another of the lions of Dürkheim is the so-called Heidenmauer, a vast fortification inclosing the square top of a mountain to the north-west of the town. Antiquaries seem pretty well agreed that this work, in spite of some Roman coins having been found there, was prior not only to the Romans, but even to the Germans. Passing the ditch we arrive at a strange rock in the wood, to which has been given the name of Teufelstein, or Stone of the Devil. It is a block about twelve feet high, and has the appearance of having been artificially brought to the spot. On the top is a depression, with three channels running from it, and it can be ascended from a kind of natural stair at the back. It was not improbably a Celtic altar, either brought to the spot by unknown means, or fashioned out of a block originally there. But its present name is owing to the mediæval legend.

When the Abbey of Limburg was being built, the Devil appeared in the disguise of a travelling mechanic, and asked what was the destination of the work. He was told, probably from the fact of his disguise being insufficient to conceal the tail, that the building was to be a tavern. Thinking thus that it was intended to forward his own views, he worked at it with a will, and owing to his agency it was soon completed. Then, and not till then, he took a general view of the whole, and to his great disgust, saw the stately abbey before him. He went off in dudgeon, and bent on vengeance took up an enormous rock on a neighbouring height with the intention of hurling it against the abbey. But the stone in his hands became miraculously as soft as butter, and slipped out of his fingers. Then he sat down on the rock and gave a huge howl of despair. The guides still show the depression on the top to testify to the fact of his having sat there, and marks on the sides which were made by his fingers. At all events, the Devil appears on this occasion to have become, in cricketing phrase, butter-fingered, and to have let drop the stone. Perhaps the rudiments of a grand moral lie under the numerous legends which represent the Author of Evil as so often outwitted. The knave is, after all, but a round-about fool. G. C. S.