Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/89

Rh light stone lantern-tower, with the ridiculous terrace surrounding the building ,and with the hideous finials with which the modern German architects have disfigured the grand old building!

At Cologne we took the steamer and ran up the river. A far more sensible proceeding than that of these days, when tourists take the railway, and consequently can see only one side of the view. The river craft was comfortable, the meals were plentiful, the Pisporter was a sound an unadulterated wine, and married remarkably well with Knaster tobacco, smoked in long pipes with painted china bowls. The crowd, too, was good-tempered, and seemed to enjoy its holiday. Bonn, somehow or other, always managed to show at least one very pretty girl, with blue porcelain eyes and gingerbread-coloured hair. Then came the Castle Crag of Drachenfels and the charming Siebengebirge, which in those days were not spoiled by factory chimneys. We landed at Mainz, and from there drove over to the old Fontes Mattiace, called in modern day Wiesbaden.

It has been said that to enjoy the Rhine one must go to it from England, not the other way from Switzerland; and travellers' opinions are very much divided about it, some considering it extremely grand, and others simply pretty. I was curious to see what its effect upon me would be after visiting the four quarters of the globe; so, in May, 1872, I dropped down the river from Basle to the mouth. The southern and the northern two-thirds were uninteresting, but I found the middle as pretty as ever, and, in fact, I enjoyed the beautiful and interesting river more than when I had seen it as a boy.

I found the middle, beginning at Bingen, charming. Bishop Hatto's Tower had become a cockneyfied affair, and the castles, banks, and islands were disagreeably suggestive of Richmond Hill. But Drachenfels, Nonnenswerth, and Rolandseck, were charming, and I quite felt the truth of the saying, that this is one of the paradises of Germany. At Düsseldorf the river became old and ugly, and so continued till Rotterdam.

Wiesbaden in those days was intensely "Germany and ordinary," as Horace Walpole says. It was a kind of Teutonic Margate, with a chic of its own. In the days before railways, this was the case with all these "Baths," where people either went to play, or to get rid of what the Germans call cine sehr schöne corpulenz, a corporation acquired by stuffing food of three kinds, salt, sour, or greasy, during nine or ten months of the year. It was impossible to mistake princely Baden-Baden and its glorious Black Forest, for invalid Kissingen or for Homberg, which combined mineral waters and