de Montespan's niece. This lady was beautiful and charming at sixty. The Duke also had an abundance of admirers in Paris, in Fresnes, in Rome. Coulanges says that Rome était aimable, The economical making little verses. De peu de couverts. duke chiefly occupied himself in He wrote thus to the Abbé Chaulieu : Par St. Cyr, Fût venu, etc. His appreciation of other poets may be measured by his patronage of Pradon in opposition to Racine. There is not much to tell of such a man. His sweet daughter, known as Api," married the Duc d'Estrées and died young. Nevers had one son, who became the father of Louis Jules Bourbon-ManciniMazarini, Duc de Nivernais, a well-known figure in the political and literary world of the first half of the eighteenth century; with him ended the line of Mancini. The d'Estrées family became extinct in 1762. It is a wonderful story, that of the nieces of Mazarin ; they were wives and mothers of Stuarts, of Estes, of Carignans, of Vendômes, of Contis, of Colonnas, of Bouillons. Yet, as we have seen, the houses of Stuart Este, Vendôme, Conti, Bouillon, and Soissons, were shortly afterwards extinct. To whom can we point now as a descendant of Mancini, the hatter? The lesson of Mazarin's life is obvious. F. BAYFORD HARRISON. T Norwich HE city of gardens and churches, as it has been aptly called, which in past centuries ranked as the second in importance and commerce in the British Isles, is not the resort of many Americans or tourists. Yet nowhere do the old world, with its quaint and stirring memories, and the new world, full of commercial activity and realism, mingle so curiously as in Norwich. It is at once the city of ancient kings and of prosperous modern factories; the city of knights and ladies and mediæval romance, as well as the home of conventional twentiethcentury families. For in the midst of the grind and clatter of an improved electric tram system lies a labyrinth of historic streets, deviating into dingy cobbled courtyards and dark alleys, and offering a sufficient variety of relics of the past to fill the portfolios of an antiquary. In the midst, I repeat; for while many of these interesting thoroughfares are quiet and deserted except perchance by the ghosts of their former residents, some are a network of tram lines, and the poorer inhabitants of one of the oldest streets in Norwich have only to stretch out their hands from the bulging gables to touch the shoulders of the outside passengers, as with a jolt and a clatter they rush by the scene of many a courtly drama and early struggle, when the Christ to whose saving presence fortysix churches were afterwards dedicated was unhonoured and unknown. But in those dark days the now modernised, trampierced King Street, with its quaint yards and alleys running down to the river, was but a tract of land known as Conisford, dotted with mud huts. After the horrors of a Pagan invasion it advanced into some sort of settled dwelling-place for man and beast, and at length became the resort of merchants, princes, Jews, and courtly dignitaries; in fact, it was the patrician quarter of the second city in the kingdom. Up and down these winding shallow staircases moved ladies in ruffs and farthingales, or the towering headdresses of Edward III.'s reign, waving farewell to gallant cavaliers from the latticed windows which now overlook some hideous. factory or brewery. In and out of these alleys and grey stone churches princes and priests came and went, intent on strife and persecution. Here in the grand old "musick-house," with its enormous latticed windows and heavy beams, dwelt Sir John Paston, known to all readers of the famous Paston letters; and later, Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer, lived under the same roof. He passed away; and the house was turned to other uses. It echoed with the minstrelsy of the city waits, the clinking of tankards, and the clattering of post and coach horses, for from then till now it has been a "house for beer." What glories of romance, what whispers of escape, what plots, what songs, what bitter cries and ribald jokes would fill our ears if the old walls about us could speak; for not only this long narrow street but a mile or so around us is historic ground, laden with an air of romance which should suffice to inspire a hundred novels. We have for the moment cast off the hurrying habit of modern life and forgotten the insistent needs of work and action, and are waiting, as it were, on the threshold of centuries for knights and ladies, trafficking Jews, and ministering friars. If we are imaginative enough we can follow in fancy the gay dresses, the alert Hebraic faces, and the black and white garments of "the religious down the highways and byways of the city; but few of the passers-by can enlighten us about them. To those who hasten past we are merely visitors, lucky "donothings," who can indulge the strange and unremunerative fancy of gazing at old red bricks, or prowling about some of the grey decaying churches which crowd together in the ancient streets. Hereditary influences and distinctions are difficult to abandon, and Norwich, even in these days of higher criticism and agnosticism, retains her ecclesiastical and even her Puritanical reputation. She was the refuge of persecuted dissenters from Roman Catholicism during bitter years of strife and the witness of the Lollards' martyrdom; small wonder then that the church, and clergy, and parochial enterprises play no small part in her comfortable, prosaic life to-day. It is only a few steps from the top of King Street to Tombland-the wide cobbled space before the two Cathedral gateways-and then once again we stand in the old world, on the burial place of thousands who fell under the devastating visitation of the Black Death. This is the scene, too, of the celebrated Monk's Fair on the Feast of Trinity, when the citizens and country folk |