most beautiful park scenery, with splendid trees, rich pastures, rare plants and flowers, gardens and vineyards, with the addition of grand mountains towering on your left hand, and the ever-varying sea upon your right. This is the favorite retreat of the Russian aristocracy, and their countryhouses line the coast. At Alupka is the great semi-Gothic palace of Prince Woronzoff, built by an English architect, and looking like an English house. At Orianda is the large square house of the Grand Duke Constantine, with Greek porticos and frescoed court-yards, after the fashion of Pompeii. At Livadia is the little villa of the Empress herself, with its cluster of attendant houses.

We had to wait an hour for horses at our last stage, and the clock was striking twelve as we drove up to the Grand Hotel de Russie at Yalta, not sorry to come to the end of our eleven hours' jolting. The hotel itself is large, pretentious, and expensive; but those who do not like roughing it had better make Yalta their headquarters in the Crimea. In itself it is a beautiful place. The mountains here retire somewhat from the sea, and the bright little town lies basking in an amphitheatre of hills, where it would seem no wind could ever disturb the unruffled calm. The steamer touches here twice a week in each direction, to Sevastopol and Odessa, and to Theodosia and Kertch. The coast eastward as far as Alushta, where there is a new hotel, is of the same character as that between Alupka and Yalta. At Alushta itself are towers and walls dating from the time of Justinian, rising amidst the flat roofs of Tartar houses and the green balconies of Russian villas. Kertch and Theodosia are both colonies of Miletus. Kertch is the Panticapeum of Strabo, once the capital of Mithridates, and now one of the chief arsenals of Russia. Theodosia is the Kaffa of the middle ages, the centre of Genoese ascendancy. Many pretty excursions may be made in the immediate neighborhood of Yalta. You may follow up the course of the little river of the Uchan Su, through an evernarrowing valley, till you find your path blocked by frowning precipices

Where, like a downward smoke the slender Along the cliff to fall, and pause, and fall,

stream,

doth seem."

Or you may wander about amongst the Tartar villages behind the town, and study the quaint dresses and customs of the people. Several of the villas, too, are worth seeing; and should you be fortunate enough to fall in with Prince Troubetchkoy at Massandra, you will find that the mere fact of being an Englishman is a sufficient passport to a truly hospitable house. Prince Troubetchkoy, as brother-in-law of Prince Woronzoff, keeps the key of the cellars where the Crimean wine from the estates of Alupka and Margaratch is stored-and these alone are well worthy of a visit.

My

I have

It was after some days at Yalta that I determined to cross the hills and visit the old Tartar capital of Baktchiserai. only medium of communication was a Jew commissionnaire, who, as he told me, could speak every language except English, and generally acted as an interpreter for me in French. Him I charged to make all necessary arrangements for me in the way of horses and provisions, only taking care to name my own price. Accordingly next morning, having sent my heavy baggage back to Sevastopol, I started about five o'clock in company with a Tartar guide and two horses, one for him and one for me. My guide was a typical specimen of the Tartar inhabitants of the south coast, who have for the most part lost, by mixture with Western races, the high cheek-bones and flat noses which one generally connects with the Mongolian races. seen such faces in some of the villages; but for the most part the Tartars of the south coast are a fine, tall, intelligentlooking set of men. The long loose trousers which they wear, fastened high up round their waist with a sash of many folds, makes them perhaps look even taller than they really are. My companion in this case was courteous and agreeable; and although he could speak nothing but Russian or Tartar, we managed occasionally to exchange ideas. The ascent in the early morning through the wooded hills at the back of Yalta was delightful; and when one reached the summit, the view back upon the sheltered valley and the houses sparkling on the beach, was like saying farewell to the country of the lotus-eaters, and turning again to the realities of life. One step further, and we were over the crest. Yalta and its seduc

tive beauties were lost to sight, and there before us lay a typical bird's-eye view of the Crimea a bleak, reddish table-land, seamed and scored with deep valleys with precipitous cliffs. Only one mountain rose to any conspicuous height-the Tchatchyr Dag-upon our right. Vegetation was scanty, for the trees lie hidden in the valleys. The air, as it blew upon us from the northern steppes, seemed sharp and icy; but it soon got hot enough as we began to descend again into the long and dusty valley along which our route lay most of the day.

It was not till towards evening that we came in sight of the palace domes and minarets of Baktchiserai, lying in a hollow, with strange-shaped, fantastic rocks hanging over it. After some little difficulty I was put up at the house of a Mussulman, with beard and turban fit for the Prophet himself. I had expected to sleep at the old Tartar palace; but the commandant told me that this now required a special order from the Government, so I resigned my self to my turbaned friend, who from the first had seemed to regard me as his own. He showed me a tidy little room with a divan at one end, partitioned off from the balcony over the street, and approached only by a staircase on the outside. On the whole, I was less persecuted there at night than might have been expected; and my turbaned host and his Tartar boy, though utterly unable to speak a word of any language but Russian or Tartar, seemed at once to divine my wants and haste to supply them.

Baktchiserai is a purely oriental town, Tartar in race, in customs, and religion. The inhabitants have more of the genuine Nogai Tartar of the steppes in them than those of the coast, and are smaller and less prepossessing in appearance. The

turban is at least as common there as at Constantinople. The women do not content themselves with the thin coquettish gauze which with the Turkish ladies forms an apology for a veil, but wrap themselves closely round with linen clothes, till nothing is visible but two specks of eyes. The houses are low, and all built of wood; the shops are open along their whole front to the street, and the owner sits smoking, cross-legged on the counter.

There are dancing dervishes there, like those in Pera; and, before I went to sleep that night, I heard the voice of the muez

zin from the minaret calling the faithful to prayer.

The next morning I decided to start for the old Jewish town of Tchufootkalè ; and, after some bargaining with the natives, I set off alone on a sturdy little horse with a Tartar saddle. This consists merely of two peaks before and behind, between which you wedge yourself in, as best you can, letting your legs hang straight down on each side. However they are not nearly so uncomfortable as they look, and I should think it would be almost impossible to tumble out of them. Having learnt the general direction, I struck out my own way across country, which is not so easy as it sounds; for the plateau on which the deserted town stands is cut up by very deep and wide ravines, with, as a rule, perfectly precipitous sides. By a happy instinct, I managed to avoid all these except one, where, by dismounting, I was able to lead my horse down a break in the cliff, and in about an hour's time I reached the old town. It is a most curious place, once a fortress of great strength, enclosed on three sides by inaccessible ravines, and on the fourth by a double row of walls and towers, now deserted and silent as the grave. Grass grows in the ill-paved streets-the houses are for the most part unroofed—one or two animals straying disconsolately about the ruins were the only sign of life. It was formerly, even so lately as thirty years ago, inhabited by the sect of the Karaim Jews, and their synagogue is one of the few buildings still kept in repair. This sect-which claims for itself to date from the time of the Captivity, and professes to acknowledge only the literal text of Scripture without the addition of the Talmud-though scattered about in various parts of Poland and Russia, has its headquarters in the Crimea, and from time immemorial has held to the Rock of Tchufootkalè. Outside the walls is their burial-place, in the so-called valley of Jehoshaphat, a wilderness of tombstones shaded by fine trees-a quiet, beautiful spot, where the devout Karaites still love to be laid in peace beside their forefathers. I noticed several new tombstones in the valley; there was a man at work upon the boundary-wall, and the whole place was evidently cared for with affectionate solicitude. I spent some hours in wandering about the old town, and going

down steps which seemed to lead into deserted cellars. The rock on which the town stands, like other rocks in the Crimea, is hollowed out into dwelling-places, some of them of considerable size, with arrangements like stone divans running round them. They have windows cut in the precipitous face of the rock, and from these you could look down and see the long trains of Tartar carts slowly creaking along the road which winds round the base of the cliff. This was the main road by which the Russians kept up their communications with the interior during the Crimean war, when Baktchiserai was used as a hospital and depot. Tartar carts, it may be mentioned, are made entirely of wood; no iron is used in any part of the construction, and the wheels are always guiltless of grease. The creaking which naturally follows they are very proud of, having no wish, as they say, to steal upon people unawares, like a thief in the night. Such self-justification reminds one rather of the old proverb, Qui s'excuse s'accuse." To return, however, to these caves: they are a very curious feature to be met with all over the Crimea; the heights of Inkerman-the true heights, that is, on the north of the Tchernaya river-and the rock-fortresses of Tchufootkalè and Mangoupkalè, being particularly full of them. As to the question of their origin, nothing certain is known, and it seems generally disposed of by assigning them to the semi-mythical troglodytes or the early Christians, who seem always held responsible for any rockdwellings in whatever part of the world they may be found. In any case, they must have been the result of great time and labor and no little skill. I left the city by a postern-gate, descended a steep path cut in the rock, and then went down one of the valleys at the foot of the cliff. In this lies the Uspenskoi Monastir, or Monastery of the Assumption, where the monks have appropriated the old rockdwellings, and converted them into cells and chapels. One of the monks showed me over the place. I made my luncheon in its shady garden, and then went on down the valley to Baktchiserai. The rest of the day was spent in seeing the palace, which has been restored since the war, and is now kept up in the style and condition in which it was fitted up by one

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXIII., No. 2

of the last Khans of Crim Tartary for the reception of Catherine II. The courtyard has been turned into a public garden. On one side lies the suite of state apartments, on the other the mosque and graveyard of the old Tartar Khans. The buildings are low, quaint, and irregular in shape, fitted up in truly oriental style with rich divans, thick carpets, and brilliant coloring. In one court is the "Fountain of Tears," celebrated in verse by Pushkin, an imitation of which may be seen in the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. In another the fountain of the ill-starred Maria Potoski, the Christian love of one of the Mussulman Khans. There is the bed in which Catherine slept, and the marble basin in which she bathed. Beyond is the private garden of the harem, and in the centre a high pagoda-like tower, from the latticed windows of which the ladies of the establishment, unseen themselves, could see everything which went on in the main courtyard.

Altogether it is a most curious, fascinating place, almost unique in Europe as a specimen of a purely oriental palace; there is certainly nothing in the Seraglio at Constantinople at all to be compared to it. The other sights-the graveyard of the Khans, the mausoleum with the long coffins surmounted by the fez of the buried prince, the mosque with its two singularly beautiful minarets-have none of them any special interest, beyond the fact that they bring to one's mind a race and a power which is passing away from Europe, and that they remind one that even in Holy Russia herself it is still found necessary to tolerate other forms of religion than the orthodox faith. This it is which makes Baktchiserai so interesting at the present day. The horse-tail standards. which flew in the van of every invasion from the banks of the Don to the streets. of Moscow, and from Belgrade up to the walls of Vienna, have been tamed by the all-absorbing power of Russia; but the ghost of their former greatness still lingers about the scene of their departed glory within reach almost of those ruined arsenals that mark the last great effort of the same power against their fellow-soldiers of the Crescent.

There is a railway now from Baktchiserai to Sevastopol, and I took my place. that night tired and sleepy, to wake up.

15

and have a silent row by midnight down the whole length of the deserted harbor, and to muse over the fate which has made the country of the trustiest sons of Islam

the base and centre of operations against the head of the Mohammedan religion.— Blackwood's Magazine.

BAYREUTH does not count amongst the important cities of the Fatherland, or even of Bavaria, but it is not without attractions to the tourist who wishes to break his journey from the Rhine to Munich and Vienna, or to enjoy a day of contemplative repose in a small German country town. Situated on the bank of the river Main, which takes its rise not far off, and surrounded by lovely hills and silents forests, its scenery cannot but satisfy the most fastidious lover of nature. Neither are historical and literary reminiscences entirely absent. It was here that Frederica Wilhelmina, the favorite sister of Frederick the Great, and the fellow sufferer of his youth, wrote her celebrated a simple Margravine de Baireuth,' although the daughter of a mighty king, and once all but the brideelect of the heir to the British throne. A large theatre, at present strangely out of place in the little town, and several palaces and beautiful parks in the neighborhood of Bayreuth, speak of the splendor-now long departed-of a miniature German Court of the eighteenth century. One of these parks has been described in his fanciful manner by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, and on its outskirts lies the Rollwenzel, a little inn where the poet used to rest from his walks, and in a room of which (still shown to the visitor) he composed several of his tales.

To these associations with literature Bayreuth will add a new and important one in August next year, when the longexpected performance of Wagner's musicodramatic tetralogy, the Ring of the Niblung, will become a reality. Whatever the success of that gigantic enterprise may be, it may be predicted with oracular certainty that it will mark an epoch in the history of music, and that, in any case, a mighty structure will be destroyed on the occasion. Whether this structure be the rotten fabric of antiquated formalism or the airy castle of a wild belief in the 'fu

Wag

ture,' the event alone can show. ner's theories, no less than his creative faculty, will then be put to a decisive test, and his claims at least to a place in the foremost ranks of composers will, to a great extent, depend upon the result.

To convey some idea to the reader of Wagner's latest work, of its genesis, and of the circumstances preceding, and, after many delays, leading to, its imminent performance, is the aim of this article. But for this purpose we must not regard the tetralogy as a solitary effort; it is, in a manner, the consistent outgrowth and ultimate result of an artistic career, remarkable alike for its disappointments and triumphs, and perhaps unequalled in the indomitable energy which conquered success by disdaining to sue for it.

Wagner, it ought to be said first of all, is a man of action. He does not resemble so many artists and poets of Germany who pass their lives in the obscurity of small towns, and whose career may be summed up in one sentence, 'He was born, took a wife, and died.' Wagner, too, has passed periods of his life in almost absolute seclusion; but he soon sallied forth with the fruits of his solitary labor to hold them up to the applause or (it might be, and indeed has been) to the hisses of European capitals; and when the time has come for his life to be fully described, with its hopes and passions, its struggles and triumphs, it will read like a romance.

The keynote of his being has been indicated by Wagner himself. The Norne (the Pandora of Northern mythology),' he says, ' approached my cradle and laid on it the never-contented spirit which always seeks the new. The consequences of this fatal gift soon began to appear. His plans from the very beginning show signs of a colossal energy. In 1824, at the age of eleven, the boy was sketching some enormous drama, a 'compound,' he says,

of Hamlet and King Lear. The design was grand in the extreme. Forty-two

people died in the course of the piece, and I was obliged to let most of them reappear as ghosts in the last acts for want of living characters.' The result, of course, was nonsense, but nonsense on a large scale, reminding one of the toys of a young Titan, somewhat difficult to handle for mortals of ordinary growth. The mode in which Wagner acquired the knowledge of his own art bears the same stamp of superabundant energy. By chance he witnessed a performance of Beethoven's music to Goethe's tragedy of Egmont, and at once his competitive zeal was roused. Without any theoretical knowledge he set to work at a musical accompaniment to his own tragedy. Failure was, under such circumstances, a matter of course; but failure, deserved or undeserved, has never deterred Wagner from renewed effort. In this case it served to bring home to him the old useful doctrine of ars vera res severa. For a little while he went on writing orchestral works on a gigantic scale, and full of unutterable as piration, one of which, an overture, the climax of his eccentricities, as Wagner himself has called it, was performed at Leipsic, but received with mortifying, though deserved, ridicule by the audience. But the ingredient of common sense which is invariably mingled with true artistic gift soon taught the young enthusiast the futility of his untutored attempts. He took to studying seriously the theoretic foundation of his art; trying to make up by application for the time lost. It must, however, be confessed that even these earnest pursuits were somewhat impulsive, not to say spasmodic in character. His teachers, with the sole exception of the excellent Cantor Weinlig, found him idle or obstinate, a circumstance which it would be unjust to put down altogether to their pedantry or want of zeal. Wagner's nature is essentially autodidactic; he loved to find out by his own hard-gained experience what it would have been easier to accept on the authority of others. Only the works of the great dead he accepted as his guides. He studied Gluck and Mozart, Bach and Beethoven. His passionate admiration for the genius of the last-mentioned master (is described by one of Wagner's early friends as 'a regular furor Teutonicus.' The writer says:

I am doubtful whether there ever has been a young musician more familiar with the

works of Beethoven than Wagner at eighteen. He possessed most of the master's overtures and large instrumental scores, in copies made with his own hand. He went to bed with the sonatas and rose with the quartets. He sang the songs and whistled the concerti, for with pianoforte-playing he could not get on very well.

Thus the young man's soul ripened for his future task. But in the meantime his worldly prospects were of anything but a brilliant kind. Being without means of subsistence, he had to accept the conductorship of a small opera in the North of Germany-a narrow sphere of action for one rife with hopes and projects of the widest scope. The years spent by Wagner in the manner alluded to were full of misery and disappointment. The first charm of the unconventional ease of theatrical life soon gave way to a feeling akin to despair at being compelled to associate with a class of persons void of artistic aspirations, and therefore utterly uncongenial to his own nature. His official duties were, moreover, of the most tedious kind. The German stage was at that time flooded with the shallowest productions of the French and Italian schools, and these Wagner had to rehearse over and over again with singers of the third or fourth. order, whose incompetence was equalled only by their wilfulness and arrogance. Nevertheless, Wagner tried to do his duty. We have the testimony of one of his employers with regard to his unceasing efforts to work with the scanty materials at his disposal. Presence of mind as a conductor, and the skilful handling of theatric effects, which so favorably distinguishes him from most German dramatists, may be mentioned as the two beneficial results of this dreariest period of Wagner's career. An ill-advised marriage with an actress contracted about this time added to the difficulties of his situation. Wagner's tastes and habits were those of artistic refinement and luxury, and his small earnings were wholly insufficient to meet the demands of a mismanaged, extravagant household.

The situation at last became intolerable; an effort had to be made, and the manner in which it was made is again highly characteristic of Wagner's nature. The change of fortune was to be at once sudden and brilliant; a great work was to be created, and on its eventual performance at one of the great theatres of Eu