TAKES HIS DOCTOR'S DEGREE IN HOLLAND 275 



have expected in the South. But even more experienced 

 travellers than he have never seen any town so odd, so 

 quaint, so Gothic, so riotous in invention, so queerly 

 coloured, and so charming. Red-brick buildings, shiny 

 black-brick arcades, and Gothic frontages, all crying 

 out ' No dinner for you to-night ; so long as twilight 

 lasts come out and look at me ' ; Renaissance and florid 

 architecture of all styles retiring only to await their turn 

 for attention. Other Gothic towns, even Bremen, subside 

 into commonplace before the luxuriance of Liibeck. The 

 shields on the buildings are gilt, coloured, and slung 

 sideways anything for extravagant effect. Here are 

 spires of all sizes, and gable-forms from great A to little z, 

 and as the city lies on a slope they can all be seen together, 

 like the diagram at the South Kensington Museum of the 

 typical buildings of the world and their relative heights, 

 from Cheops' pyramid down to a drinking-fountain. 

 The drapers in this part of Germany have a way of 

 arranging the basement cellar window beneath the shop 

 in the same manner as the shop above. In Denmark the 

 cellar window is also dressed, but it usually belongs to a 

 different establishment, and generally vends vegetables 

 or beer. 



The best way to see Liibeck is to do as Linnaeus 

 most probably did, as he was a great one for hill-climb- 

 ing that is, to take an evening walk up a forest-covered 

 hill called Chimborasso, just outside the town, and so 

 gain a concrete idea of the place, that one may the 

 better relish afterwards the full and bewildering effect of 



T 2 



