the altar, bed, and stove, as likewise a picture and a stamp of this devout prince. The church of the Franciscan convent is famous for the monument of the Emperor Maximilian the First, which stands in the midst of it. It was erected to him by his grandson Ferdinand the First, who probably looked upon this emperor as the founder of the Austrian greatness. For, as by his own marriage he annexed the Low Countries to the house of Austria, so, by matching his son to Joan of Arragon, he settled on his posterity the kingdom of Spain, and, by the marriage of his grandson, Ferdinand, got into his family the kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary. This monument is only honorary, for the ashes of the emperor lie elsewhere, On the top of it is a brazen figure of Maximilian on his knees, and on the sides of it a beautiful base-relief representing the actions of this prince. His whole history is digested into twenty-four square pannels of sculpture in base-relief. The subject of two of them is his confederacy with Henry the Eighth, and the wars they made together upon France. On each side of this monument is a row of very noble brazen statues much bigger than the life, most of them representing such as were some way or other related to Maximilian. Among the rest is one that the fathers of the convent tell us represents King Arthur, the old British king. But what relation had that Arthur to Maximilian? I do not question, therefore, but it was designed for Prince Arthur, elder brother of Henry the Eighth, who had espoused Catharine, sister of Maximilian, whose divorce afterwards gave occasion to such signal revolutions in England. This church was built by Ferdinand the First. One sees in it a kind of offer at modern architecture, but, at the same time, that the architect has shown his dislike of the Gothic manner, one may see very well that in that age they were not, at least in this country, arrived at the knowledge of the true way. The portal, for example, consists of a composite order unknown to the ancients s;

the ornaments, indeed, are taken from them, but so put together, that you see the volutas of the Ionic, the foliage of the Corinthian, and the uovali of the Doric, mixed without any regularity on the same capital. So the vault of the church, though broad enough, is encumbered with too many little tricks in sculpture. It is, indeed, supported with single columns, instead of those vast clusters of little pillars that one meets with in Gothic cathedrals; but, at the same time, these columns are of no regular order, and, at least, twice too long for their diameter. There are other churches in the town, and two or three palaces, which are of a more modern make, and built with a good fancy. I was shown the little Notredame, that is handsomely designed, and topped with a cupola. It was made as an offering of gratitude to the Blessed Virgin, for having defended the country of the Tirol against the victorious arms of Gustavus Adolphus, who could not enter this part of the empire, after having overrun most of the rest. This temple was, therefore, built by. the contributions of the whole country. At about half a league's distance from Inspruck stands the castle of Amras, furnished with a prodigious quantity of medals, and many other sorts of rarities both in nature and art, for which I must refer the reader to Monsieur Patin's account in his Letter to the Duke of Wirtemburg, having myself had neither time nor opportunity to enter into a particular examination of them. From Inspruck we came to Hall, that lies at a league distance on the same river. This place is particularly famous for its salt-works. There are, in the neighbourhood, vast mountains of a transparent kind of rock not unlike alum, extremely solid, and as piquant to the tongue as salt itself. Four or five hundred men are always at work in the mountains, where, as soon as they have hewn down any quantities of the rock, they let in their springs and reservoirs among their works. The water eats away and dissolves the particles of salt which are mixed in the stone, and is

conveyed by long troughs and canals, from the mines, to the town of Hall, where it is received in vast cisterns, and boiled off from time to time.

They make after the rate of eight hundred loaves a week, each loaf four hundred pound weight. This would raise a great revenue to the emperor, were there here such a tax on salt as there is in France. At present he clears but two hundred thousand crowns a year, after having defrayed all the charges of working it. There are in Switzerland, and other parts of the Alps, several of these quarries of salt that turn to very little account, by reason of the great quantities of wood they consume.

The salt-works at Hall have a great convenience for fuel, which swims down to them on the river Inn. This river, during its course through the Tirol, is generally shut up between a double range of mountains that are most of them covered with woods of firtrees. Abundance of peasants are employed in the hewing down of the largest of these trees, that, after they are barked and cut into shape, are tumbled down from the mountains into the stream of the river, which carries them off to the salt-works. At Inspruck they take up vast quantities for the convents and public officers, who have a certain portion of it allotted them by the emperor; the rest of it passes on to Hall. There are generally several hundred loads afloat; for they begin to cut above twenty-five leagues up the river above Hall, and there are other rivers that flow into the Inn, which bring in their contributions. These salt-works, and a mint that is established at the same place, have rendered this town, notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the capital city, almost as populous as Inspruck itself. The design of this mint is to work off part of the metals which are found in the neighbouring mountains; where, as we were told, there are seven thousand men in constant employ. At Hall we took a boat to carry us to Vienna. The first night we lay at Rottenburg, where is a strong castle above

the town. Count Serini is still a close prisoner in this castle, who, as they told us in the town, had lost his senses by his long imprisonment and afflictions. The next day we dined at Kuff-stain, where there is a fortress on a high rock above the town, almost inaccessible on all sides: this being a frontier place on the duchy of Bavaria, where we entered, after about an hour's rowing from Kuff-stain. It was the pleasantest voyage in the world to follow the windings of the river Inn through such a variety of pleasing scenes as the course of it naturally led us. We had sometimes, on each side of us, a vast extent of naked rocks and mountains, broken into a thousand irregular steeps and precipices; in other places we saw a long forest of fir-trees, so thick set together, that it was impossible to discover any of the soil they grew upon, and rising up so regularly one above another, as to give us the view of a whole wood at once. The time of the year, that had given the leaves of the trees so many different colours, completed the beauty of the prospect. But as the materials of a fine landscape are not always the most profitable to the owner of them, we met with but very little corn or pasturage for the proportion of earth that we passed through, the lands of the Tirol not being able to feed the inhabitants. This long valley of the Tirol lies inclosed on all sides by the Alps, though its dominions shoot out into several branches that lie among the breaks and hollows of the mountains. It is governed by three councils residing at Inspruck, one sits upon life and death, the other is for taxes and impositions, and a third for the common distributions of justice. As these courts regulate themselves, by the orders they receive from the imperial court, so, in many cases, there are appeals from them to Vienna. The inhabitants of the Tirol have many particular privileges above those of the other hereditary countries of the emperor. For as they are naturally well fortified among their mountains, and, at the same time, border upon many different govern

ments, as the Grisons, Venetians, Swiss, Bavarians, &c. a severe treatment might tempt them to set up for a republic, or at least throw themselves under the milder government of some of their neighbours: besides, that their country is poor, and that the emperor draws considerable incomes out of his mines of salt and metal. They are these mines that fill the country with greater numbers of people than it would be able to bear without the importation of corn from foreign parts. The emperor has forts and citadels at the entrance of all the passes that lead into the Tirol, which are so advantageously placed on rocks and mountains, that they command all the valleys and avenues that lie about them. Besides, that the country itself is cut into so many hills and inequalities, as would render it defensible, by a very little army, against a numerous enemy. It was, therefore, generally thought the duke of Bavaria would not attempt the cutting off any suc-. cours that were sent to Prince Eugene; or the forcing his way through the Tirol into Italy. The river Inn, that had hitherto been shut up among mountains, passes generally through a wide open country during all its course through Bavaria, which is a voyage of two days, after the rate of twenty leagues a day.