the greatest of them could do must be, must look quite as small.  “Shall I, the gnat that dances in Thy ray, dare to be reverent?” The Franciscans have not dared to be reverent; they have only dared to be cheerful.  It may be too awful an adventure of the imagination to imagine Christ in that garden.  But there is not the smallest difficulty about imagining St. Francis there; and that is something to say of an institution which is eight hundred years old.

Immediately above this little garden, overshadowing and almost overhanging it, is a gorgeous gilded building with golden domes and minarets glittering in the sun, and filling a splendid situation with almost shameless splendour; the Russian church built over the upper part of the garden, belonging to the Orthodox-Greeks.  Here again many Western travellers will be troubled; and will think that golden building much too like a fairy palace in a pantomime.  But here again I shall differ from them, though perhaps less strongly.  It may be that the pleasure is childish rather than childlike; but I can imagine a child clapping his hands at the mere sight of those great domes like bubbles of gold against the blue sky.  It is a little like Aladdin’s Palace, but it has a place in art as Aladdin has a place in literature; especially since it is oriental literature.  Those wise missionaries in China who were not afraid to depict the Twelve Apostles in the costume of Chinamen might have built such a church in a land of glittering mosques.  And as it is said that the Russian has in him something of the child and something of the oriental, such a style may be quite sincere, and have even a certain simplicity in its splendour.  It is genuine of its kind; it was built for those who like it; and those who do not like it can look at something else.  This sort of thing may be called tawdry, but it is not what I call meretricious.  What I call really meretricious can be found yet higher on the hill; towering to the sky and dominating all the valleys.

The nature of the difference, I think, is worth noting.  The German Hospice, which served as a sort of palace for the German Emperor, is a very big building with a very high tower, planned I believe with great efficiency, solidity and comfort, and fitted with a thousand things that mark its modernity compared with the things around, with the quaint garden of the Franciscans or the fantastic temple of the Russians.  It is what I can only describe as a handsome building; rather as the more vulgar of the Victorian wits used to talk about a fine woman.  By calling it a handsome building I mean that from the top of its dizzy tower to the bottom of its deepest foundations there is not one line or one tint of beauty.  This negative fact, however, would be nothing; it might be honestly ugly and utilitarian like a factory or a prison; but it is not.  It is as pretentious as the gilded dome below it; and it is pretentious in a wicked way where the other is