of Mount Sinai, and there imitate, in the far West, the austerities
of St. Simeon Stylites in the East, and be enrolled in the new
Pantheon, not of Caesars, but of Saints.

Under the supposed patronage of those Saints, Treves rose again out
of its ruins. It gained its four great abbeys of St. Maximus (on
the site of Constantine's palace); St. Matthias, in the crypt
whereof the bodies of the monks never decay; {30} St. Martin; and
St. Mary of the Four Martyrs, where four soldiers of the famous
Theban legion are said to have suffered martyrdom by the house of
the Roman prefect. It had its cathedral of St. Peter and St.
Helena, supposed to be built out of St. Helena's palace; its
exquisite Liebfrauenkirche; its palace of the old Archbishops,
mighty potentates of this world, as well as of the kingdom of
heaven. For they were princes, arch-chancellors, electors of the
empire, owning many a league of fertile land, governing, and that
kindly and justly, towns and villages of Christian men, and now and
then going out to war, at the head of their own knights and yeomen,
in defence of their lands, and of the saints whose servants and
trustees they were; and so became, according to their light and
their means, the salt of that land for many generations.

And after a while that salt, too, lost its savour, and was, in its
turn, trodden under foot. The French republican wars swept away the
ecclesiastical constitution and the wealth of the ancient city. The
cathedral and churches were stripped of relics, of jewels, of
treasures of early art. The Prince-bishop's palace is a barrack; so
was lately St. Maximus's shrine; St. Martin's a china manufactory,
and St. Matthias's a school. Treves belongs to Prussia, and not to
"Holy Church;" and all the old splendours of the "empire of the