may be regarded as a place made up of ancient houses, many of them with gables and pointed doorways or projecting storeys. Prominent in the higher part of the town are no less than four castellated feudal residences. The most important of these is a fine work of the fifteenth century, its date being sufficiently discernible in the florid elegance of the tracery which decorates the machicolated round towers, the high-roofed watch-turrets, the cross-shaped windows, the well quartered coatsof-arms, although as a relic of medieval art the building suffers from too bold an effort of restoration at the hands of a living architect. Two other antique châteaux stand, respectively, on the north Iside of the church and behind its eastern end. Like the preceding, these date from the fifteenth century, and contribute each by a good octagon tower their share in heightening the architectural treat that awaits anyone whose love of art and romance may lead him to seek out this storehouse of mediæval masonry. The same may be said of an edifice surmounted by a circular tower, massive and severe, which now serves as a barrack for mounted constabulary, the modern representatives of those men-at-arms who once may have formed the predatory garrison of the keep.

From the raised tableland of Thiviers it is worth while to follow the windings of a road on

your right, and descend into the smiling valley of St.-Jean-de-Côle. Leaving behind the hamlet of St.-Clément and its not too ornate church, your eye rests for a while upon vine-gardens and woods that stretch along the hillsides, while the river Côle, flowing between high banks, serpentines through the fertile vale beneath. On the opposite shore of the stream some bold crags, sharply defined, tell of the heavings and throes of nature in remote ages. Rounding the hill to the right, with its steep vineyard well set to the sun, you come quickly upon the village of St.-Jean, Lying pleasantly in the more open part of a verdant dale, its tenements are watered by the Côle, a torrent that lends its name not to this parish only, but also to another in close proximity to it-that of St.-Pierre-de- Côle.

The first object that confronts one is the Castle of La Martonie, an imposing relic of feudal chivalry, with lofty embattled towers. These overlook the ruins of an ancient Priory of St. John, whose fine eleventh-century minster is now the parish church. Though an indisputably fine example of the distinctive Byzantine architecture of Périgord, the effect of this ancient edifice is nevertheless somewhat marred by the promiscuous crowding up of houses, mean and good, including the market hall, against its walls, which are thus in parts thrust out of view; and even more still by an injury to the

well-proportioned dome sustained early in the present century. The salient characteristics of the style are, it will be remembered, a grand central cupola surrounded by satellites in the form of domical turrets raised upon curved arches, the latter approximating in many cases towards a horse-shoe form. This church is of singular interest, both from its own intrinsic merits and from its distant date, having been built as early as 1083 by Renaud de Thiviers, bishop of Périgueux, upon the model of the Cathedral of St.-Front. The dome, notwithstanding its imperfect preservation, is the leading feature of the building, suggesting primarily the Oriental style of which St. Sophia at Constantinople and St. Mark's, Venice, are the familiar types; yet at the same time recalling, but more remotely, many noble cupolas of the Palladian order, such as that of our own St. Paul's, and of Notre Dame at Boulogne. It need hardly be said that, in a village church west of the Alps and north of the Pyrenees a good example of the Oriental dome such as this, dating from eight hundred years back, is not a little remarkable from both an architectural and antiquarian point of view. It should be added, that the nave and the two aisles each terminate in a good pentagonal apse, and that there are remains of a fine Romanesque cloister.

A successor of Renaud de Thiviers-the

actual bishop of the diocese-has lately committed the parish of St.-Jean-de-Côle with its domed minster to the care of Premonstrant canons, a colony of whom have migrated hither from the parent house in Provence. A new monastery is building for this fraternity of the white robe. In surveying the rising works, one naturally lingers to observe the masons as they handle trowel, or ply hammer and chisel, in toilsomely fashioning a claustral home for the fresh comers: even as eight centuries ago other artificers were piling stone upon stone of the now ruined Priory of St. John for the habitation of the recluses of that day. And just as Bishop Renaud of Thiviers founded yon dilapidated priory, so a lady of the neighbourhood has recently presented an estate of moderate extent (known by the name of Boni) near the village of St.-Jean, by way of endowment for the nascent house of canons regular. We may note, moreover, that the old Priory of St.-Jean itself also belonged to canons regular (of the Order of Ste.-Geneviève), who had enjoyed continuous possession for seven centuries when scattered to the winds by the Revolution. Thus the Premonstrants, or regular canons Prémontré, in settling down at St.-Jean-de-Côle will, to borrow words that fell from the present Bishop of Périgueux in laying the first stone of the new buildings, be taking up the thread of the

traditions and labours of their predecessors during many generations. These latter were depicted by the same prelate as once eminent by 'their piety and learning,' though he went on to supply the information that the brotherhood, which at their suppression about 1792 consisted but of three members, had then fallen into the lax condition in which the Revolution surprised not a few of the so-called religious houses of France.

But if sloth had crept in among the later occupants of St. John's Priory, their modern successors, on the other hand, the Premonstrants of Boni, are all life and vigour: asceticism itself in these days partaking of the restless energy of the age in which we live. Busied in building, in works of ascetic devotion, and in a 'Gospel ministry' none. the less zealous for being popish and ultramontane to the backbone, they join to their multifarious other labours that of concocting and selling for the benefit of the house a ‘Liqueur des Prémontrés de Boni,' which is a spirit distilled from some exotic fruit unnamed, to the no small comfort, it is said, of weak digestions. A more costly and presumably a more fortified variety of the same preparation is sold, anent which we are told that 'La Crême de cette liqueur est pour les estomacs les plus délicats.'

Many French houses professedly religious seek

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