Memoirs of Robert Alfred Vaughan Author:Robert Vaughan Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. DAYS IN ITALY. 1847. Leaving Halle, Alfred made a pilgrimage to Wurtem- bergh, the Jerusalem of the German Protestants. He there saw the door... more »—that is, where the door was—to which Luther nailed his Theses—trod the floor of the room in which he studied; paid due homage to the table before which he sat, and on which he wrote; gazed on a stone sculpture representing the four Evangelists writing the Gospels, executed after a design by the great Reformer; was privileged to see some much- valued manuscripts; also a piece of worsted, or rather silk-work, from the hands of Luther's wife, and a bust of the great man from a cast taken after death. Ofcourse the spot where the Pope's bull was committed to the flames was not overlooked, nor the houses in which Melancthon and Cranach rested by night, and prosecuted their different labours by day. But Wurtembergh was taken in the way to Berlin. In that capital several weeks were occupied in seeing great sights and great men. The curiosity of the humble but well-to-do couple in whose apartments my son found his lodgings, appears to have been much excited by his presence and manner. The lady, indeed, soon discovered that he must be a young lord. The husband, who wore a pair of enormous spectacles, came into the apartment with his pipe in his mouth, " to try the experiment of a little conversa- "tion, and asked if the people in England were all " white f " The writer adds that among the lower class of Germans " England is like the end of the world, "and an Englishman is almost as great a curiosity as " a man from the moon." In the same letter he writes, —" was last night in a society of literati, where I was " much interested, and saw some of the most celebrated "characters of Germany." We regret that more concerning this v...« less