more than a thousand years when the Emperor Valentinian built at this
angle of the river a fortress which was called the Basilia. Houses soon
began to cluster round it upon the ruins of an old Helvetian town, and
thus Basel or Bâle obtained its existence and its name. Bâle suffered
many calamities. War, pestilence, and earthquake alternately made it
desolate. Whether we must enumerate among its misfortunes a Grand
Ecclesiastical Council which assembled there in 1431, and sat for
seventeen years, deposing one infallible Pope, and making another
equally infallible, let theological disputants decide. But the
assembling of this Council was of some service to us; for its Secretary,
Aeneas Sylvius, (who, like the saucy little _prima donna_, was one of
the noble and powerful Italian family, the Piccolomini, and afterward,
as Pope Pius II., wore the triple crown which St. Peter did not wear,)
in his Latin dedication of a history of the transactions of that body
to the Cardinal St. Angeli, has left a description of Bâle as it was in
1436.

After telling us that the town is situated upon that "excellent river,
the Rhine, which divides it into two parts, called Great Bâle and Little
Bâle, and that these are connected by a bridge which the river rising
from its bed sometimes carries off," he, naturally enough for an
ecclesiastic and a future Pope, goes on to say, that in Great Bâle,
which is far more beautiful and magnificent than Little Bâle, there are
handsome and commodious churches; and he naively adds, that, "_although_
these are not adorned with marble, and are built of common stone, they
are much frequented by the people." The women of Bâle, following the
devotional instincts of their sex, were the most assiduous attendants
upon these churches; and they consoled themselves for the absence of
marble, which the good Aeneas Sylvius seems to imply would partly have
excused them for staying away, by an arrangement in itself as odd as in