they do, to a single century, seem to bring the dead time and those who shaped it as it was, so near to us that in its shadow the present is made mean and dwarfed. All the intervening generations that the locust has eaten, those dim, quite forgotten generations which once in their hour furnished the daily bread of Time, appear to drop away. In our garish modernity, wearing no wedding garment of their art, we find ourselves. unbidden guests at this banquet of the past-face to face with the age of Donatello and Fra Bartolommeo and Savonarola and the great Medici, and of the rest who lived when Florence was in flower. The effect is strange. Perhaps it does not strike the Italian thus, or even those foreigners who are constant residents. Perhaps in this case also, such as seek find, and the period which gave Florence her glory, is the period which oppresses us now that her sons are no longer mighty preachers, painters, or architects.

Why is it? Who can explain the mystery of the change? Why, when we look into a picture or sculpture shop on the Lung' Arno, for instance, do we see on the one side replicas of the famous and beautiful antique; and, on the other, marbles indeed, but what marbles! Simpering children in frilled dresses; young women with their nudity accentuated by means of bathing drawers; vulgar-looking busts of vulgar-looking men; coy creatures smirking at butterflies seated on their naked arms or bosoms, and other sculptured delights. But never a work that has a spark of the old Promethean fire, which elevates its student, or moves him-at any rate as art should move.

Of painting and buildings is it not the same? Where has the genius flown and will it ever return? I know the fashion is to decry our modern English art, and doubtless much of it is poor.

Yet so far as

B

my small experience goes, that art has, at any rate in some instances, more truth and spirit than any other of the day which I have found abroad.

I have said that I will not discourse upon the art treasures of Florence. Still I may be permitted to mention two, by no means of the best known, which perhaps impressed me most among them. Of these one is a certain life-sized Annunciation by Donatello, fashioned of a dark-coloured freestone, cut in high relief and set into a very gloomy wall of the church of Santa Croce. It was, I believe, one of the master's earlier works, but looking at it I wondered whether he ever fashioned anything more beautiful. The Virgin is of a somewhat modern type of face, with rippling hair parted in the middle; indeed I can remember a lady who might have sat for a model of that statue. As for the exquisite grace of her pose and shape, or that of the angel who bends the knee to her, to be understood they must be seen. Description here is hopeless; I can say only that in my case at any rate they affect the mind as does the sight of some perfect landscape, or of a lovely flower breaking

into bloom.

What imagination also is comprised in the Virgin's pose. She has risen from her seat and her left hand clasps the book she reads. Her robe has caught upon a corner of the chair so that her mantle is strained tight. What under ordinary conditions would be a woman's first instinctive thought? Doubtless to free it with the hand that was disengaged. But no-the message has come to her-the Power has fallen upon her, and that hand is pressed upon the heart wherein It lies. There is much else that might be said of this true masterpiece, but let an artist say it, not one merely of art's most humble admirers.

The second work that struck me pre-eminently,

although in a fashion totally different, is in the church of Certosa di Val d'Ema. It is by Francesco da Sangallo, and represents in white marble the body of the Cardinal Leonardo Buonafede, who died in 1545, as laid out for burial. Not an attractive subject it may be thought, this corpse of an old, old man. Yet with what power and truth is it treated; those full, somewhat coarse features are instinct with the very dignity of death. There before us is the man as his mourners laid him upon the bier centuries ago-every line of his wrinkled face, every fold of the flesh that after serving him so well has failed him now. It is a triumph of forceful portraiture.

The old monastery where this statue lies, and with it . others almost as perfect, is a strange and lovely place. Inhabited by a few ancient monks who, under the Italian law abolishing the religious establishments, are, I believe, not allowed to recruit their numbers; a vast pile of rambling buildings fortified for defence, it stands supreme upon a cypress-covered hill. Its interior with the halls, chapels, crypts, and columned galleries need not be described. Indeed, quaint as they are, there is something better here-the view from certain windows and cloisters.

This prospect is quite unlike any that I have seen in other parts of the world. Perhaps some of the high uplands of Mexico, with their arid, aloe-clothed soil, go nearest to it in general character and colouring, though that is not so very near. The prevailing colour-note of Tuscany, in winter, is greyness. This tone it owes chiefly, though not altogether, to the sad-hued olives which clothe its slopes and plains, broken here and there by rows and clumps of tall and gracious cypresses, standing sometimes, and thus they are most beautiful, upon a mountain ridge clear-cut against the sky. Let