rel, who, however, like most writers on Florence, is so
extravagantly splendid or "gushing" in his description of everything,
that untravelled readers who peruse his pages in good faith must needs
believe that in every church and palazzo there is a degree of picturesque
magnificence, compared to which the Pandemonium of Milton, or even the
Celestial City itself as seen by Saint John, is a mere cheap Dissenting
chapel. According to him, Or' San Michele is by right "a world's wonder,
and a gift so perfect to the whole world, that, passing it, one should
need say (or be _compelled_ to pronounce) a prayer for Taddeo's soul."
Which is like the dentist in Paris, who proclaimed in 1847 that it was--

"Presque une crime
De ne pas crier, '_Vive_ Fattet!'"

The legend, as told by this writer, and cited by Hare, is as follows:

"Surely nowhere in the world is the rugged, changeless, mountain
force of hewn stone piled against the sky, and the luxuriant,
dream-like poetic delicacy of stone carven and shaped into leafage
and loveliness, more perfectly blended and made one than where San
Michele rises out of the dim, many-coloured, twisting streets, in its
mass of ebon darkness and of silvery light.

"The other day, under the walls of it, I stood and looked at its
Saint George, where he leans upon his shield, so calm, so young, with
his bared head and his quiet eyes.

"'That is our Donatello's,' said a Florentine beside me--a man of the
people, who drove a horse for hire in the public ways, and who
paused, cracking his whip, to tell this tale to me. 'Donatello did
that, and it killed him. Do you not know? When he had done that
Saint George he showed it to his master. And the master said, "It
wants one thing only." Now this saying our Donatello took gravely to
heart, chiefly because his master would never explain where the fault
lay; and so much did it hurt him, that he fell ill of it, and came
nigh to death. Then he called his master to him. "Dear and great
one, do tell me before I die," he said, "what is the one thing my
statue lacks?" The master smiled and said: "Only speech." "Then I
die happy," said our Donatello. And he--died--indeed, that hour.'

"Now I cannot say that the pretty story is true--it is not in the
least true; Donatello died when he was eighty-three, in the Street of
the Melon, and it was he