, no one could dispute
that it would be an improvement.

Up stairs is a very sweet Annunciation. The subdued, demure, somewhat
astonished joy of the Virgin is poetically rendered, both in face and
attitude, and the figure of the angel has much grace. A small, but
beautiful composition, the Coronation of the Virgin, is perhaps the
most impressive of the whole series.

Below is a series of frescos by a very second-rate artist,
Poccetti. Among them is a portrait of Savonarola; but as the reformer
was burned half a century before Poccetti was born, it has not even
the merit of authenticity. It was from this house that Savonarola was
taken to be imprisoned and executed in 1498. There seems something
unsatisfactory about Savonarola. One naturally sympathizes with the
bold denouncer of Alexander VI.; but there was a lack of benevolence
in his head and his heart. Without that anterior depression of the
sinciput, he could hardly have permitted two friends to walk into the
fire in his stead, as they were about to do in the stupendous and
horrible farce enacted in the Piazza Gran Duca. There was no lack of
self-esteem either in the man or his head. Without it, he would
scarcely have thought so highly of his rather washy scheme for
reorganizing the democratic government, and so very humbly of the
genius of Dante, Petrarch, and others, whose works he condemned to the
flames. A fraternal regard, too, for such great artists as Fra
Angelico and Fra Bartolommeo,--both members of his own convent, and
the latter a personal friend,--might have prevented his organizing
that famous holocaust of paintings, that wretched iconoclasm, by which
he signalized his brief period of popularity and power. In weighing,
gauging, and measuring such a man, one ought to remember, that if he
could have had his way and carried out all his schemes, he would have
abolished Borgianism certainly, and perhaps the papacy, but that he
would have substituted the rhapsodical reign of a single demagogue,
perpetually seeing visions and dreaming dreams for the direction of
his fellow-citizens, who were all to be governed by the hallucinations
of this puritan Mahomet.

IX.

THE MEDICI CHAPEL.

The famous cemetery of the Medici, the Sagrestia Nuova, is a ponderous
and dismal toy. It is a huge mass of expensive, solemn, and insipid
magnificence, erected over the carcasses of as contemptible a family
as ever rioted above the earth, or rotted under it. The only man o