men would have the nerve to undertake.

SANTA MARIA MAGGIORE[21]

BY HIPPOLYTE ADOLPHE TAINE

We followed the street which ascends and descends, bordered with palaces
and old hedges of thorn, as far as Santa Maria Maggiore. This basilica,
standing upon a large eminence, surmounted with its domes, rises nobly
upward, at once simple and complete, and when you enter it, it affords
still greater pleasure. It belongs to the fifth century; on being
rebuilt at a later period, the general plan, its antique idea, was
preserved. An ample nave, with a horizontal roof, is sustained by two
rows of white Ionic columns. You are rejoiced to see so fine an effect
obtained by such simple means; you might almost imagine yourself in a
Greek temple.

It is said that a temple of Juno was robbed of these columns. Each of
them bare and polished, with no other ornament than the delicate curves
of its small capital, is of healthful and charming beauty. You
appreciate here the good sense, and all that is agreeable in genuine
natural construction, the file of trunks of trees which bear the beams,
resting flat and providing a long walk. All that has since been added is
barbarous, and first, the two chapels of Sixtus V. and Paul V., with
their paintings by Guido, Josepin, and Cigoli, and the sculptures of
Bernini, and the architecture of Fontana and Flaminio. These are
celebrated names, and money has been prodigally spent, but instead of
the slight means with which the ancients produced a great effect, the
moderns produce a petty effect with great means.

When the bewildered eye is satiated with the elaborate sweep of these
arches and domes, with the splendors of polychromatic marbles, with
friezes and pedestals of agate, with columns of oriental jasper, with
angels hanging by their feet, and with all these bas-reliefs of bronze
and gold, the visitor hastens to get away from it as he would to escape
from a confectioner's shop. It seems as if this grand, glittering box,
gilded and labored from pavement to lantern, caught up and tore at every
point of its finery the delicate web of poetic reverie; the slender
profile of the least of the columns impresses one far more than any of
this display of the art of upholsterers and parvenus. Similarly to this
the facade, loaded with balustrades, and round and angular pediments,
and statues roosting on its stones, is a "hotel-de-ville" frontage.

The campanile, belonging to the fourteenth century,