oming to make their
official music, they have brought each his share of heaven's dessert: a
little offering of two peaches, three figs, and three cherries on one
stalk (so precious therefore!), placed neatly, spread out to look much,
not without consciousness of the greatness of the sacrifice. They have
not, those two little angels, forgotten, I am sure, the gift they have
brought, during that rather weary music-making before the inattentive
Madonna. They keep on thinking how Christ will awake to find all those
precious things, and they steel their little hearts to the sacrifice.
The little bird who has come (invited for like reason) and perched on
the curtain bar, understands it all, respects their feelings, and refrains
from pecking.

Such is the heart of the saints, and out of it comes the painted triumph
of _El Magno Jesulino_.

THE IMAGINATIVE ART OF THE RENAISSANCE

I

In a Florentine street through which I pass most days, is a house
standing a little back (the place is called the Square of Purgatory),
the sight of which lends to that sordid street of stained palace backs,
stables, and dingy little shops, a certain charm and significance, in
virtue solely of three roses carved on a shield over a door. The house
is a humble one of the sixteenth century, and its three roses have just
sufficient resemblance to roses, with their pincushion heads and straight
little leaves, for us to know them as such. Yet that rude piece of
heraldic carving, that mere indication that some one connected with the
house once thought of roses, is sufficient, as I say, to give a certain
pleasurableness to the otherwise quite unpleasurable street.

This is by no means an isolated instance. In various places, as emblems
of various guilds or confraternities, one meets similarly carved, on
lintel or escutcheon, sheaves of lilies, or what is pleasanter still,
that favourite device of the Renaissance (become well known as the
monogram of the painter Benvenuto Garofalo), a jar with five clove-pinks.
And on each occasion of meeting them, that carved lily and those graven
clove-pinks, like the three roses in the Square of Purgatory, have shed
a charm over the street, given me a pleasure more subtle than that derived
from any bed of real lilies, or pot of real clove-pinks, or bush of real
roses; colouring and scenting the street with this imaginary colour and
perfume. What train of thought has been set up? It would be hard to say.
Some