perly hanged for it.

Of the two pictures on the entrance wall, so high as to be imperfectly
seen, that on the right as you face it has peculiar interest to
English visitors, for (painted by Paolo Uccello, whose great battle
piece enriches our National Gallery) it represents Sir John Hawkwood,
an English free-lance and head of the famous White Company, who
after some successful raids on Papal territory in Provence, put his
sword, his military genius, and his bravoes at the service of the
highest bidder among the warlike cities and provinces of Italy, and,
eventually passing wholly into the employment of Florence (after
harrying her for other pay-masters for some years), delivered her
very signally from her enemies in 1392. Hawkwood was an Essex man,
the son of a tanner at Hinckford, and was born there early in the
fourteenth century. He seems to have reached France as an archer under
Edward III, and to have remained a free-booter, passing on to Italy,
about 1362, to engage joyously in as much fighting as any English
commander can ever have had, for some thirty years, with very good
pay for it. Although, by all accounts, a very Salomon Brazenhead,
Hawkwood had enough dignity to be appointed English Ambassador to Rome,
and later to Florence, which he made his home, and where he died in
1394. He was buried in the Duomo, on the north side of the choir, and
was to have reposed beneath a sumptuous monument made under his own
instructions, with frescoes by Taddeo Gaddi and Giuliano d'Arrigo;
but something intervened, and Uccello's fresco was used instead,
and this, some sixty years ago, was transferred to canvas and moved
to the position in which it now is seen.

Hawkwood's life, briskly told by a full-blooded hand, would make a fine
book. One pleasant story at least is related of him, that on being
beset by some begging friars who prefaced their mendicancy with the
words, "God give you peace," he answered, "God take away your alms";
and, on their protesting, reminded them that such peace was the last
thing he required, since should their pious wish come true he would
die of hunger. One of the daughters of this fire-eater married John
Shelley, and thus became an ancestress of Shelley the poet, who,
as it chances, also found a home for a while in this city, almost
within hailing distance of his ancestor's tomb and portrait, and here
wrote not only his "Ode to the West Wind," but his caustic satire,
"Peter Bell the Third".