wistful intelligence of a boy softly
touched already by the radiancy of the [99] celestial Wisdom. "Her
ways are ways of pleasantness!" That is the lesson this winsome,
docile, spotless creature--ingenui vultus puer ingenuique
pudoris--younger brother or cousin of Borgognone's noble deacons at the
Certosa--seems put there to teach us. And in this church, indeed, as
it happens, Scipione's work is side by side with work of his.

It is here, in fact, at Bergamo and at Brescia, that the late survival
of a really convinced religious spirit becomes a striking fact in the
history of Italian art. Vercelli and Novara, though famous for their
mountain neighbourhood, enjoy but a distant and occasional view of
Monte Rosa and its companions; and even then those awful stairways to
tracts of airy sunlight may seem hardly real. But the beauty of the
twin sub-alpine towns further eastward is shaped by the circumstance
that mountain and plain meet almost in their streets, very effectively
for all purposes of the picturesque. Brescia, immediately below the
"Falcon of Lombardy" (so they called its masterful fortress on the last
ledge of the Pie di Monte), to which you may now ascend by gentle
turfed paths, to watch the purple mystery of evening mount gradually
from the great plain up the mountain-walls close at hand, is as level
as a church pavement, home-like, with a kind of easy walking from point
to point about it, rare in Italian towns--a town full of walled
gardens, giving even to [100] its smaller habitations the retirement of
their more sumptuous neighbours, and a certain English air. You may
peep into them, pacing its broad streets, from the blaze of which you
are glad to escape into the dim and sometimes gloomy churches, the
twilight sacristies, rich with carved and coloured woodwork. The art
of Romanino still lights up one of the darkest of those churches with
the altar-piece which is perhaps his most expressive and noblest work.
The veritable blue sky itself seems to be breaking into the
dark-cornered, low-vaulted, Gothic sanctuary of the Barefoot Brethren,
around the Virgin and Child, the bowed, adoring figures of Bonaventura,
Saint Francis, Saint Antony, the youthful majesty of Saint Louis, to
keep for ever in memory--not the King of France however, in spite of
the fleurs-de-lys on his cope of azure, but Louis, Bishop of Toulouse.
A Rubens in Italy! you may think, if you care to rove from the
delightful fact before you