planning the Loggia, but every workman who
chiselled out a piece of its stone, that put all his head and heart into
the doing thereof. It was not only Michaelangelo in his studio, but
every poor painter who taught the mere a, b, c, d of the craft to a
crowd of pupils out of the streets, who did whatsoever came before them
to do mightily and with reverence.

In those days all the servants as well as the sovereigns of art were
penetrated with the sense of her holiness.

It was the mass of patient, intelligent, poetic, and sincere servitors
of art, who, instead of wildly consuming their souls in envy and desire,
cultured their one talent to the uttermost, so that the mediocrity of
that age would have been the excellence of any other.

Not alone from the great workshops of the great masters did the light
shine on the people. From every scaffold where a palace ceiling was
being decorated with its fresco, from every bottega where the children
of the poor learned to grind and to mingle the colours, from every cell
where some solitary monk studied to produce an offering to the glory of
his God, from every nook and corner where the youths gathered in the
streets to see some Nunziata or Ecce Homo lifted to its niche in the
city wall, from every smallest and most hidden home of art--from the
nest under the eaves as well as from the cloud-reaching temples,--there
went out amidst the multitudes an ever-flowing, ever-pellucid stream of
light, from that Aspiration which is in itself Inspiration.

So that even to this day the people of Italy have not forgotten the
supreme excellence of all beauty, but are, by the sheer instinct of
inherited faith, incapable of infidelity to those traditions; so that
the commonest craftsman of them all will sweep his curves and shade his
hues upon a plaster cornice with a perfection that is the despair of the
maestri of other nations.

* * *

The broad plains that have been the battle-ground of so many races and
so many ages were green and peaceful under the primitive husbandry of
the contadini.

Everywhere under the long lines of the yet unbudded vines the seed was
springing, and the trenches of the earth were brimful with brown
bubbling water left from the floods of winter, when Reno and Adda had
broken loose from their beds.

Here and there was some old fortress grey amongst the silver of the
olive orchards; some village with white bleak house-walls and flat roofs
pale an