ions the evening passed. We rested well in large hard
beds with dry rough sheets. But there was a fretful wind abroad, which
went wailing round the convent walls and rattling the doors in its
deserted corridors. One of our party had been placed by himself at the
end of a long suite of apartments, with balconies commanding the wide
sweep of hills that Monte Amiata crowns. He confessed in the morning to
having passed a restless night, tormented by the ghostly noises of the
wind, a wanderer, "like the world's rejected guest," through those
untenanted chambers. The olives tossed their filmy boughs in twilight
underneath his windows, sighing and shuddering, with a sheen in them as
eery as that of willows by some haunted mere.

IV.

The great attraction to students of Italian art in the convent of Monte
Oliveto is a large square cloister, covered with wall-paintings by Luca
Signorelli and Giovannantonio Bazzi, surnamed Il Sodoma. These represent
various episodes in the life of S. Benedict; while one picture, in some
respects the best of the whole series, is devoted to the founder of the
Olivetan Order, Bernardo Tolomei, dispensing the rule of his institution
to a consistory of white-robed monks. Signorelli, that great master of
Cortona, may be studied to better advantage elsewhere, especially at
Orvieto and in his native city. His work in this cloister, consisting of
eight frescoes, has been much spoiled by time and restoration. Yet it
can be referred to a good period of his artistic activity (the year
1497) and displays much which is specially characteristic of his manner.
In Totila's barbaric train, he painted a crowd of fierce emphatic
figures, combining all ages and the most varied attitudes, and
reproducing with singular vividness the Italian soldiers of adventure of
his day. We see before us the long-haired followers of Braccio and the
Baglioni; their handsome savage faces; their brawny limbs clad in the
parti-coloured hose and jackets of that period; feathered caps stuck
sideways on their heads; a splendid swagger in their straddling legs.
Female beauty lay outside the sphere of Signorelli's sympathy; and in
the Monte Oliveto cloister he was not called upon to paint it. But none
of the Italian masters felt more keenly, or more powerfully represented
in their work, the muscular vigour of young manhood. Two of the
remaining frescoes, different from these in motive, might be selected as
no less characteristic of Signor