ter is not going to end here. At
Varallo they have now got a dreadful knife for the Circumcision
chapel. They had none last winter. What they have now got would do
very well to kill a bullock with, but could not be used
professionally with safety for any animal smaller than a rhinoceros.
I imagine that someone was sent to Novara to buy a knife, and that,
thinking it was for the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, he got the
biggest he could see. Then when he brought it back people said
"chow" several times, and put it upon the table and went away.

Returning to Montrigone, the Simeon is an excellent figure, and the
Virgin is fairly good, but the prophetess Anna, who stands just
behind her, is by far the most interesting in the group, and is
alone enough to make me feel sure that Tabachetti gave more or less
help here, as he had done years before at Orta. She, too, like the
Virgin's grandmother, is a widow lady, and wears collars of a cut
that seems to have prevailed ever since the Virgin was born some
twenty years previously. There is a largeness and simplicity of
treatment about the figure to which none but an artist of the
highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a second or
third-rate man. The hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon the
broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old
experience of a great poet can reach. The lips of the prophetess
are for the moment closed, but she has been prophesying all the
morning, and the people round the wall in the background are in
ecstasies at the lucidity with which she has explained all sorts of
difficulties that they had never been able to understand till now.
They are putting their forefingers on their thumbs and their thumbs
on their forefingers, and saying how clearly they see it all and
what a wonderful woman Anna is. A prophet indeed is not generally
without honour save in his own country, but then a country is
generally not without honour save with its own prophet, and Anna has
been glorifying her country rather than reviling it. Besides, the
rule may not have applied to prophetesses.

The Death of the Virgin is the last of the six chapels inside the
church itself. The Apostles, who of course are present, have all of
them real hair, but, if I may say so, they want a wash and a brush-
up so very badly that I cannot feel any confidence in writing about
them. I should say that, take them all round, they are a good
average sa