and galleries he has seen but a very small part of the whole,
and, excepting when in the Loggie, he probably could not once have stood
still and pointed in the direction of the main part of the palace.

[Illustration: BELVEDERE COURT OF THE VATICAN GALLERY

From a print of the last century]

In order to speak even superficially of it all, it is indispensable to
classify its parts in some way. Vast and irregular it is at its two
ends, toward the colonnade and toward the bastions of the city, but the
intervening length consists of two perfectly parallel buildings, each
over three hundred and fifty yards long, about eighty yards apart, and
yoked in the middle by the Braccio Nuovo of the Museum and a part of
the library, so as to enclose two vast courts, the one known as
Belvedere,--not to be confused with the Belvedere in the Museum,--and
the other called the Garden of the Pigna, from the pine-cone which
stands at one end of it.

Across the ends of these parallel buildings, and toward the city, a huge
pile is erected, about two hundred yards long, very irregular, and
containing the papal residence and the apartments of several cardinals,
the Sixtine Chapel, the Pauline Chapel, the Borgia Tower, the Stanze and
Loggie of Raphael, and the Court of Saint Damasus. At the other end of
the parallelogram are grouped the equally irregular but more beautiful
buildings of the old Museum, of which the windows look out over the
walls of the city, and which originally bore the name of Belvedere, on
account of the lovely view. This is said to have been a sort of
summer-house of the Borgia, not then connected with the palace by the
long galleries.

It would be a hopeless and a weary task to attempt to trace the history
of the buildings. Some account of the Pope's private apartments has
already been given in these pages. They occupy the eastern wing of the
part built round the Court of Damasus; that is to say, they are at the
extreme end of the Vatican, nearest the city, and over the colonnade,
and the windows of the Pope's rooms are visible from the square. The
vast mass which rises above the columns to the right of Saint Peter's is
only a small part of the whole palace, but is not the most modern, by
any means. It contains, for instance, the Sixtine Chapel, which is
considerably older than the present church, having been built by Sixtus
the Fourth, whose beautiful bronze monument is in the Chapel of the
Sacrament, in Saint Peter's.