he stone, once and for all time,
the grief of the human mother for her son, not comforted by
foreknowledge of resurrection, nor lightened by prescience of near
glory. He discovered in the marble, by one effort, the divinity of
death's rest after torture, and taught the eye to see that the
dissolution of this dying body is the birth of the soul that cannot die.
In the dead Christ there are two men manifest to sight. 'The first man
is of earth, earthy; the second man is the Lord from heaven.'

In the small chapel stands a strangely wrought column, enclosed in an
iron cage. The Romans now call it the Colonna Santa, the holy pillar,
and it is said to be the one against which Christ leaned when teaching
in the temple at Jerusalem. A great modern authority believes it to be
of Roman workmanship, and of the third century; but those who have lived
in the East will see much that is oriental in the fantastic ornamented
carving. It matters little. In actual fact, whatever be its origin, this
is the column known in the Middle Age as the 'Colonna degli Spiritati,'
or column of those possessed by evil spirits, and it was customary to
bind to it such unlucky individuals as fell under the suspicion of
'possession' in order to exorcise the spirit with prayers and holy
water. Aretino has made a witty scene about this in the 'Cortegiana,'
where one of the Vatican servants cheats a poor fisherman, and then
hands him over to the sacristan of Saint Peter's to be cured of an
imaginary possession by a ceremonious exorcism. Such proceedings must
have been common enough in those days when witchcraft and demonology
were elements with which rulers and lawgivers had to count at every
turn.

Leave the column and its legend in the lonely chapel, with the exquisite
'Pieta'; wander hither and thither, and note the enormous contrasts
between good and bad work which meet you at every turn. Up in the right
aisle of the tribune you will come upon what is known as Canova's
masterpiece, the tomb of Clement the Thirteenth, the Rezzonico pope, as
strange a mixture of styles and ideas as any in the world, and yet a
genuine expression of the artistic feeling of that day. The grave Pope
prays solemnly above; on the right a lovely heathen genius of Death
leans on a torch; on the left rises a female figure of Religion, one of
the most abominably bad statues in the world; below, a brace of
improbable lions, extravagantly praised by people who do not understand
leo