nd caverns, some almost deep enough to render the
walls unsafe, entirely owing to the uses to which the recesses of the
church are dedicated by the refined and high-minded Italians. But St.
Michele of Lucca is wrought entirely in white marble and green
serpentine; there is hardly any relieved sculpture except in the
capitals of the shafts and cornices, and all the designs of wall
ornament are inlaid with exquisite precision--white on dark ground; the
ground being cut out and filled with serpentine, the figures left in
solid marble. The designs of the Pavian church are encrusted on the
walls; of the Lucchese, incorporated with them; small portions of real
sculpture being introduced exactly where the eye, after its rest on the
flatness of the wall, will take most delight in the piece of substantial
form. The entire arrangement is perfect beyond all praise, and the
morbid restlessness of the old designs is now appeased. Geometry seems
to have acted as a febrifuge, for beautiful geometrical designs are
introduced amidst the tumult of the hunt; and there is no more seeing
double, nor ghastly monstrosity of conception; no more ending of
everything in something else; no more disputing for spare legs among
bewildered bodies; no more setting on of heads wrong side foremost. The
fragments have come together: we are out of the Inferno with its weeping
down the spine; we are in the fair hunting-fields of the Lucchese
mountains (though they had their tears also),--with horse, and hound,
and hawk; and merry blast of the trumpet.--Very strange creatures to be
hunted, in all truth; but still creatures with a single head, and that
on their shoulders, which is exactly the last place in the Pavian church
where a head is to be looked for.

My good friend Mr. Cockerell wonders, in one of his lectures, why I give
so much praise to this "crazy front of Lucca." But it is not crazy; not
by any means. Altogether sober, in comparison with the early Lombard
work, or with our Norman. Crazy in one sense it is: utterly neglected,
to the breaking of its old stout heart; the venomous nights and salt
frosts of the Maremma winters have their way with it--"Poor Tom's a
cold!" The weeds that feed on the marsh air, have twisted themselves
into its crannies; the polished fragments of serpentine are spit and
rent out of their cells, and lie in green ruins along its ledges; the
salt sea winds have eaten away the fair shafting of its star window into
a skeleton