loped boldly in the legend of
"Intialo," to which I have devoted another chapter, and it appears as
markedly in this. The idea of having an attendant demon, whom the
master, in the consciousness of superior intellect, despises, knowing
that he will crush him when he will, is not to be found, I believe, in a
single German, French, or any other legend not Italian.

If this be so, it is a conception well deserving study, as illustrating
the subtle and powerful Italian intellect as it was first analysed by
Macaulay, and is now popularly understood by such writers as Scaife. {96}
It is indeed a most unholy and unchristian conception, since it is quite
at war with the orthodox theology of the Church, as of Calvin and Luther,
which makes the devil the grand master of mankind, and irresistible
except where man is saved by a _special_ miracle or grace.

And it may also be noted from such traditions that folk-lore, when it
shall have risen to a sense of its true dignity and power, will not limit
itself to collecting variants of fairy tales to prove the routes of races
over the earth, but rise to illustrating the characteristic, and even the
aesthetic, developments of different stocks. That we are now laying the
basis for this is evident.

Though the devil dared not depict lives and legends of the saints upon
the palace, he did not neglect to put his own ugly likeness there,
repeated above the four front windows in a perfectly appalling Gothic
style, which contrasts oddly with the later and severe character of the
stately building. These faces are fiendish enough to have suggested the
story.

It may here be mentioned that it was in the middle of the Borgo degli
Albizzi, near this palace, that that indefatigable corpse-reviver and
worker of miracles, San Zenobio, raised from the dead the child of a
noble and rich French lady. "Then in that place there was put a pillar
of white marble in the middle of the street, as a token of a great
miracle."

"_Haec fabula docet_--this fable teaches," adds Flaxius the immortal,
"that there was never yet anything left incomplete by neglect or
incapacity or poverty, be it in buildings or in that higher
structure, man himself, but what it was attributed to the devil. If
it had not been for the devil, what fine fellows, what charming
creatures, we would all have been to be sure! The devil alone
inspires us to sin; _we_ would never have dreamed of it. Whence I