was the cause, he
was one of the first to be seized by that terrible disease. Alone he
fought the enemy, and alone he died. Lucrezia had left him as soon as
he fell ill, for she feared the deadly plague, and Andrea gladly let
her go, for he loved her to the last with the same great unselfish love.

So passed away the faultless painter, and his was the last great name
engraved upon that golden record of Florentine Art which had made
Florence famous in the eyes of the world. Other artists came after him,
but Art was on the wane in the City of Flowers, and her glory was
slowly departing.

We can trace no other great name upon her pages and so we close the
book, and our eyes turn towards the shores of the blue Adriatic, where
Venice, Queen of the Sea, was writing, year by year, another volume
filled with the names of her own Knights of Art.

THE BELLINI

Almost all the stories of the lives of the painters which we have been
listening to, until now, have clustered round Florence, the City of
Flowers. She was their great mother, and her sons loved her with a
deep, passionate love, thinking nothing too fair with which to deck her
beauty. Wherever they wandered she drew them back, for their very
heartstrings were wound around her, and each and all strove to give her
of their best.

But now we come to the stories of men whose lives gather round a
different centre. Instead of the great mother-city beside the Arno,
with her strong towers and warlike citizens, the noise of battle ever
sounding in her streets, and her flowery fields encircling her on every
side, we have now Venice, Queen of the Sea.

No warlike tread or tramp of angry crowds disturbs her fair streets,
for here are no pavements, only the cool green water which laps the
walls of her marble palaces, and gives back the sound of the dipping
oar and the soft echo of passing voices, as the gondolas glide along
her watery ways. Here are no grim grey towers of defence, but fairy
palaces of white and coloured marbles, which rise from the waters below
as if they had been built by the sea nymphs, who had fashioned them of
their own sea-shells and mother-of-pearl.

There are no flowery meadows here, but instead the vast waters of the
lagoons, which reach out until they meet the blue arc of the sky or
touch the distant mountains which lie like a purple line upon the
horizon. Here and there tiny islands lie upon its bosom, so faint and
fairylike that they scarcely se