sts to the Ark, Noah coaxes the lion on board,
and in the next compartment the patriarch shoves the king of beasts down
the plank in a most ludicrous fashion. The mosaics of the New Testament
are less archaic, though still very old, too old to be infected by the
tricks of later Romanism,--such, for instance, as introducing the Virgin
among the receivers of the mysterious gift of tongues. Saint Paul, both
here and at the Royal Chapel, appears under the earlier type adopted
whether by fancy or tradition to represent that saint,--that is, a
short, strong figure, with the head large, and almost devoid of hair,
except at the sides, and one dark lock in the centre of the massive
forehead. Over the western door-way is a mosaic of the Virgin with the
following leonine and loyal distich beneath it:--

"Sponsa suae prolis, O Stella puerpera Solis,
Pro cunctis ora, sed plus pro rege labora!"

There is an ample square cloister, with twenty-seven pairs of columns on
each side, once richly decorated in mosaics like those of San Giovanni
Laterano and San Paolo at Rome, but even more dilapidated than either
of these latter. Indeed, so entirely non-existent is the mosaic, the
twisted and channelled columns showing nothing but places "where the
pasty is not," that the more probable solution may be that want of funds
or of devotion has left the work unfinished. On the capital of one
column may be seen the figure of William the Good, who founded the
Cathedral in 1170. He bears in his arms a model of the building, which
here appears with circular-headed windows instead of the lanceolated
Gothic now existing.

In, perhaps, the very loveliest of the many lovely sites around Palermo
stands the small Moorish building of La Ziza. Moorish it may be called;
for the main feature of the edifice, a hall with a fountain trickling
along a channel in the pavements, is clearly due to the Saracens. These,
however, had availed themselves of Roman columns to support their
fretted ceilings, once gorgeous in color, but now desecrated with
whitewash. The Norman invaders have added their never-failing gold
mosaic,--while the Spaniard, after painting sundry scenes from Ovid's
"Metamorphoses" in a dreadfully barocco style, calls upon the world,
in those magniloquent phrases which somehow belong as of right to your
mighty Don, to admire the exquisite commingling of modern art with
antique beauty, to which his _fiat_ has given birth.

Somewhat of Spain, per