y excellent.

Allowance must, of course, be made for tawdry accessories and repeated
coats of shiny oleaginous paint--very disagreeable where it has peeled
off and almost more so where it has not. What work could stand against
such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures have had to put up
with? Take the Venus of Milo; let her be done in terra-cotta, and have
run, not much, but still something, in the baking; paint her pink, two
oils, all over, and then varnish her--it will help to preserve the paint;
glue a lot of horsehair on to her pate, half of which shall have come
off, leaving the glue still showing; scrape her, not too thoroughly, get
the village drawing-master to paint her again, and the drawing-master in
the next provincial town to put a forest background behind her with the
brightest emerald-green leaves that he can do for the money; let this
painting and scraping and repainting be repeated several times over;
festoon her with pink and white flowers made of tissue paper; surround
her with the cheapest German imitations of the cheapest decorations that
Birmingham can produce; let the night air and winter fogs get at her for
three hundred years, and how easy, I wonder, will it be to see the
goddess who will be still in great part there? True, in the case of the
Birth of the Virgin chapel at Montrigone, there is no real hair and no
fresco background, but time has had abundant opportunities without these.
I will conclude my notice of this chapel by saying that on the left,
above the door through which the under-under-nurse's drudge is about to
pass, there is a good painted terra-cotta bust, said--but I believe on no
authority--to be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico. Others say that the
Virgin's grandmother is Giovanni d'Enrico, but this is even more absurd
than supposing her to be St. Joachim.

The next chapel to the Birth of the Virgin is that of the _Sposalizio_.
There is no figure here which suggests Tabachetti, but still there are
some very good ones. The best have no taint of _barocco_; the man who
did them, whoever he may have been, had evidently a good deal of life and
go, was taking reasonable pains, and did not know too much. Where this
is the case no work can fail to please. Some of the figures have real
hair and some terra cotta. There is no fresco background worth
mentioning. A man sitting on the steps of the altar with a book on his
lap, and holding up his hand to another, who is leanin