g over him and
talking to him, is among the best figures; some of the disappointed
suitors who are breaking their wands are also very good.

The angel in the Annunciation chapel, which comes next in order, is a
fine, burly, ship's-figurehead, commercial-hotel sort of being enough,
but the Virgin is very ordinary. There is no real hair and no fresco
background, only three dingy old blistered pictures of no interest
whatever.

In the visit of Mary to Elizabeth there are three pleasing subordinate
lady attendants, two to the left and one to the right of the principal
figures; but these figures themselves are not satisfactory. There is no
fresco background. Some of the figures have real hair and some terra
cotta.

In the Circumcision and Purification chapel--for both these events seem
contemplated in the one that follows--there are doves, but there is
neither dog nor knife. Still Simeon, who has the infant Saviour in his
arms, is looking at him in a way which can only mean that, knife or no
knife, the matter is not going to end here. At Varallo they have now got
a dreadful knife for the Circumcision chapel. They had none last winter.
What they have now got would do very well to kill a bullock with, but
could not be used professionally with safety for any animal smaller than
a rhinoceros. I imagine that some one was sent to Novara to buy a knife,
and that, thinking it was for the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, he
got the biggest he could see. Then when he brought it back people said
"chow" several times, and put it upon the table and went away.

Returning to Montrigone, the Simeon is an excellent figure, and the
Virgin is fairly good, but the prophetess Anna, who stands just behind
her, is by far the most interesting in the group, and is alone enough to
make me feel sure that Tabachetti gave more or less help here, as he had
done years before at Orta. She, too, like the Virgin's grandmother, is a
widow lady, and wears collars of a cut that seems to have prevailed ever
since the Virgin was born some twenty years previously. There is a
largeness and simplicity of treatment about the figure to which none but
an artist of the highest rank can reach, and D'Enrico was not more than a
second or third-rate man. The hood is like Handel's Truth sailing upon
the broad wings of Time, a prophetic strain that nothing but the old
experience of a great poet can reach. The lips of the prophetess are for
the moment closed,