but she has been prophesying all the morning, and the
people round the wall in the background are in ecstasies at the lucidity
with which she has explained all sorts of difficulties that they had
never been able to understand till now. They are putting their
forefingers on their thumbs and their thumbs on their forefingers, and
saying how clearly they see it all and what a wonderful woman Anna is. A
prophet indeed is not generally without honour save in his own country,
but then a country is generally not without honour save with its own
prophet, and Anna has been glorifying her country rather than reviling
it. Besides, the rule may not have applied to prophetesses.

The Death of the Virgin is the last of the six chapels inside the church
itself. The Apostles, who of course are present, have all of them real
hair, but, if I may say so, they want a wash and a brush-up so very badly
that I cannot feel any confidence in writing about them. I should say
that, take them all round, they are a good average sample of apostle as
apostles generally go. Two or three of them are nervously anxious to
find appropriate quotations in books that lie open before them, which
they are searching with eager haste; but I do not see one figure about
which I should like to say positively that it is either good or bad.
There is a good bust of a man, matching the one in the Birth of the
Virgin chapel, which is said to be a portrait of Giovanni d'Enrico, but
it is not known whom it represents.

Outside the church, in three contiguous cells that form part of the
foundations, are:--

1. A dead Christ, the head of which is very impressive while the rest of
the figure is poor. I examined the treatment of the hair, which is terra-
cotta, and compared it with all other like hair in the chapels above
described; I could find nothing like it, and think it most likely that
Giacomo Ferro did the figure, and got Tabachetti to do the head, or that
they brought the head from some unused figure by Tabachetti at Varallo,
for I know no other artist of the time and neighbourhood who could have
done it.

2. A Magdalene in the desert. The desert is a little coal-cellar of an
arch, containing a skull and a profusion of pink and white paper
bouquets, the two largest of which the Magdalene is hugging while she is
saying her prayers. She is a very self-sufficient lady, who we may be
sure will not stay in the desert a day longer than she can help, and
while