dles enthusiasm,
still does not fail to please. It looks as though of somewhat older date
than the Birth of the Virgin chapel, and I should say shows more signs of
direct Valsesian influence. In Marocco's book about Oropa it is ascribed
to Aureggio, but I find it difficult to accept this.

The seventh, and in many respects most interesting chapel at Oropa, shows
what is in reality a medieval Italian girl school, as nearly like the
thing itself as the artist could make it; we are expected, however, to
see in this the high-class kind of Girton College for young gentlewomen
that was attached to the Temple at Jerusalem, under the direction of the
Chief Priest's wife, or some one of his near female relatives. Here all
well-to-do Jewish young women completed their education, and here
accordingly we find the Virgin, whose parents desired she should shine in
every accomplishment, and enjoy all the advantages their ample means
commanded.

I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her
Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple College.
These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other than eventful;
but incidents, or bits of life, are like living forms--it is only here
and here, as by rare chance, that one of them gets arrested and
fossilised; the greater number disappear like the greater number of
antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one of these flies, as it
were, of life should get preserved in amber more than another. Talk,
indeed, about luck and cunning; what a grain of sand as against a
hundredweight is cunning's share here as against luck's. What moment
could be more humdrum and unworthy of special record than the one chosen
by the artist for the chapel we are considering? Why should this one get
arrested in its flight and made immortal when so many worthier ones have
perished? Yet preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's
wand had struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others
who do duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as
sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours are
like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the other left,
and none can give the reason more than he can say why Gallio should have
won immortality by caring for none of "these things."

It seems to me, moreover, that fairies have changed their practice now in
the matter of sleeping beauties, mu