of the buildings; and Cardinal Gastaldi, who had been refused
the privilege of placing his arms upon a church which he had desired to
build in Bologna, and was looking about for an opportunity of
perpetuating his name, finished the two churches, his attention having
been first called to them by the old woman's humble bequest.

As for the Pincio itself, and the ascent to it from the Piazza del
Popolo, all that land was but a grass-grown hillside, crowned by a few
small and scattered villas and scantily furnished with trees, until the
beginning of the present century; and the public gardens of the earlier
time were those of the famous and beautiful Villa Medici, which Napoleon
the First bestowed upon the French Academy. It was there that the
fashionable Romans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used to
meet, and walk, and be carried about in gilded sedan-chairs, and flirt,
and gossip, and exchange views on politics and opinions about the latest
scandal. That was indeed a very strange society, further from us in many
ways than the world of the Renascence, or even of the Crusades; for the
Middle Age was strong in the sincerity of its beliefs, as we are
powerful in the cynicism of our single-hearted faith in riches; but the
fabric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was founded upon the
abuse of an already declining power; it was built up in the most
extraordinary and elaborate affectation, and it was guarded by a system
of dissimulation which outdid that of our own day by many degrees, and
possibly surpassed the hypocrisy of any preceding age.

No one, indeed, can successfully uphold the idea that the high
development of art in any shape is of necessity coincident with a strong
growth of religion or moral conviction. Perugino made no secret of being
an atheist; Lionardo da Vinci was a scientific sceptic; Raphael was an
amiable rake, no better and no worse than the majority of those gifted
pupils to whom he was at once a model of perfection and an example of
free living; and those who maintain that art is always the expression of
a people's religion have but an imperfect acquaintance with the age of
Praxiteles, Apelles and Zeuxis. Yet the idea itself has a foundation,
lying in something which is as hard to define as it is impossible to
ignore; for if art be not a growth out of faith, it is always the result
of a faith that has been, since although it is possible to conceive of
religion without art, it is out