vely in the French work of this
age; Niccolo has in some way discovered classic art, and has been
content with that, as the humanists of the Renaissance were to be
content with the discovery of ancient literature later: he has imitated
the statues and the bas-reliefs of the sarcophagi, as they copied
Cicero.

To pass from the Baptistery into the Campo Santo, where among Christian
graves the cypresses are dying in the earth of Calvary, and the urns and
sarcophagi of pagan days hold Christian dust, is perhaps to make easier
the explanation we need of the art of Niccolo. Here, it is said, he
often wandered "among the many spoils of marbles brought by the
armaments of Pisa to this city." Among these ancient sarcophagi there is
one where you may find the Chase of Meleager and the Calydonian boar;
this was placed by the Pisans in the facade of the Duomo opposite S.
Rocco, and was used as a tomb for the Contessa Beatrice, the mother of
the great Contessa Matilda. Was it while wandering here, in looking so
often on that tomb on his way to Mass, that he was moved by its beauty
till his heart remembered its childhood in a whole world of such things?
It must have been so, for here all things meet together and are
reconciled in death.

Out of the dust and heat of the Piazza one comes into a cool cloister
that surrounds a quadrangle open to the sky, in which a cypress still
lives. The sun fills the garden with a golden beauty, in which the
butterflies flit from flower to flower over the dead. I do not know a
place more silent or more beautiful. One lingers in the cool shadow of
the cloisters before many an old marble,--a vase carved with
Bacchanalian women, the head of Achilles, or the bust of Isotta of
Rimini. But it is before the fresco of the Triumph of Death that one
stays longest, trying to understand the dainty treatment of so horrible
a subject. Those fair ladies riding on horseback with so brave a show of
cavaliers, even they too must come at last to be just dust, is it, or
like that swollen body, which seems to taint even the summer sunshine,
lying there by the wayside, and come upon so unexpectedly? What
love-song was that troubadour, fluttering with ribbons, singing to that
little company under the orange-trees, cavaliers and ladies returned
from the chase, or whiling away a summer afternoon playing with their
falcons and their dogs? The servants have spread rich carpets for their
feet, and into the picture trips a sing