ster be
"passionate," and he would see you, S. Zita, without "transports of
rage." Your biographer tells us that it is not to be conceived how much
you had continually to suffer in that situation. Unjustly despised,
overburdened, reviled, and often beaten, you never repined nor lost
patience, but always preserved the same sweetness in your countenance,
and abated nothing of your application to your duties. Moreover, you
were willing to respect your fellow-servants as your superiors. And if
you were sent on a commission a mile or two, in the greatest storms, you
set out without delay, executed your business punctually, and returned
often almost drowned, without showing any sign of murmuring. And at
last, S. Zita, they found you out, they began to treat you better, they
even thought so well of you that a single word from you would often
suffice to check the greatest transports of your master's rage; and you
would cast yourself at the feet of that terrific man, to appease him in
favour of others. And all these and more were your virgin virtues, lost,
gone, forgotten out of mind, by a world that dreams of no heavenly
housemaid save in Lucca where you lived, and where they still keep your
April festa, and lay their nosegays on your grave.

So I passed in Lucca from church to church, finding here the body of a
little saint, there the tomb of a soldier, or the monument of some dear
dead woman. In S. Francesco, that desecrated great mausoleum that lies
at the end of the Via di S. Francesco not far from the garden tower of
Paolo Guinigi, I came upon the humble grave of Castruccio Castracani. In
S. Romano, at the other end of the city behind the Palazzo Provinciale,
it was the shrine of that S. Romano who was the gaoler of S. Lorenzo I
found, a tomb with the delicate flowerlike body of the murdered saint
carved there in gilded alabaster by Matteo Civitali.

It is chiefly Civitali's work you seek in the Museo in Palazzo
Provinciale, for, fine as the work of Bartolommeo is in two pictures to
be found there, it is for something more of the country than that you
are to come to Lucca. There, in a Madonna Assunta carved in wood and
plaster, and daintily painted as it seems he loved to do, you have
perhaps the most charming work that has come from his bottega. He was
not a great sculptor, but he had seen the vineyards round about, he had
wandered in the little woods at the city gates, he had watched the dawn
run down the valleys, and t