t. While the names of Braccio, his master
in the art of war, and of Piccinino, his great adversary, are familiar
to few but professed students, no one who has visited either Bergamo
or Venice can fail to have learned something about the founder of the
Chapel of S. John and the original of Leopardi's bronze. The annals
of sculpture assign to Verocchio, of Florence, the principal share in
this statue: but Verocchio died before it was cast; and even granting
that he designed the model, its execution must be attributed to his
collaborator, the Venetian Leopardi. For my own part, I am loth to
admit that the chief credit of this masterpiece belongs to a man whose
undisputed work at Florence shows but little of its living spirit and
splendour of suggested motion. That the Tuscan science of Verocchio
secured conscientious modelling for man and horse may be assumed; but
I am fain to believe that the concentrated fire which animates them
both is due in no small measure to the handling of his northern
fellow-craftsman.

While immersed in the dreary records of crimes, treasons, cruelties,
and base ambitions, which constitute the bulk of fifteenth-century
Italian history, it is refreshing to meet with a character so frank
and manly, so simply pious and comparatively free from stain, as
Colleoni. The only general of his day who can bear comparison with
him for purity of public life and decency in conduct, was Federigo di
Montefeltro. Even here, the comparison redounds to Colleoni's credit;
for he, unlike the Duke of Urbino, rose to eminence by his own
exertion in a profession fraught with peril to men of ambition and
energy. Federigo started with a principality sufficient to satisfy
his just desires for power. Nothing but his own sense of right and
prudence restrained Colleoni upon the path which brought Francesco
Sforza to a duchy by dishonourable dealings, and Carmagnola to the
scaffold by questionable practice against his masters.

* * * * *

_CREMA AND THE CRUCIFIX_

Few people visit Crema. It is a little country town of Lombardy,
between Cremona and Treviglio, with no historic memories but very
misty ones belonging to the days of the Visconti dynasty. On every
side around the city walls stretch smiling vineyards and rich meadows,
where the elms are married to the mulberry-trees by long festoons of
foliage hiding purple grapes, where the sunflowers droop their heavy
golden heads among t