a, and Modena and Urbino,
and Cortona and Perugia, there would grow up a gentle lad who from
infancy most loved to stand and gaze at the missal paintings in his
mother's house, and the coena in the monk's refectory, and when he had
fulfilled some twelve or fifteen years, his people would give in to his
wish and send him to some bottega to learn the management of colours.

"Then he would grow to be a man; and his town would be proud of him, and
find him the choicest of all work in its churches and its convents, so
that all his days were filled without his ever wandering out of reach of
his native vesper bells.

"He would make his dwelling in the heart of his birthplace, close under
its cathedral, with the tender sadness of the olive hills stretching
above and around; in the basiliche or the monasteries his labour would
daily lie; he would have a docile band of hopeful boyish pupils with
innocent eyes of wonder for all he did or said; he would paint his
wife's face for the Madonna's, and his little son's for the child
Angel's; he would go out into the fields and gather the olive bough, and
the feathery corn, and the golden fruits, and paint them tenderly on
ground of gold or blue, in symbol of those heavenly things of which the
bells were for ever telling all those who chose to hear; he would sit in
the lustrous nights in the shade of his own vines and pity those who
were not as he was; now and then horsemen would come spurring in across
the hills and bring news with them of battles fought, of cities lost and
won; and he would listen with the rest in the market-place, and go home
through the moonlight thinking that it was well to create the holy
things before which the fiercest reiter and the rudest free-lance would
drop the point of the sword and make the sign of the cross.

"It must have been a good life--good to its close in the cathedral
crypt--and so common too; there were scores such lived out in these
little towns of Italy, half monastery and half fortress, that were
scattered over hill and plain, by sea and river, on marsh and mountain,
from the day-dawn of Cimabue to the afterglow of the Carracci.

"And their work lives after them; the little towns are all grey and
still and half peopled now; the iris grows on the ramparts, the canes
wave in the moats, the shadows sleep in the silent market-place, the
great convents shelter half-a-dozen monks, the dim majestic churches are
damp and desolate, and have the scent