different realm of feeling. Medallions above the doors of sacristy
and chancel, stately figures reared aloft beneath gigantic canopies, men
and women slumbering with folded hands upon their marble biers--we read
in all those sculptured forms a strange record of human restlessness
resolved into the quiet of the tomb. The iniquities of Gian Galeazzo
Visconti, _il gran Biscione_; the blood-thirst of Gian Maria; the dark
designs of Filippo and his secret vices; Francesco Sforza's treason;
Galeazzo Maria's vanities and lusts; their tyrants' dread of thunder and
the knife; their awful deaths by pestilence and the assassin's poniard;
their selfishness, oppression, cruelty, and fraud; the murders of their
kinsmen; their labyrinthine plots and acts of broken faith--all is
tranquil now, and we can say to each what Bosola found for the Duchess
of Malfi ere her execution:

Much you had of land and rent;
Your length in clay's now competent:
A long war disturbed your mind;
Here your perfect peace is signed!

Some of these faces are commonplace, with _bourgeois_ cunning written on
the heavy features; one is bluff, another stolid, a third bloated, a
fourth stately. The sculptors have dealt fairly with all, and not one
has the lineaments of utter baseness. To Cristoforo Solari's statues of
Lodovico Sforza and his wife, Beatrice d'Este, the palm of excellence
in art and of historical interest must be awarded. Sculpture has rarely
been more dignified and true to life than here. The woman with her short
clustering curls, the man with his strong face, are resting after that
long fever which brought woe to Italy, to Europe a new age, and to the
boasted minion of fortune a slow death in the prison palace of Loches.
Attired in ducal robes, they lie in state; and the sculptor has carved
the lashes on their eyelids heavy with death's marmoreal sleep. He, at
least, has passed no judgment on their crimes. Let us, too, bow and
leave their memories to the historian's pen, their spirits to God's
mercy.

After all wanderings in this temple of art, we return to Antonio Amadeo,
to his long-haired seraphs playing on the lutes of Paradise, to his
angels of the Passion with their fluttering robes and arms outspread in
agony, to his saints and satyrs mingled on pilasters of the marble
doorways, his delicate _Lavabo_ decorations, and his hymns of piety
expressed in noble forms of weeping women and dead Christs. Wherever we
may pass, this