le longer, and offered up a lamb as a pretext to
gain time. Perhaps he guessed about his mother-in-law, or he may
have asked the angel. Of course, even in spite of such evidence as
this, I may be mistaken about the Virgin's grandmother's sex, and
the sacristan may be right; but I can only say that if the lady
sitting by St. Anne's bedside at Montrigone is the Virgin's father--
well, in that case I must reconsider a good deal that I have been
accustomed to believe was beyond question.

Taken singly, I suppose that none of the figures in the chapel,
except the Virgin's grandmother, should be rated very highly. The
under-nurse is the next best figure, and might very well be
Tabachetti's, for neither Giovanni d'Enrico nor Giacomo Ferro was
successful with his female characters. There is not a single really
comfortable woman in any chapel by either of them on the Sacro Monte
at Varallo. Tabachetti, on the other hand, delighted in women; if
they were young he made them comely and engaging, if they were old
he gave them dignity and individual character, and the under-nurse
is much more in accordance with Tabachetti's habitual mental
attitude than with D'Enrico's or Giacomo Ferro's. Still there are
only four figures out of the eleven that are mere otiose supers, and
taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant impression as being
throughout naive and homely, and sometimes, which is of less
importance, technically excellent.

Allowance must, of course, be made for tawdry accessories and
repeated coats of shiny oleaginous paint--very disagreeable where it
has peeled off and almost more so where it has not. What work could
stand against such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures
have had to put up with? Take the Venus of Milo; let her be done in
terra-cotta, and have run, not much, but still something, in the
baking; paint her pink, two oils, all over, and then varnish her--it
will help to preserve the paint; glue a lot of horsehair on to her
pate, half of which shall have come off, leaving the glue still
showing; scrape her, not too thoroughly, get the village drawing-
master to paint her again, and the drawing-master in the next
provincial town to put a forest background behind her with the
brightest emerald-green leaves that he can do for the money; let
this painting and scraping and repainting be repeated several times
over; festoon her with pink and white flowers made of tissue paper;
surround her with