ing down idiotic astonishment and rebuke from the apse;
skin-clad skeletons hanging on crosses, or stuck all over with arrows,
or stretched on gridirons; women and monks with heads aside in perpetual
lamentation. I have seen enough of those wry-necked favourites of
heaven at Constantinople. But what is this bronze door rough with
imagery? These women's figures seem moulded in a different spirit from
those starved and staring saints I spoke of: these heads in high relief
speak of a human mind within them, instead of looking like an index to
perpetual spasms and colic."

"Yes, yes," said Nello, with some triumph. "I think we shall show you
by-and-by that our Florentine art is not in a state of barbarism. These
gates, my fine young man, were moulded half a century ago, by our
Lorenzo Ghiberti, when he counted hardly so many years as you do."

"Ah, I remember," said the stranger, turning away, like one whose
appetite for contemplation was soon satisfied. "I have heard that your
Tuscan sculptors and painters have been studying the antique a little.
But with monks for models, and the legends of mad hermits and martyrs
for subjects, the vision of Olympus itself would be of small use to
them."

"I understand," said Nello, with a significant shrug, as they walked
along. "You are of the same mind as Michele Marullo, ay, and as Angelo
Poliziano himself, in spite of his canonicate, when he relaxes himself a
little in my shop after his lectures, and talks of the gods awaking from
their long sleep and making the woods and streams vital once more. But
he rails against the Roman scholars who want to make us all talk Latin
again: `My ears,' he says, `are sufficiently flayed by the barbarisms of
the learned, and if the vulgar are to talk Latin I would as soon have
been in Florence the day they took to beating all the kettles in the
city because the bells were not enough to stay the wrath of the saints.'
Ah, Messer Greco, if you want to know the flavour of our scholarship,
you must frequent my shop: it is the focus of Florentine intellect, and
in that sense the navel of the earth--as my great predecessor,
Burchiello, said of _his_ shop, on the more frivolous pretension that
his street of the Calimara was the centre of our city. And here we are
at the sign of `Apollo and the Razor.' Apollo, you see, is bestowing
the razor on the Triptolemus of our craft, the first reaper of beards,
the sublime _Anonimo_, whose mysterious identi