he pioneers who first
won through to our West. The last may be the greatest, but the first
will always have been the first, the daring, the romantic, who did what
no man had done before them.

And so it is also in the peaceful ways of art. Giotto, Beato Angelico,
Lippo Lippi, Botticelli, never attained to the greatness of Lionardo or
Michelangelo or Raphael. Sober criticism can never admit that they did,
whatever soft-hearted enthusiasts may say and write. But those earlier
men had something which the later ones had not, both in merit and in
genius. They fought against greater odds, with poorer weapons, and where
their strength failed them, heart and feeling took the place of
strength; and their truth and their tenderness went straight to the
heart of their young world, as only the highest perfection of illusion
could appeal to the eyes of the critical, half-sceptic generation that
came after them.

And so, although it be true that art is not dependent on genius alone,
but also on mechanical skill, yet there is something in art which is
dependent on genius and on nothing else. It is that something which
touches, that something which creates, that something which itself is
life; that something which belongs, in all ages, to those who grope to
the light through darkness; that something of which we almost lose sight
in the great completeness of the greatest artists, but which hovers like
a halo of glory upon the brows of Italy's earliest, truest and tenderest
painters.

[Illustration]

REGION XIV BORGO

Borgo, the 'Suburb,' is the last of the fourteen Regions, and is one of
the largest and most important of all, for within its limits stand Saint
Peter's, the Vatican, and the Mausoleum of Hadrian--the biggest church,
the biggest palace and the biggest tomb in the whole world.

To those who know something of Rome's great drama, the Castle of Sant'
Angelo is the most impressive of all her monuments. Like the Colosseum,
it stands out in its round strength alone, sun-gilt and shadowy brown
against the profound sky. Like the great Amphitheatre, it has been
buffeted in the storms of ages and is war-worn without, to the highest
reach of a mounted man, and dinted above that by every missile invented
in twelve hundred years, from the slinger's pebble or leaden bullet to
the cannon ball of the French artillery. Like the Colosseum, it is the
crestless trunk of its former self. But it has life in it still, whereas
the C