them, but approves them specially because Mrs. Kelly will not allow them to be spoken of as 'ladies.' He is quite glad to see them enter in upon the place of the drunken spendthrift squireen, Barry Lynch, but I do not think he realizes how easily such a household produces in the next generation as finished ladies and gentlemen as can be found.

In the Ireland that he knew, the Roman Catholic was, as such, regarded as 'inferior in standing' even though he was, like Sir Nicholas Bodkin in The Land Leaguers, a baronet of long-established family. 'It was the business of a Protestant to take rent, and the business of a Catholic to pay rent.' Trollope records that sentiment, with a suggestion that its logic was not apparent to the Englishman. But none the less he was all for the old order and the Ireland of gentlemen and sportsmen with Protestants and Catholics in their normal positions. There will not easily be found a more powerful piece of description than that which introduces 'Black Daly,' Master of the Galway Blazers, nor a better chapter than the telling how Daly found the hunt stopped by the Land League. I defy the most extreme Nationalist, unless he were a thin bigot, to refuse sympathy to that grim, melancholy, devoted figure, confronted with what seemed to him the end of hunting - and of the world.

Well, neither the end of the world nor of hunting has come in Ireland, though Irish packs are, perhaps, more often than not kept by an Englishman, generally some Englishman who, like Trollope, has fallen in love with Ireland. But there is an end of the social order

that Trollope knew. Some chapters of The Land Leaguers give very well the impact of the revolution, or rather the first lapping-up of its tide on the protecting dykes. But as a whole the book has no value. Trollope judged these later phenomena from a distance, he was not living among them; had he been, it is doubtful whether he would have comprehended them. Irish his tory was a sealed book to him as to most of the Irish with whom he associated.

There is every reason to be thankful that Trollope did not waste more time on stories of Irish life. He avoided them because he knew they were unpopular. 'I cannot understand why it should be so,' he says in his autobiography, 'as the Irish character is peculiarly well fitted for romance.' That may, or may not, be true; but what had Anthony Trollope to do with romance? His invention belonged to the regions of prose, unheightened by any pulse of rhythm; but about scenes of English life it worked genially and naturally, with sure if limited comprehension. In Ireland his mind had to deal with the juxtaposition of two nations, in contact but not blended; and one of those nations was, by religion and by history, unknown and alien to this Englishman, who in consequence never gave us a story of Irish life in which all the parts harmonized and grew naturally into and out of each other. Yet, despite this literary defect, he had qualities of vision, of sympathy, and of honest understanding, that enabled him to describe phases of Irish social history with more justice than any other Englishman — indeed, than almost any Irishman — of his time.

SIENA fulfills, in the most fascinating and enchanting manner, two of the requirements of the traveler in search of medieval romantic cities—it is built on a hill, and it is surrounded by a wall. The hill is immense, with more than one summit, and the wall is intact. If you wander out through one of the gates, as I carelessly did one morning, expecting to reënter when I would by an ordinary breach, you must walk to the next before you can enter again; and the next is a long way off. Not only are the walls intact, but immediately outside them the country begins: vines, figs, olives, oxen, and the brown earth with peasants at work on it.. There is no debatable allotment ground: città one minute; podesta the

next.

All this, in these days, and especially to anyone who may have come to Siena from, say, Milan, where civilization is assertive and noisy, is very much to the good. Even better is the discovery that, within its massive ramparts, Siena is still a stronghold of antiquity. There may be newspapers, motor-cars with the most discordant horns, cinemas, and electric light; but the streets are still narrow and paved entirely with blocks of grooved stone; there are no sidewalks; and although little clattering horses and carts and donkeys and mules are everywhere, it is a point of honor with the Sienese, who are a healthy, independent, incurious folk, not to expect them to be there at From the Sunday Times (London pro-French Sunday paper), January 3, 10, 17

all, and to make with the utmost deliberateness the least possible room for them to pass. Add to this that it is a city of massive palaces, rising sheer from the narrow streets, some of extreme beauty and still in perfect repair, although none are now occupied by such families as they were built for, and - here is the wonder — a city of cleanliness and unimpeachable water.

If Siena were not often so painfully steep, walking in it would, to lovers of architecture, be the pleasantest pursuit imaginable, for there is always a discovery to be made a courtyard, a gateway, a window, a relief, a wroughtiron bracket, a piece of carving, a church that somehow you had missed before. Or a vista. And on its human side it touches hands with antiquity too, the old crafts still being carried on in the old quarters. Tanning seems to be a local industry, judging by the loads of skins that one meets and the pungent odor that often fills the air. The more friendly aroma of the mews is more common, for, although motorcars hoot with peculiar virulence, Siena in reality belongs still to its little horses. It is a city of unexpected stables. Small shops are still the rule, just big enough for a living without anxiety. Among these, fruiterers' are numerous, glowing with color and continually surprising a Northerner by their cheapness. Cobblers are numerous too, and no wonder when you consider the Sienese granite and the Sienese gradients.

The presence in the streets of so

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many representations of Romulus and Remus extracting nourishment from their foster mother you see this group on the tops of columns again and again, in relief on houses, and in pictorial form is due to the circumstance that Siena claims to have been founded by Senus, Remus's son. Of these representations of the she-wolf and the twins, perhaps the one in colored marbles inlaid in the floor of the Cathedral is the most dignified; but I like an ancient sculpture in the Museo del Opera, where the artist has departed from the ordinary treatment and has caught Romulus and Remus in a moment of repletion, leaving them free to fondle their deputy parent with no hint of cupboard love.

None of the great Italian churches ever suggests a crowd of worshipers, but I think that Siena's three immense fanes the Duomo, St. Agostino, and St. Domenico - give a completer impression of emptiness than any in the whole country. In the case of St. Agostino and St. Domenico, this may be due to the care with which they are tended, intense cleanliness and light emphasizing the absence of pews or chairs. Both are vast, and both are mere shells, with immensities of red floor space, and a series of altars in the nave and chapels in the choir, each with an Old Master in perfect condition. The emptiness of these great red floors may strike into the visitor-and particularly the Protestant visitor a certain chill; but when he enters the Duomo he is grateful, for otherwise he could not see the famous mosaics that cover it, and which, not inaptly, have been called the Bible in marble. I say mosaic, but to anyone coming here from Venice, with the rich and restless tessellated pavement of St. Mark's in mind, the word would be confusing. The two cathedrals could hardly be more opposed in decoration - St.

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Mark's all gold and color and Oriental caprice, with its multicolored floor billowing up and down, and Siena selfrespecting and austere, with its pavement strictly level and frigid in tone. If St. Mark's is in mosaic, this is merely in inlay. The famous graffiti are on such a scale that it is impossible to see them whole; one has to move over the canvas so to speak to understand them. Only from a cradle suspended from the roof could one really appreciate their power and vigor. But they are an unfailing source of interest, and the more so if one makes a study of the reproductions in little that hang in the Museo del Opera, where a plan of the whole cathedral as it was so nobly conceived and authorized by the Sienese in 1322, but so much of which remains unfinished, may also be consulted.

Tastes will differ as to the most interesting of the Biblical illustrations. I found myself again and again tracing out the horrors of the 'Massacre of the Innocents' by Matteo de Giovanni; but Beccafumi's 'Children of Israel in the Wilderness,' and Domenico de Niccolo's 'Judgment of Solomon' are likewise inexhaustible to the earth-creeping investigator. Perhaps the most amusing is the 'Absalom' of Pietro del Minella, the fatal coiffure having a new interest since the rise of the Fascisti, whose young bloods tend to a shock of hair carefully trained upward and crimped, quite in the Absalom style. I must not say that they derived their fashion in hair from the Siena Cathedral pavement, but they might have done so. They might also have found it in the spirited drawing of the Wind in one of the music books in the Cathedral library, although equally it might have come from our old friend Struwwelpeter.

The inlaid masterpieces of the floor are not the only pictorial allurements of the Duomo. One must go thither also to see the Pinturicchios, which are

divided between the little chapel of St. John the Baptist and the Library where the illuminated psalters are kept. In the Library is Pinturicchio's famous series of paintings representing scenes in the life of Pius II (1458-1464), whose family name was Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, and whose family palace in the Via de Città still stands, in this antiseptic air, exactly as he must have known it, at any rate externally, but inside transformed to suit the purposes of the Banca d'Italia.

Bernardino Pinturicchio comes not too well out of Vasari's Lives. He was among those artists - Sodoma, also a Sienese hero, is another—against whom the biographer had a grudge; but to us he is nothing but a benefactor and dispenser of delight. According to Vasari, he was an indifferent painter, whose principal idea was to please his exalted patrons, whether princes or Popes, not minding whether, in doing so, he contravened the canons of art. Vasari also attributes his death to pique and disappointment at not participating in the spoil-five hundred golden ducats that burst from a chest in the painting-room set apart for him by the monks at San Francesco, also in Siena. Finally, Vasari roundly states that Raphael, who had been invited to assist in this work in the Piccolomini series, and who was then (1505) twenty-two, Pinturicchio being fifty-one, made all the designs and did much of the work; but there is no reason to believe this. Yet Raphael's hand certainly is to be found there, and might have remained to enrich Siena through commissions of his own but for his excitement on hearing that Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were in competition over a battle piece to be painted for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence; and off he went to see the fun. Delightful and sparkling and triumphant as is the Pius II series, I think

that I prefer Pinturicchio's quieter and tenderer paintings in the chapel of St. John the Baptist, depicting scenes in the life of the saint - his birth, standing immediately, as though to foretell his destiny, in his little basin, while one nurse bathes him and another waits with a towel to dry the tiny mystic; his isolation in the desert among deer and wild flowers; and his preachings in the wilderness, one of his listeners being a thoughtful boy carrying something very like a Wessex thumb-stick. All these are very sweet and gentle. And then there is the famous picture of the young knight in armor making his devotions, which is so familiar in reproductions the knight being Alberti Arringhieri.

Pinturicchio is also to be found at the Accademia, and although the Sodomas will, I suppose, always be the most popular pictures there with the Sienese, few strangers omit to stop at the photograph stall as they pass out, to buy a reproduction, in full or in detail, of Pinturicchio's 'Holy Family' with the adorable little Jesus and Saint John in it. This picture must be known all over the world.

The work of Sodoma is everywhere, always accomplished and with a certain charm and sweetness, but I find it impossible to think of it as even of the second class. And impossible also to believe that the artist brought to it any depth of feeling or any rapture. Dipping into Vasari, I find that Sodoma was his particular black beast. He can find almost nothing good to say of him, and elevates Beccafumi by contrast. Beccafumi was sincere, painstaking, pious, his only defect being that he was 'somewhat excessively disposed to solitude'; Giannantonio Bazzi, known as Sodoma, was frivolous, careless, and given to tomfoolery. Beccafumi was always busy and continually experimenting - he died of overwork while laboring at a new medium; Sod

painted as little as was necessary and as quickly as possible, and then got back to his practical jokes, his horse-racing, at which he was very successful, gaining many cups which he was so vain as to exhibit in his window- and his menagerie.

This collection of animals, which Vasari cannot forgive, included badgers, squirrels, apes, cat-a-mountains, dwarf asses, horses and barbs, magpies, dwarf chickens, tortoises, and Indian doves. The painter also had a raven that counterfeited his master's voice to perfection, and especially when anyone knocked at the door. In short, 'the dwelling of this man seemed like the very ark of Noah.' None the less, Sodoma, by his personal charm, his facility, and a certain agreeable quality in his pictures, which often prove him to have had greater gifts than he was generally concerned to employ, obtained commissions on every hand, and in spite of his reputation as a blagueur and playboy was actually chosen by the general of the monks of Monte Oliveto to complete a pictorial life of Saint Benedict begun by no less a moralist and whole-hearted devotee of art and rectitude than Luca Signorelli.

One of the longer excursions from Siena is to the monastery where these frescoes are to be seen. It is fifteen miles away through hilly country, with here and there a white farmhouse, and here and there a village, and always the sentinel cypress. The journey in the old days of horses must have been very tedious; even in the modern car it is long enough to have monotony. The last few miles are spent in climbing winding roads, with occasional halts while sheep reluctantly make way. And at length the monastery is seen, with cypresses, no longer singly, but in battalions, thronging about it, set on a terrace ridge in a forest, amid vast steepnesses, a bleak, drear settlement of recluses bent

The monastery is no longer a living force; only a few monks remain; and the place suggests desolation. I was there on a peculiarly forbidding day of rain and wind, and my impression is therefore gloomy; but even in sunshine one must be aware of decay and emptiness. The frescoes are in the cloisters, with insufficient protection from the weather, so that some are in bad repair and a few obliterated in places. As an illustrated biography of Saint Benedict the series is complete: no salient episode as related by Saint Gregory has been neglected by the two artists. Personally, I think Luca's representation of Benedict recognizing Totila is the masterpiece, but many of Sodoma's are very engaging and debonair, if not conspicuously pious; and it is easy to believe that the monks of Monte Oliveto, who enjoyed watching him both at work and play, were not improved in discipline during the progress of his task.

I said something just now about the indomitable Italian builder, and truly Siena itself is another proof of his courage and persistence. Not only is its architecture beautiful, in gross and in detail, but it has a superb solidity. I have spoken of its surrounding walls. Equally massive are the walls of that formidable fortress on the edge of the city,- formidable in the past, when assailants had to approach it from the valley, but now like all other fortresses rendered futile by the airplanes, — the ramparts of which are a popular resort, especially on fine Sundays. It is good to see these blocks of stone after the rapid steel-girder building-methods in use nowadays in England and America. One side of the fort was once a pallone court, but Siena has no pallone to-day, and when I was there those who would