A little doorway close by used to lead to the cloisters, and a mercenary sacristan was never far distant, only too ready to unlock for a fee what should never have been locked, and black with fury if he got nothing.  But all this has now been done away with, and the entrance to the cloisters is from the Piazza, just to the left of the church, and there is a turnstile and a fee of fifty centimes.  At S. Lorenzo the cloisters are free.  At the Carmine and the Annunziata the cloisters are free.  At S. Croce the charge is a lira and at S. Maria Novella half a lira.  To make a charge for the cloisters alone seems to me utterly wicked.  Let the Pazzi Chapel at S. Croce and the Spanish Chapel here have fees, if you like; but the cloisters should be open to all.  Children should be encouraged to play there.

Since, however, S. Maria Novella imposes a fee we must pay it, and the new arrangement at any rate carries this advantage with it, that one knows what one is expected to pay and can count on entrance.

The cloisters are everywhere interesting to loiter in, but their chief fame is derived from the Spanish Chapel, which gained that name when in 1566 it was put at the disposal of Eleanor of Toledo’s suite on the occasion of her marriage to Cosimo I. Nothing Spanish about it otherwise.  Both structure and frescoes belong to the fourteenth century.  Of these frescoes, which are of historical and human interest rather than artistically beautiful, that one on the right wall as we enter is the most famous.  It is a pictorial glorification of the Dominican order triumphant; with a vivid reminder of the origin of the word Dominican in the episode of the wolves (or heretics) being attacked by black and white dogs, the Canes Domini, or hounds of the Lord.  The “Mornings in Florence” should here be consulted again, for Ruskin made a very thorough and characteristically decisive analysis of these paintings, which, whether one agrees with it or not, is profoundly interesting.  Poor old Vasari, who so patiently described them too and named a number of the originals of the portraits, is now shelved, and from both his artists, Simone Martini and Taddeo Gaddi, has the authorship been taken by modern experts.  Some one, however, must have done the work.  The Duomo as represented here is not the Duomo of fact, which had not then its dome, but of anticipation.

Opposite, we see a representation of the triumph of the greatest of the Dominicans, after its founder, S. Thomas Aquinas, the author of the “Summa Theologiae,” who died in 1274.  The painter shows the Angelic Doctor enthroned amid saints and patriarchs and heavenly attendants, while three powerful heretics grovel at his feet, and beneath are the Sciences and Moral Qualities and certain distinguished men who served them conspicuously, such as Aristotle, the logician, whom S. Thomas Aquinas edited, and Cicero, the rhetorician.  In real life Aquinas was so modest and retiring that he would accept no exalted