The series which begins, like the speech of the Intendant in “Les Plaideurs,” “Avant la creation du monde” complies with the wish of (the judge?) by going on to the Deluge, in a train of singularly meagre figures, most haggard of whom is Cain, here represented (as in the Campo Santo of Pisa) receiving his death accidentally from the hand of Lamech.  In the passage of the beasts to the Ark, Noah coaxes the lion on board, and in the next compartment the patriarch shoves the king of beasts down the plank in a most ludicrous fashion.  The mosaics of the New Testament are less archaic, though still very old, too old to be infected by the tricks of later Romanism,—­such, for instance, as introducing the Virgin among the receivers of the mysterious gift of tongues.  Saint Paul, both here and at the Royal Chapel, appears under the earlier type adopted whether by fancy or tradition to represent that saint,—­that is, a short, strong figure, with the head large, and almost devoid of hair, except at the sides, and one dark lock in the centre of the massive forehead.  Over the western door-way is a mosaic of the Virgin with the following leonine and loyal distich beneath it:—­

  “Sponsa suae prolis, O Stella puerpera Solis,
  Pro cunctis ora, sed plus pro rege labora!”

There is an ample square cloister, with twenty-seven pairs of columns on each side, once richly decorated in mosaics like those of San Giovanni Laterano and San Paolo at Rome, but even more dilapidated than either of these latter.  Indeed, so entirely non-existent is the mosaic, the twisted and channelled columns showing nothing but places “where the pasty is not,” that the more probable solution may be that want of funds or of devotion has left the work unfinished.  On the capital of one column may be seen the figure of William the Good, who founded the Cathedral in 1170.  He bears in his arms a model of the building, which here appears with circular-headed windows instead of the lanceolated Gothic now existing.

In, perhaps, the very loveliest of the many lovely sites around Palermo stands the small Moorish building of La Ziza.  Moorish it may be called; for the main feature of the edifice, a hall with a fountain trickling along a channel in the pavements, is clearly due to the Saracens.  These, however, had availed themselves of Roman columns to support their fretted ceilings, once gorgeous in color, but now desecrated with whitewash.  The Norman invaders have added their never-failing gold mosaic,—­while the Spaniard, after painting sundry scenes from Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” in a dreadfully barocco style, calls upon the world, in those magniloquent phrases which somehow belong as of right to your mighty Don, to admire the exquisite commingling of modern art with antique beauty, to which his fiat has given birth.