of his text are the poetical quotations and exquisite prose-bits from Ruskin, Swinburne, Symonds and others whose pens sometimes turn into the pencil of a great painter.  The author’s own descriptions are extremely faithful and charming.  To those who have made the journey from Florence to Rome a single fine page of the introduction brings back a thrill of that long ecstasy.  In these few quiet words he spreads Thrasymene before us:  “It has a soft, still beauty especially its own.  Upon the vast expanse of shallow pale-green waters, surrounded by low-lying hills, storms have scarcely any effect, and the birds which float over it and the fishing-boats which skim across its surface are reflected as in a mirror.  At Passignano and Torricella picturesque villages, chiefly occupied by fishermen, jut out into the water, but otherwise the reedy shore is perfectly desolate on this side, though beyond the lake convents and villages crown the hills which rise between us and the pale violet mountains beyond Montepulciano.”  Nothing can be more lifelike than the following picture of the tract around Siena:  “Scarcely do we pass beyond the rose-hung walls which encircle the fortifications than we are in an upland desert, piteously bleak in winter, but most lovely when spring comes to clothe it.  The volcanic nature of the soil in these parts gives a softer tint than usual to the coloring.  The miles upon miles of open gray-green country, treeless, hedgeless, houseless, swoop toward one another with the strangest sinuosities and rifts and knobs of volcanic earth, till at last they sink in faint mists, only to rise again in pink and blue distances, so far off, so pale and aerial, that they can scarcely be distinguished from the atmosphere itself.  Only here and there a lonely convent with a few black cypress spires clustered round it, or a solitary cross which the peasants choose as their midday resting-place, cuts the pellucid sky.  Here in these great uplands, where all is so immense, the very sky itself seems more full of space than elsewhere:  it is not the deep blue of the South, but so soft and aerial that it looks as if it were indeed the very heaven itself, only very far away.”

The chapter on Ravenna is the best in the book:  it is an admirable piece of work, a complete monograph.  Everything is there—­history, legends, art—­and the quotations and illustrations are peculiarly beautiful and convincing.

Mr. Hare, like many gentlemen of similar tastes and tendencies, does not seem to have a strong sense of humor, although now and then he condescends to smile as he repeats some local legend, such as that of the crucifix at S. Francesco delle Cariere, which awoke an overwearied devotee, who had fallen asleep on his knees before it, with “un soavissimo schiaffo,” the gentlest slap, and bade him go to sleep in the dormitory.  He speaks of an ancient custom, not mentioned by Murray, of harboring lost cats in the cloister of San Lorenzo at Florence:  “The feeding of the cats, which takes place when the clock strikes twelve, is a most curious sight....  From every roof and arch and parapet-wall, mewing, hissing and screaming, the cats rush down to devour.”  It sounds like a wicked parody on the poetic assembling of the Venetian pigeons at the daily scattering of grain in the square of St. Mark’s.