Allusion has been made to the Cathedral of S. Francis at Rimini, as the great ornament of the town, and the chief monument of Sigismondo’s fame.  It is here that all the Malatesti lie.  Here too is the chapel consecrated to Isotta, ‘Divae Isottae Sacrum;’ and the tombs of the Malatesta ladies, ‘Malatestorum domus heroidum sepulchrum;’ and Sigismondo’s own grave with the cuckold’s horns and scornful epitaph.  Nothing but the fact that the church is duly dedicated to S. Francis, and that its outer shell of classic marble encases an old Gothic edifice, remains to remind us that it is a Christian place of worship.[4] It has no sanctity, no spirit of piety.  The pride of the tyrant whose legend—­’Sigismundus Pandulphus Malatesta Pan.  F. Fecit Anno Gratiae MCCCCL’—­occupies every arch and stringcourse of the architecture, and whose coat-of-arms and portrait in medallion, with his cipher and his emblems of an elephant and a rose, are wrought in every piece of sculptured work throughout the building, seems so to fill this house of prayer that there is no room left for God.  Yet the Cathedral of Rimini remains a monument of first-rate importance for all students who seek to penetrate the revived Paganism of the fifteenth century.  It serves also to bring a far more interesting Italian of that period than the tyrant of Rimini himself, before our notice.

In the execution of his design, Sigismondo received the assistance of one of the most remarkable men of this or any other age.  Leo Battista Alberti, a scion of the noble Florentine house of that name, born during the exile of his parents, and educated in the Venetian territory, was endowed by nature with aptitudes, faculties, and sensibilities so varied, as to deserve the name of universal genius.  Italy in the Renaissance period was rich in natures of this sort, to whom nothing that is strange or beautiful seemed unfamiliar, and who, gifted with a kind of divination, penetrated the secrets of the world by sympathy.  To Pico della Mirandola, Lionardo da Vinci, and Michel Agnolo Buonarroti may be added Leo Battista Alberti.  That he achieved less than his great compeers, and that he now exists as the shadow of a mighty name, was the effect of circumstances.  He came half a century too early into the world, and worked as a pioneer rather than a settler of the realm which Lionardo ruled as his demesne.  Very early in his boyhood Alberti showed the versatility of his talents.  The use of arms, the management of horses, music, painting, modelling for sculpture, mathematics, classical and modern literature, physical science as then comprehended, and all the bodily exercises proper to the estate of a young nobleman, were at his command.  His biographer asserts that he was never idle, never subject to ennui or fatigue.  He used to say that books at times gave him the same pleasure as brilliant jewels or perfumed flowers:  hunger and sleep could not keep him from them then.  At other times the letters on the page appeared to