church has not the picturesque antiquity in this dry climate and clear atmosphere which our Gothic churches in moist England present.  Not more widely did the external aspect of the tabernacle in the wilderness, with its dark goat-skin coverings, differ from the interior of the Holy of holies, with its golden furniture, than does the commonplace look of the outside of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo differ from its magnificent interior.  It is a perfect museum of sculpture and painting.  Splendid tombs of eminent cardinals of the best period of the Renaissance, rare marbles and precious stones in lavish profusion adorn the altars and walls of the chapels; while they are further enriched by beautiful frescoes of sacred subjects from the pencils of Penturicchio and Annibale Caracci.  Above the high altar is an ancient picture of the Madonna, with an exceedingly swarthy eastern complexion, which is one among several others in Rome attributed to the pencil of St. Luke the Evangelist, and which is supposed to possess the power of working miracles.  One especially magnificent chapel arrests the attention, and leaves a lasting impression—­that of the Chigi family, built by Fabio Chigi, better known as Pope Alexander VII.  The architecture was planned by Raphael.  The design of the strange fresco on the ceiling of the dome, representing the creation of the heavenly bodies, was sketched by him; and he modelled the beautiful statue of Jonah, sitting upon a whale—­said to have been carved from a block that fell from one of the temples in the Forum—­and sculptured the figure of Elijah, which are among the most conspicuous ornaments of the chapel.  This is the only place in which Raphael appears in the character of an architect and sculptor.  Like Michael Angelo, the genius of this wonderfully-gifted artist was capable of varied expression; and it seemed a mere accident whether his ideals were represented in stone, or colour, or words.  On his single head God seemed to have poured all His gifts; beauty of person, and beauty of soul, and the power to perceive and embody the beauty and the wonder of the world; the eye of light and the heart of fire; “the angel nature in the angel name.”  And yet amid his fadeless art he faded away; and at the deathless shrines which he left behind the admirer of his genius is left to lament his early death.

Such thoughts receive a still more mournful hue from a touching tomb—­touching even though its taste be execrable—­which records a husband’s sorrow on account of the death of his young wife—­a princess of both the distinguished houses of Chigi and Odescalchi—­who passed away at the age of twenty, in the saddest of all ways—­in childbirth.  It goes to one’s heart to think of the desolate home and the bereaved husband left, as he says, “in solitude and grief.”  And though the weeper has gone with the wept, and the sore wound which death inflicted has been healed by his own hand nearly a hundred years ago, we feel