between them on the right hand as you go.  The left side is closed up by a wall, adorned from time to time with fresco paintings, representing the birth and most distinguished passages in the life of the blessed Virgin.  Round these paintings a little chapel is railed in, open, airy, and elegantly, not very pompously, adorned; there are either seven or twelve of them, I forget which, that serve to rest the procession as it passes, on days particularly dedicated to her service.  When you arrive at the top, a church of a most beautiful construction recompenses your long but not tedious walk, and there are some admirable pictures in it, particularly one of St. William laying down his armour, and taking up the habit of a Carthusian, very fine—­but the figure of the Madonna is the prize they value, and before this I did see some men kneel with a truly idolatrous devotion.  That it was painted by St. Luke is believed by them all.  But if it was painted by St. Luke, said I, what then? do you think he, or the still more excellent person it was done for, would approve of your worshipping any thing but God?  To this no answer was made; and I thought one man looked as if he had grace enough to be ashamed of himself.

The girls, who sit in clusters at the chapel doors as one goes up, singing hymns in praise of the Virgin Mary, pleased me much, as it was a mode of veneration inoffensive to religion, and agreeable to the fancy; but seeing them bow down to that black figure, in open defiance of the Decalogue, shocked me.  Why all the very very early pictures of the Virgin, and many of our blessed Saviour himself, done in the first ages of Christianity should be black, or at least tawny, is to me wholly incomprehensible, nor could I ever yet obtain an explanation of its cause from men of learning or from connoisseurs.

We have in England a black Madonna, very ancient of course, and of immense value, in the cathedral of Wells in Somersetshire; it is painted on glass, and stands in the middle pane of the upper window I think, is a profile face, and eminently handsome.  My mind tells me that I have seen another somewhere in Great Britain, but cannot recollect the spot, unless it were Arundel Castle in Sussex, but I am not sure:  none was ever painted so since the days of Pietro Perugino I believe, so their antiquity is unquestionable:  he and his few contemporaries drew her white, as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Pompeio Battoni.

Whilst I perambulated the palaces of the Bolognese nobility, gloomy though spacious, and melancholy though splendid, I could not but admire at Richardson’s judgment when he makes his beautiful Bigot, his interesting Clementina, an inhabitant of superstitious Bologna.  The unconquerable attachment she shews to original prejudices, and the horror of what she has been taught to consider as heresy, could scarcely have been attributed so happily to the dweller in any town but this:  where I hear nothing but the sound of people saying