on this occasion to deliver a panegyric on the Great Prince.  I have heard ... that the mass is no longer celebrated.  That is not so; but since the city has ceased to care about it, it takes place quietly at seven in the morning, instead of with some pomp at eleven.  Then again, it is said that the monks have allowed the panegyric to drop.  That too is not the case; it was not they but the Florentines who were pledged to this pious office, and it is the laity alone who have allowed it to fall into desuetude.”

[Illustration:  VIA POR.  S. MARIA]

Even here we cannot, however, escape destruction and forgetfulness.  The monastery has been turned into communal schools and police courts; the abbot has become a parish priest, and his abbey has been taken from him; there are but four monks left.  But in the steadfast, unforgetful eyes of that Church which has already outlived a thousand dynasties, and beside whom every Government in the world is but a thing of yesterday, the Abbot of S. Maria is abbot still, and no parish priest at all.  It is not, however, such things as this that will astonish the English or American stranger, whose pathetic faith in “progress” is the one touching thing about him.  He has come here not to think of deprived Benedictines, or to stand by the tomb of Ugo, of whom he never heard, but to see the masterpiece of Filippino Lippi, the Madonna and St. Bernard, with which a thousand photographs have already made him familiar.  Painted in 1480, when Filippino was still, as we may suppose, under the influence of Botticelli, it was given by Piero del Pugliese to a church outside Porta Romana, and was removed here in 1529 during the siege.

Passing down Via della Vigna Vecchia, you come at last to the little Church of S. Simone, which the monks of the Badia built about 1202, in their vineyards then, and just within the second walls.  At the beginning of the fourteenth century it became a parish church, but was only taken from them at the beginning of the nineteenth century.  Within, there is an early picture of Madonna, which comes from the Church of S. Piero Maggiore, now destroyed.  You may reach the Piazza di S. Piero (for it still bears that name) if you turn into Via di Mercatino.  Here the bishops of Florence were of old welcomed to the city and installed in the See.  Thither came all the clergy of the diocese to take part in a strange and beautiful ceremony.  Attached to the church was a Benedictine convent, whose abbess seems to have represented the diocese of Florence.  There in S. Piero the Archbishop came to wed her, and thus became the guardian of the city.  The church is destroyed now, and, as we have seen, all the monks and nuns have departed; the Government has stolen their dowries and thrust them into the streets.  Well might the child, passing S. Felice, cry before this came to pass, O bella Liberta!  But S. Piero was memorable for other reasons too beside this mystic marriage.  There lay Luca della Robbia, Lorenzo di Credi, Mariotto