body of the young Cardinal, but twenty-six years old when he died, “having lived in the flesh as though he were freed from it, an Angel rather than a man.”  Over the beautiful sarcophagus, on a bed beside which two boy angels wait, the young Cardinal sleeps, his delicate hands folded at rest at last.  Above, two angels kneel, about to give him the crown of glory which fadeth not away, and Madonna, borne from heaven by the children, comes with her Son to welcome him home.  There, in the most characteristic work of the fifteenth century, you find man still thinking about death, not as a trance out of which we shall awaken to some terrible remembrance, but as sleep, a sweet and fragile slumber, that has something of the drooping of the flowers about it, in a certain touching beauty and regret that is never bitter, but, like the ending of a song or the close of a fair day of spring, that rightly, though not without sadness, passes into silence, into night, in which shine only the eternal stars.

It is strange that of all the difficult hills of Italy, it is the steep way hither from Porto S. Niccola, of old, in truth Via Crucis, that comes into Dante’s mind when, in the Twelfth Purgatorio, he sees the ascent to the second cornice, where is purged the sin of envy.  Something of the immense sadness of that terrible hill seems to linger to-day about the Monti alle Croci:  it is truly a hill of the dead, over which hovers, pointing the way, some angel

            “la creatura bella
    Bianco vestita, e nella faccia quale
    Per tremolando mattutina Stella.”

The Convent of S. Salvatore—­S.  Francesco al Monte, as it was called of old—­was built in 1480 after a design by Cronaca.  Hesitating among the cypresses on the verge of the olives gardens, Michelangelo called it La bella Villanella, and truly in its warm simplicity and shy loveliness it is just that, a beautiful peasant girl among the vines in a garden of olives.  But she has been stripped of her treasures, her trinkets of silver, her pretty gold chains, her gown of taffetas, her kerchief of silk (do you not remember the verses of Lorenzo), and all these you will find to-day, fading out of use in the Uffizi, where, in a palace that has become a museum, they are most out of place:  thus they have robbed the peasants for the sake of the gold of the tourists, the sterile ejaculations of the critics.

It is well not to return to the city by the tramway, which rushes through the trees of the Viale Michelangelo like I know not what hideous and shrieking beast of prey, but to wander down towards the Piazzale, and then, just before you came to it, on your left, by S. Salvatore, to go down to Porta S. Miniato, that “gap in the wall,” and then to pass by the old wall itself up the hill to Porta di S. Giorgio among the olives between the towers under the Belvedere.  It is the most beautiful of all the gates of the city, little, too, and still keeps its fresco of the fourteenth century.