flutter of wings. The east grew rosy; out of the mysterious sea rose a golden ghost hidden in glory, till suddenly across the world a sunbeam fell. It touched the mountains one by one; higher and higher crept the tremulous joy of light, confident and ever more confident, opening like a flower, filling the world with gladness and light. It was the dawn: out of the east once. more had crept the beauty of the world.

"Then in that clear and joyful hour God spread out all the breadth of Italy before me: the plains, the valleys, and the mountains. Far and far away, shining in the sun, Ravenna lay, and lean Rimini and bartered Pesaro. There, the mountains rose over Siena, in that valley Gubbio slept, on that hill stood S. Marino, and there, like a golden angel bearing the Annunciation of Day, S. Leo folded her wings on her mountain. Southward, Arezzo smiled like a flower, Monte Amiata was already glorious; northward lay a sea of mountains, named and nameless, restless with light, about to break in the sun. While to the west Florence lay sleeping yet, in the cusp of her hills, her towers, her domes, perfect and fresh in the purity of dawn that had renewed her beauty."

He is a man of the Quattrocento. Modern Italy and all its works, save its ordered liberty, he holds in abhorrence. His soul dwells in the days of Botticelli and Donatello, of Mino da Fiesole and Desiderio da Settignano, of Masaccio and Filippo Lippi. Titian seems to be the last Italian whom he deems worthy of reverence. Is he truly a devout Catholic, or does he only delight in the æsthetic beauty of the faith? However it may be, he has a rare insight into the soul of man at the time of the early Renaissance and a joy in its artistic utterance that is rarely surpassed in its intensity. His outlook is much the same as Ruskin's, but he is guided by knowledge such as Ruskin did not possess, and which was indeed impossible of attainment in Ruskin's day, and by a sound judgment that prevents his delighting in many trifling works over which his great predecessor used to go into ecstasy. He is familiar with the latest discoveries and abreast with the most recent criticism; so that he is not merely a delightful but a safe guide. And for one thing I love him his thorough detestation of that hateful fanatic Savona

rola, who burned so many precious masterpieces of art on his bonfire of vanities and lorded it over Florence with so little profit to the city.

It is a delight to common mortals to find that Homer nods; so we may note than on page 319 he attributes the "Virgin Appearing to St. Bernard" in the Badia at Florence to Ghirlandaio. Not that he means it. He has been speaking of Filippo Lippi, and he has not noted that the name of Ghirlandaio has intervened. And so on page 326 he tells us that the "Madonna of the Goldfinch" was painted in 1548, nearly thirty years after Raphael's death, and on page 405 he substitutes Croesus for Crassus. But such slips correct themselves, and do not impair the value of a work so rich in precious information.

It has been discovered that a mob has a soul of its own, different from the souls of all the men who compose it, and that it will do things of which every member, taken individually, would be incapable. So every city has a soul, different from the souls of all its inhabitants, yet the joint product of them all and of all the men and women who have dwelt within its precincts in the ages past; a soul which is ever present and which seeks to mould in its own image not merely those who are born and dwell therein, but the stranger who is within its gates. Owing to the breaking up of the Italian peninsular into a multitude of petty states usually at variance with one another, the souls of Italian cities are strangely variant and individual. It has been the task of Mr. Symons, foremost of English poets now that Mr. Swinburne is past his prime, to reveal to us the souls of some of the principal cities; and this he has done with a marvellous insight that is the gift of poets and in that exquisite style possessed by them when they turn to prose. He has not the detailed information of Mr. Hutton; he is not a specialist in things Italian; but he has that perception of the essence of things that in primitive times led men to confound the bard with the seer. Rome and Florence, Naples and Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, Siena, Verona, Bologna, Bergamo and Brescia are shown to us, and however well we knew them before, we know them better still when we have read what Mr. Symons has to say. He may add nothing to our knowledge of details, but he will surely

add to our comprehension; and when we have read his pages we shall see the familiar things in a profounder way.

Italy is a land of such infinite variety, so many ages have left their impress upon her, that one may regard her from numberless points of view. Mr. Hutton looks at her as a Catholic, though I suspect that his Catholicism is æsthetic rather than practical. For him the one glorious period is the Quattrocentowhen art had attained a development that gave perfect expression to a faith which was still sincere. Mr. Symons' view of Italy is many-sided. He sees not merely the Christian exterior but the profound and ever-enduring paganism that underlies the veneer of Italian Christianity. He realizes that Italy has always been pagan at heart, with the healthy, blithe outlook on life that makes all men who love the wholesome and the beautiful turn back with yearning to the gods of Greece, and he perceives that Italy's ages of darkness have been due to foreign domination, particularly to the rule of Spain and Austria. Not that Mr. Symons ingores the Christian spirit as manifested in Italy; but his sympathy is not sincerely with it. He is a humanist, not a saint. The Italy that Mr. Hutton sees is the Italy of a single epoch, though an epoch so slpendid that we can never study it enough. The Italy that Mr. Symons sees with the clearness of a poet's vision is the Italy of all time, the Italy that has worshipped a hundred gods, that has known endless mutations of fortune, that has taken on a thousand shapes, and yet has remained the eternal enchantress. His book is one that

should be read more than once.

It was inevitable that anything written on Italy by Mr. Thayer, author of the most vigorous of all short histories of Venice, should be interesting; and "Italica" is no disappointm. ent. But it is widely different from the books we have men tioned. Mr. Hutton loves the Italy of the fifteenth century; Mr. Symons the Italy of all time; but it is the living, progressive Italy of to-day, forging steadily ahead among the nations in spite of many impediments, that appeals to Mr. Thayer. His volume of essays deals with subjects as remote from one another in time as Dante and the Italy of 1907; but the spirit is ever

the same, the true American spirit, which delights above all things in the growth of civil and religious liberty, in the uplifting of the whole body of the people, in the development of the country's material resources, in the progress of education and the sciences. To some he will seem an intense anti-clerical, while others will see in him a true friend of religion, who would free it alike from medieval bigotry and ecclesiastical politics; a man who loves United Italy so much that a Church which makes war upon it is hateful in his sight, but who would lend a cordial support to that Church if it would recognize that the temporal power of the Papacy is gone forever, and co-operate with the government of Victor Emanuel III for the good of Italy and of the world. He loves not the Vatican under the present reactionary influences; but he loves modern Italy with all his heart, and he understands her as only those who sympathize can understand. He sees on every hand grounds for hope and congratulation, and he foresees for her a future not unworthy of her glorious past.

There are too many who decry modern Italy. Some of these are intensely artistic souls, like Ruskin and Mr. Hutton, to whom all modern civilization, with its factories, its railroads, its smoke and noise, are detestable. Others blame Italy because in a few years of disturbed freedom, overwhelmed by debt and with a population long crushed by tyranny, she has not been able to catch up with the nations that lead the van of progress. Still others can see no good in a people or a government that has taken Rome from the Pope. Yet the Italians, particularly in the North, are a fine race who are advancing steadily and even rapidly despite great difficulties, and Mr. Thayer's vigorous and sympathetic presentation of their cause is heartily to be commended.

The style of his book is clear and strong, characterized by the same directness that makes his "History of Venice" so notable. I cannot refrain from quoting one passage from page 31 to show how widely his style and his views differ from those of Mr. Hutton:

"In our grandfathers' day few Yankee seacaptains returned home without bringing back some curiosity-a Buddhist idol, a South-Sea Islander's weapons, a rare piece of Chinese porcelain

or silk-to remind them of their voyages. So, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, every thrifty Venetian who traded to the Levant tucked away in his cargo the leg or arm, or at least a knuckle, of some saint, with which he enriched his parish church and assured himself and his family a safe passage to heaven. Computing by the sum of such relics as remain, the whole number which passed from the East into Western Europe must have been enormous. In the earlier times it was possible to secure at reasonable rates the entire body of a first-class saint. But with the Crusades the stream of purchasers increased a thousand-fold, and the canny Greek, who did a thriving business in these commodities, might get as high a price for a few hairs or the thumb-nail of a third-century martyr as his grandfather got for an entire apostle. The bodies of the favorite and most potent saints having long before been disposed of, dealers filled further orders more parsimoniously, doling out fragments and small bones, unconcernedly duplicating and multiplying until, if all their wares would be united, we should fnd that John the Baptist had more arms than Briareus and Mary Magdalene more feet than a centipede.'

GEORGE B. ROSE.

Little Rock, Arkansas.