PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & GAY, BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. An extra copy of THE LIVING AGE is sent gratis to any one getting up a club of Five New Subscribers. Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & GAY. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. PASSAGE BIRDS. So hot shine the sunbeams the Nile waters o'er, And palm-trees there give not a shadow more; Then longing for fatherland urges us forward, Our troops then forgather: To nor'ward, to nor'ward. And deep underfoot then we see like a grave The green-growing earth and the blue-coloured wave, Where fresh stir and tempest to each day is given, While we fare so free 'mid the cloudlets of heaven. Far off amid mountains, a meadow is there, Where lighteth our flock, where our bed we prepare. Our eggs in the chilly pole's regions we lay there, And hatch out our brood in the midnight sun's ray there. On our peaceful valley no fowler can chance, The gold-wingéd elf-people hold there their dance; The green-mantled wood-nymphs at even are lurking, And dwarfs in the mountains the red gold are working. His stand on the mountains Vindevale's son takes; His snow-covered wings with an uproar he shakes. Hares whiten; the quicken with berries is smothered; Our troops then forgather: To southward, to southward. To green-growing fields, to a temperate main, To shade-giving palm-trees our mind turns again. There rest we ourselves from our airy flight forward; There long we again for our world to the nor'ward. From the Swedish of Tegnér. BIRDS OF PASSAGE. YE fugitive guests on the far foreign strand, When seek ye again your own dear native land? When flowers coyly peep out, And rivulets leap out On lifted wings hither They find it so safely, the long sighed-for north, Where spring both their food and their shelter holds forth, The fountain's breast swelleth, The fortunate blithe ones, they build amid rest, 'Mong moss-covered pine-trees, their peaceable nest. And tempest and fray, too, And care and its powers, The warderless towers. Thou fugitive soul on a far foreign strand, When seek'st thou again thine own dear fatherland? When each palm-tree beareth, In fatherworld growing, As little birds hie. Through wildering sky, From the Swedish of Runeberg. THE LITTLE CHURCH BY THE SEA. ART'S "tender strokes" in thee I seek in vain, From The Fortnightly Review. THE HISTORY OF A PAVEMENT. THERE are few among the works of man's hand that stand alone in their kind. es 195 this singular and famous pavement may be read the whole artistic history of a brilliant community for nearly two hundred years. Such a floor to walk upon, I say, wrought all over with imagery in engraved and inlaid marble, is like nothing else in the world. It is quite different from mosaic, as we shall see. The only thing it brings to mind is a certain dream of Dante's in the twelfth canto of the "Purgatory." Dante there describes the ledge that winds round the mountain of expiation between the circles of Pride and Envy. Virgil bids him look down as they go, and see how their path is paved with imagery of God's own workmanship. I quote from Mr. Cayley's translation, venturing to change a turn here and there: As, to preserve their memory from decay, The tombs of earth above the buried show Tablets that each one as he looked pourtray, Which make afresh the gazer's eyes to flow From the compulsion of remembrance old, Whose stings the tender-hearted only know; Thus all the part which jutteth to enfold The mount as causeway, was delineated With shapes that of their holier Author told. Then we hear what the delineations are. They are examples of pride and its pun You prefer one church to another, or doubt which to admire the most among a hundred; and the same of pictures, statues, and all the usual inventions of art. But art sometimes strikes out an invention which is unique, so that you can compare it with no standard, but have to study and take it in by itself. Such an invention is the pavement of the metropolitan church of the Virgin in the Tuscan city of Siena. It is a marble floor wrought, every part of it, with curious engraving or inlay, or a mixture of the two. Day by day, sauntering, praying, the people have worn the surface with their feet or knees, except where certain compartments, being more teemed than the rest, are protected with boards and uncovered only on great occasions. Some places have been restored, where generations of feet and knees had left too rude a mark. To restore commonly means to exchange old work, priceless in its ruin, for new work worthless in its gloss. When will the Italians respect their monuments enough to feel that this vulgar falsification is worse than honourable decay? | ishment. It was characteristic of Dante The municipal passion for restoring has done almost as much harm at Siena as at more central and frequented cities. They have taken down the statues of their famous Fonte Gaia, they have taken down the statues of this very cathedral front, and swept them into the museum or magazine of the cathedral works. Much renewal of the pavement has taken place from time to time. Much more is in contemplation. How-death of Saul is followed by the metamorever, it is to the credit of the authorities that before the last improvements were put in hand, tracings were taken from the designs on the pavement as it then was. And a set of drawings faithfully reduced from these tracings has been brought to England, so that of the monument in question, whatever happens to it in future, there will exist among us a genuine record. My purpose is to show how in The drawings, by Sigr. Leopoldo Maccari, scultore dell' opera dei duomo at Siena, have been acquired by the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. The following essay is condensed from a course of lectures given by the writer in connection with these drawings. no less than of those who came after him - characteristic of the Italian genius from the first hour of its freedom to think of scripture and the classics together. Accordingly classical examples alternate in this passage with scriptural. The overthrow of Satan is matched with the overthrow of Briareus; the consternation of Nimrod with the despair of Niobe; the phosis of Arachne; the flight of Rehoboam by the chastisement of Eriphile; the murder of Sennacherib by his sons comes next to the vengeance taken by the Scythian queen upon Cyrus; the rout of the host of Holofernes is side by side with the sack of Troy. All these subjects Dante sees upon the pathway, in such lineaments that Living the living, dead appeared the dead, Who sees the fact can see no more than I, So long as I advanced with down-bent head. Observe Dante's comparison of the workI manship with that of portraits on tombs. Clearly what he has in his mind is the common type of stone or metal slab let into the floor of a church, engraved or incised with the likeness of the deceased, and the engraved lines filled in with a black paste after the manner of niello. Now, that is part of the method actually employed in the Siena pavement. In the case of figure subjects, a slab of white marble has been cut to the size and shape of its destined compartment; the main lines of the composition have been strongly engraved or incised upon it, and then filled in with black; and so the subject lies boldly outlined under your feet. As you examine the area, you will find it contains not only Scripture scenes, and among them one at least corresponding to the very text of Dante I. AT the end of the thirteenth century, as all students of Italian art and history know, Siena was one of the most illustrious of the Tuscan commonwealths. Crowned along her three-divided hill with towers the colour of the rose, guarded with her massive circuit of rose-coloured walls, she was the chief city of a great territory between Thrasimene and the sea. She was mistress of near one third of old Etruria. She was the neighbour and rival of Florence. Like Florence, she had little by little acquired practical independence and self-government during the two centuries while the struggle raged between pope and emperor. She had taken the Ghibelline or emperor's side in that struggle, Florence the Guelf or pope's side. how Asshur's army was dispersed But, Guelf or Ghibelline, the growth and When Holofernes fell, and the defaced Remains of carnage organization of such a city followed the same law. A great centre of exchange and production, a great population of merchants, manufacturers, and artisans had to constitute and maintain itself amidst an order of things theoretically feudal. Franchises had to be openly or covertly acquired; imperial officers had to be defied, or transformed into a republican executive. Territorial nobles had to be assailed in but also mystical allegories and the lineaments of pagan sages. You will find it said by Vasari, the popular gossip and historian of these things, how the pavement was begun "in a new manner by the early Sienese painter Duccio. Duccio lived at the same time as Dante; and so, putting two and two together, you may naturally ask whether, in his imaginary their strongholds, and compelled to take pavement of purgatory, Dante had not in on the duties and responsibilities of citiview this real pavement of Siena cathe-zens; smaller towns had to be brought dral. The answer is, no; Dante cannot under, and a whole district to be thus subhave taken his hint from the workmen of jected to tribute and military service. At Siena; but they may possibly have taken first each city was led along this course of theirs from Dante.* For Vasari's remark aggrandisement by a governing oligarchy about Duccio turns out to have been of great families. As the industrial and made, like so many of his remarks, at rancommercial spirit grew stronger and more dom. It is ascertained that this new way confident, a share in the magistracy had to of enriching the pavement was in fact not be conquered by the trading guilds. All thought of till after Duccio and Dante had this had happened at Siena, as at Florboth been dead nearly half a century. ence, by the time the final struggle of The historical origin of the work was this. Guelf and Ghibelline was fought out, between 1250 and the end of the century. Both republics were in the first pride of their strength. It was their heroic age. The hearts of men beat high with liberty; their thoughts were set on great things; there was greatness in their looks and words, greatness in the monuments they founded, greatness in their hatreds and I press this point, because so good a worker as Mr. J. A. Symonds has noticed the coincidence, and asked ("Sketches in Italy and Greece," p. 49) whether Dante had ever seen the Siena pavement; concluding, "That is what we cannot say." Whereas we can say very well. I am sure Mr. Symonds will not take it ill in a fellow-student if I say, that neither the paragraph above cited, nor that on Sienese political revolutions in his comprehensive new volume ("Renaissance in Italy," Smith, Elder & Co., 1875), seems to me to give quite a just impression of its subject. divisions. The names of Guelf and Ghibelline, Mother of God she had been from of old time consecrate. The coin struck by the people after the battle of the Arbia asserts the double claim in the legends Sena vetus, Siena the ancient, and Civitas Virginis, city of the Virgin. To raise great public monuments was common also in those days; but no other state planned monuments so colossal, in proportion to her power and revenues, as this one. Her crowning monument is the cathedral or mother church, dedicated to the Virgin of the Assumption, and standing on the highest ground within the walls. To its splendour the whole population contributed. Whatever factions tore the commonwealth, whatever bloodshed stained the streets, here rose above the strife the visible symbol of an ideal unity and of a common worship. The maintenance and enrichment of the building constituted one of the first duties of the magistracy. In that very year of victory, 1260, the chief of the executive on taking office had to swear to a long series of articles binding him to take proper measures for this purpose. And at all times, it was his business to see that contributions to the cathedral fund were duly paid, that a qualified superintendent of the works was afterwards the mere pretext of rancour, for she had been founded when Rome was were now war-cries with a meaning. founded; she was a holy city, for to the Siena was the inland as Pisa was the maritime fortress of the Ghibelline cause. She was the refuge of Ghibelline exiles from other cities. Therefore the Guelfic league resolved that she should be brought low. In the year 1260 Florence led out the league and encamped before Siena to destroy her. On a memorable September afternoon her armed citizens and the exiles within her gates, with some German auxiliary horse, poured out against the foe. That night the Arbia ran red with the blood of Florentines. There had been treachery in the Guelfic ranks; their borse had given way before the German onset; the best manhood of Florence had fallen fighting round her sacred car; the sun had gone down upon the slaughter. Siena never won such another victory. The day of the Arbia is her great day. Her triumph had indeed no lasting political consequences. The sword of Charles of Anjou came into the scale on the papal side; within a few years the Ghibelline cause was irretrievably lost again; and Siena herself passed over quietly to the Guelfic name. Her government became more democratic. The magistracy of twenty-four priors, chosen half from the nobles and half from the people, by which she had been governed since 1232, was re-appointed and his orders obeyed, and that placed, after several experiments, by a magistracy of nine from which the nobles were altogether shut out. But the exhilaration of the victory did not pass away. The city had become glorious in her own eyes. Her temper and enterprises put on henceforward that character to which Dante points once and again, calling the Sienese the vainest of all people. Her vanity lay in two things, an extravagant patriotism and an extravagant greatness of conception in her public works. To love your home and be proud of it was common to these early republics, but love and pride of home were nowhere so fanatical as at Siena. Imagination claimed for the city an august and legendary antiquity, and showed her badge of the she-wolf and sucklings in warrant of the claim. Religion claimed for her the special favour and protection of the Virgin. She was a venerable city, moot questions of art or construction were submitted to commissions of experts elected according to certain forms. The great source of the revenues of the fabric consisted in wax candles. Every male inhabitant of the town between eighteen and seventy was bound to offer one - of the best wax on the eve of the festival of the Assumption in August. Every tributary town or village was rated for the same purpose, and compelled to contribute in the same kind according to its wealth. Besides this, the several trade guilds or corporations had to offer gifts of candles, each on the anniversary of its patron saint, without prejudice to the general offering on the eve of the Assumption. These offerings were readily converted into money, the demand for candles being permanent and steady, for purposes of private devotion. The considerable rev |