Of such examination it has received but little. Among Catholics the "legend" of the Saint is to this day extensively used for such purposes as similar legends were intended to serve. Orthodox teachers have used the story unsparingly as stimulus, example, and testimony. But orthodox historians have passed over it with the lightest tread and most hurried step; while such Protestant readers as may have chanced to stray into the dim, despised wilderness of Romish hagiography, have in all probability very quickly tossed the volume aside, compendiously classing its subject in their minds with other dark-aged lumber of martyrs, who walked with their heads in their hands, and saints who personally maltreated the enemy of mankind. Yet a very little consideration of the story will show, that it cannot with fairness be thus summarily disposed of. After seeing large solid masses of monastic romance and pious falsehood evaporate from the crucible of our criticism, there will be still found a very considerable residuum of strangely irreducible fact of the most puzzling description. It is to be borne in mind, moreover, that the phenomena to be examined are not the product of the dark night-time of history, so favourable to the generation of saints and saintly wonders. Cock-crow was near at hand when Catherine walked the earth. The grandsons of her contemporaries had the printing-press among them; and the story of her life was printed at Florence in the ninety-seventh year after her death. While the illiterate Sienese dyer's daughter was working miracles, moral and physical, Petrarch and Boccaccio were still writing, and Dante had recently written. Giotto had painted the panels we still gaze on, and Niccolò of Pisa carved the stones we yet handle. Chroniclers and historians abounded; and the scene of the strange things recorded by them was at that time one of the centres of human civilisation and progress. We are there in no misty debateable land of myth and legendary song; but walk among familiar facts of solid well-authenticated history, studied for its lessons by statesmen, and accepted as the basis of theories by political philosophers. And yet, in the midst of these indubitable facts, mixed with them, acting on them, undeniably influencing them, we come upon the records of a story wild as any tale of Denis or Dunstan. [Sidenote: SIENA.] When once launched on the strange narrative, as it has come down to us, it is somewhat difficult to remember steadily how near we are all along to the solid shore of indisputable fact. Holding fast to this, therefore, as long as may be, we will approach the subject by endeavouring to obtain some idea of the material aspect of the "locus in quo."