of life-expression, to get all the wonderful things you see and feel into a certain picture or series of pictures, but Giotto tried it and he succeeded very well, too. The decorations are not great, but they are quaint and lovely, even if you have to admit at times that an apprentice of to-day could draw and compose better. He couldn’t “intend” better, however, nor convey more human tenderness and feeling in gay, light coloring,--and therein lies the whole secret! There are some twenty-eight of these frescoes ranged along the lower walls on either side--St. Francis stepping on the cloak of the poor man who, recognizing him as a saint, spread it down before him; St. Francis giving his cloak to the poor nobleman; St. Francis seeing the vision of the palace which was to be reared for him and his followers; St. Francis in the car of fire; St. Francis driving the devils away from Arezzo; St. Francis before the Sultan; St. Francis preaching to the birds; and so on. It was very charming. I could not help thinking what a severe blow has been given to religious legend since those days however; nowadays, except in the minds of the ignorant, saints and devils and angels and stigmata and holy visions have all but disappeared. The grand phantasmagoria of religious notions as they relate to the life of Christ have all but vanished, for the time being anyhow, even in the brains of the masses, and we are having an invasion of rationalism or something approximating it, even at the bottom. The laissez-faire opportunism which has characterized the men at the top in all ages is seeping down to the bottom. Via the newspaper and the magazine, even in Italy--in Assisi--something of astronomy, botany, politics and mechanics, scientifically demonstrated, is creeping in. The inflow seems very meager as yet, a mere trickle, but it has begun. Even in Assisi I saw newspapers and a weekly in a local barber-shop. The natives--the aged ones--very thin, shabby and pale, run into the churches at all hours of the day to prostrate themselves before helpless saints; but nevertheless the newspapers are in the barber-shops. Old Cosimo Medici’s truism that governments are not managed by paternosters is slowly seeping down. We have scores of men in the world to-day as able as old Cosimo Medici and as ruthless. We will have hundreds and thousands after a while, only they will be much more circumspect in their ruthlessness and they will work hard for the State. Perhaps there won’t be so much useless praying before useless images when that time comes. The thought of divinity _in the individual_ needs to be more fully developed.