The windows all have a deep splay outside, very simple stone traceries, and glass fitted to wooden frames placed inside against the stonework. There seem also to have been shutters outside, for which the hooks still remain. A sort of penthouse, or perhaps a cloister-roof was carried along in front of the chapel, but of this nought remains but the corbels which carried it. There is no more to be said about the exterior than that it is simple and good of its kind--the kind being very humble. Let us go inside, and we shall pass a very different verdict. Giotto is to many of us not only a person singularly gifted in a great age, but in some sort the embodiment of an idea. The idea is that of an artist, pure, simple, and direct in his work, who should excel equally in all the arts, and show--even though his work be an exception to all rules--the consummate success of such a course. The man was fortunate in his day and in his friends. Here, where we stand to admire, he painted, whilst probably Dante looked on. For merely human and artistic interest there is, therefore, no room which more rightly deserves to be the object of endless pilgrimages; and there is none in which one will find the artist more faithful to his calling, more full of recollection and self-restraint than in this. I know, therefore, no one building, of such very small size and cost, which can claim the same degree of interest as this small Chapel of the Arena. It is, indeed, one of the glories of art that the works of its great masters cannot diminish in value, or even be competed with by subsequent masters: when once done, they are done for ever; and so the Pietà of Giotto, in this little chapel at Padua, is now--as it was when first painted in the commencement of the fourteenth century, and as it will continue to be so long as the neglect with which it is now treated allows it to exist--one of the great paintings of the world, one of those fountains from which school after school and age after age of artists may drink instruction and knowledge, and never fail to gain more, the more they study its many excellences, and its intensity of feeling and conception. [Illustration: SIDE WINDOW--ARENA CHAPEL.]