In the centre of the Baptistery is a superb eight-sided basin; each one of three sides is incrusted with a rich and complicated flower in full bloom, and each flower is different. There is a circle of large Corinthian columns around it, supporting round-arched arcades; most of them are ancient and are ornamented with antique bas-reliefs: Meleager with his barking dogs and the nude bodies of his companions is assisting at Christian mysteries. On the left, there is a pulpit similar to the one in Sienna, the first work of Nicholas of Pisa,[13] a simple marble coffer supported on marble columns and covered with carvings. The feeling of the strength and nudity of antiquity is exhibited here in a striking manner. The sculptor understood the postures and movements of the body. His figures, a little massive, are grand and simple; sometimes he reproduces the tunics and the folds of the Roman costume; one of his nude personages, a kind of Hercules carrying a lion on his shoulders, has that large chest and the strained muscles that the sculptors of the Sixteenth Century loved so much. What a difference to human civilization and what a hastening of it there would have been if these restorers of ancient beauty, these young Republics of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, these precocious creators of modern thought had been left to themselves like the ancient Greeks, if they had followed their natural bent, if mystical tradition had not intervened to limit and divert their effort, if secular genius had developed among them, as it formerly did in Greece, amongst free, rude and healthy institutions, and not, as it did, two centuries later, in the midst of the servitude and the corruptions of the decadence. The last of these edifices, the Campo-Santo, is a cemetery, the earth of which, brought from Palestine, is holy. Four high walls of polished marble surround it with their white and highly ornamented panels. Within, a square gallery forms a promenade and opens upon a court through arcades trellised with ogival windows. It is filled with mortuary monuments, busts, inscriptions, and statues of every form and of every age. Nothing could be nobler or simpler. A framework of dark wood supports the vault, and the naked crest of the roof cuts the crystal of the sky. At the corners four cypresses rustle their leaves in the light breeze. The grass grows in the court with freshness and wild luxuriance. Here and there a climbing flower twines itself around a column, a little rosebush, or tiny shrub, glowing in a ray of sunlight. Not a sound,--this quarter is deserted; now and then you hear only the voice of a stroller which echoes as if beneath the vault of a church. It is the veritable cemetery of a free and Christian city; here before the tombs of the great, you can well reflect upon death and public affairs. [Illustration: ROCHESTER CASTLE, ENGLAND.] ROCHESTER CASTLE ARTHUR SHADWELL MARTIN