The authorities for the legends have been the _Legenda Aurea_ of Voragine, in the old French and English translations; the _Flos Sanctorum_ of Ribadeneira, in the old French translation; the _Perfetto Legendario_, editions of Rome and Venice; the _Legende delle Sante Vergini_, Florence and Venice; the large work of Baillet, _Les Vies des Saints_, in thirty-two volumes, most useful for the historical authorities; and Alban Butler’s _Lives of the Saints_. All these have been consulted for such particulars of circumstance and character as might illustrate the various representations, and then compressed into a narrative as clear as I could render it. Where one authority only has been followed, it is usually placed in the margin. The First Part contains the legends of the scriptural personages and the primitive fathers. The Second Part contains those sainted personages who lived, or are supposed to have lived, in the first ages of Christianity, and whose real history, founded on fact or tradition, has been so disguised by poetical embroidery, that they have in some sort the air of ideal beings. As I could not undertake to go through the whole calendar, nor yet to make my book a catalogue of pictures and statues, I have confined myself to the saints most interesting and important, and (with very few exceptions) to those works of Art of which I could speak from my own knowledge. The legends of the monastic orders, and the history of the Franciscans and Dominicans, considered merely in their connexion with the revival and development of the Fine Arts in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, open so wide a range of speculation,—the characteristics of these religious enthusiasts of both sexes are so full of interest and beauty as artistic conceptions, and as psychological and philosophical studies so extraordinary, that I could not, in conscience, compress them into a few pages: they form a volume complete in itself, entitled ‘Legends of the Monastic Orders.’ The little sketches and woodcuts are trifling as illustrations, and can only assist the memory and the fancy of the reader but I regret this the less, inasmuch as those who take an interest in the subject can easily illustrate the book for themselves. To collect a portfolio of prints, including those works of art which are cited under each head as examples, with a selection from the hundreds of others which are not cited, and arrange them in the same order—with reference, not to schools, or styles, or dates, but to subject merely—would be an amusing, and I think not a profitless, occupation. It could not be done in the right spirit without leading the mind far beyond the mere pleasure of comparison and criticism, to ‘thoughts more elevate and reasonings high’ of things celestial and terrestrial, as shadowed forth in form by the wit and the hand of man. [Illustration: An Angel] CONTENTS OF