in stodgy vaultings; Corinthian pilasters shoved lacelike rood-screens out of the way, and fat sprawling cherubs shouldered bleeding, shadowy Christs from the altars. The spirit which inspired this stupid ruthlessness was perfectly expressed by Addison, who, commenting upon the great Cathedral of Siena, said pragmatically: “When a man sees the prodigious pains that our 31forefathers have been at in these barbarous buildings, one cannot but fancy what miracles of architecture they would have left us had they only been instructed in the right way; for when the devotion of those ages was much warmer than it is at present, and the riches of the people much more at the disposal of the priests, there was so much money consumed on these Gothic churches as would have finished a greater variety of noble buildings than have been raised before or since that time. Than these Gothic churches nothing can make a prettier show to those who prefer false beauties and affected ornaments to a noble and majestic simplicity”—of dull plaster! Much has been said of the irreverence of the Nineteenth Century. The Eighteenth respected nothing their forefathers had wrought; not even in this little far-away mountain town, and St. John of the Bull is now—poor Saint!—housed drearily in a dull, dusty, echoing white cavern, with not one point of beauty to hold the protesting eye save the splendid marble pulpit—escaped by some miracle of ruth to stand out in that dull waste upon delicate twisted alabaster columns, which stand in their turn upon crawling marble lions. Its four sides, and its baldachino, show beautiful patterns of precious mosaics, wrought with lapis lazuli, with verd antique, and with sanguine Egyptian marbles. The carefullest and richest of these mosaics, of course—along the side of the pulpit’s stair—is devoted to picturing that extremely qualmish archaic whale who in all Ravello’s churches unswallows the Prophet Jonah with every evidence of emotion and relief. Recently, in the process of removing some of the acres of Eighteenth Century plaster, there was brought 32to light in a little chapel in the crypt a life-sized relief of St. Catherine and her wheel. Such a lovely lady!—so fair, so pure, so saint-like; with faint memories of old tinting on her small lips, on her close-folded hair, and her downcast eyes—that even the most frivolous of tourists might be moved to tears by the thought that she alone is the one sweet ghost escaped from all that brutal destruction of mediæval beauty; resurrected by the merest chance from her plaster tomb.