of choir; the vaulted roof is supported by slender columns with chiselled capitals, and the walls and floor are ornamented with marbles and mosaic of different colours. * * * * * To close this chapter without touching upon the career of Elias, who is at once the black sheep of the franciscan order and one of the greatest citizens of Assisi, would be impossible. Few have written calmly about him, trying either to exculpate him or blaming his actions too severely, so that it is difficult to obtain any just idea of the real motives which guided him in an ill-starred life. Elias was neither devil nor saint, though he possessed the energy of both and his marked and domineering character would have fitted him better for the world than for the cloister. Ambition seems to have been his chief fault, together with a certain proud reserve which kept him aloof from his companions. From the various references to him in the early biographies of St. Francis we feel the writers failed ever to come quite in touch with one so outside their lives, and whom they considered as a kind of Judas--for did he not betray the interests of the Master? "Elias is an altogether different type of man from the simple-minded Francis," writes Mrs Oliphant, echoing the general opinion. "He is an ambitious and ascetic churchman, of the class which has pushed Rome into much power and many abuses--an almost conventional development of the intellectual monk, making up for compulsory humbleness in external matters by the highest strain of ecclesiastical ambition and spiritual pride."