especially lovely, and there are admirable decorative heads between. Within, are some characteristic _putti_ by Donatello. The side apses, which represent the right and left transepts, guarded by sixteenth century Apostles, and with frescoed Saints and Prophets in the chapels by Bicci di Lorenzo, are quite uninteresting. By the door that leads out of the northern aisle into the street, is a wonderful picture, painted in honour of Dante by order of the State in 1465, by Domenico di Michelino, a pupil of Fra Angelico, whose works, with this exception, are hardly identified. At the time that this was painted, the authentic portrait of Dante still existed in the (now lost) fresco at Santa Croce, so we may take this as a fairly probable likeness; it is, at the same time, one of the earliest efforts to give pictorial treatment to the _Purgatorio_. Outside the gates of Florence stands Dante in spirit, clothed in the simple red robe of a Florentine citizen, and wearing the laurel wreath which was denied to him in life; in his left hand he holds the open volume of the _Divina Commedia_, from which rays of burning light proceed and illumine all the city. But it is not the mediæval Florence that the divine singer had known, which his ghost now revisits, but the Florence of the Quattrocento--with the completed Cathedral and the cupola of Brunelleschi rising over it, with the Campanile and the great tower of the Palazzo della Signoria completed--the Florence which has just lost Cosimo dei Medici, Pater Patriae, and may need fresh guidance, now that great mutations are at hand in Italy. With his right hand he indicates the gate of Hell and its antechamber; but it is not the torments of its true inmates that he would bid the Florentines mark, but the shameful and degrading lot of the cowards and neutrals, the trimmers, who would follow no standard upon earth, and are now rejected by Heaven and Hell alike; "the crew of caitiffs hateful to God and to his enemies," who now are compelled, goaded on by hornets and wasps, to rush for ever after a devil-carried ensign, "which whirling ran so quickly that it seemed to scorn all pause." Behind, among the rocks and precipices of Hell, the monstrous fiends of schism, treason and anarchy glare through the gate, preparing to sweep down upon the City of the Lily, if she heeds not the lesson. In the centre of the picture, in the distance, the Mountain of Purgation rises over the shore of the lonely ocean, on the little island where rushes alone grow above the soft mud. The Angel at the gate, seated upon the rock of diamond, above the three steps of contrition, confession, and satisfaction, marks the brows of the penitent souls with his dazzling sword, and admits them into the terraces of the mountain, where Pride, Anger, Envy, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust (the latter, in the purifying fire of the seventh terrace, merely indicated by the flames on the right) are purged away. On the top of