In the view of the whole building from the great Piazza on the west side, its faults are more apparent—the inadequacy and insignificance of the cupola, or central tower, the incongruity of the façade, the extravagance of the ornamentation. Nevertheless, the huge white marble pile has always majesty and splendour, if only from its size and material and the amazing number of its airy embroideries and fripperies of stone. It has a magic, unearthly beauty of colour, silver, dove-like, rosy against the blue, according to the changing light of the day—most wonderful in the strange, pale, clear moment when the sun has just set. An exotic in this flat country of the alluvial soil, where brick is the natural medium for the builder, it seems to bring into the hot and stifling city at midsummer a cooling breath from that marble cave close to Lago Maggiore whence its material was drawn. One could almost believe that it was the dripping of water through countless ages which had built up its clear substance into those strange fantastic shapes, those spires and fretted edges and fairy shafts. Their Cathedral is the pride and joy of the Milanese. Yet not so much this billowy heap of stone, but the spot upon which it stands should be consecrate to their hearts. None of the noblest memories of their past sanctify the church which Gian Galeazzo Visconte founded, which opened its doors with equal welcome to Francesco Sforza, the usurper, and to French and Spanish and Austrian conquerors by turn, and which was finished by Napoleon Buonaparte. But the ancient, half-ruined church, which Gian Galeazzo pulled down to make room for his new temple, enshrined the dearer history of Milan’s liberty. Sta. Maria Maggiore, as it was then called, was the representative through many transformations of that _basilica nuova intramuros_ in which Ambrose entrenched himself in his great struggle with the Empress Justina and achieved his victory for the new organisation of the Church, protector of the people, over the corrupt despotism of the Empire. And if what is one of the spiritual events of the world’s history must be fixed in time and place, it was no doubt at the gates of this, the chief church, that Ambrose interposed his hand between the blood-stained Emperor and the altar of Christ. In later centuries, in the figures of the enthusiasts Arialdo and Erlembaldo, of the courageous Peter Damian, fronting the excited and hostile multitudes, the memories of the old Cathedral church were still of the victory of the spirit over the forces of the world, of liberty over oppression, of a new order of things over the corrupt system of the past. And in the early days of the Milanese Republic the church was closely associated with the life and struggles of the people. All business, public and private, was transacted in the piazza outside. The portico of the church was the house of parliament, and the politics of the city were sanctified by the benediction of religion. The chief