In this solemn interior it seems as if the native and foreign ideals had united for once, with harmonious result. Here is the breadth and spaciousness of Latin thought—the loftiness of Gothic. With its five aisles, transepts and apsidal east end, the church is of striking simplicity. There are no chapels built out, few side altars, and few monuments. The High Altar, with its canopy, and the florid pulpits and marble screen round the sanctuary, are the only conspicuous objects. There is little incident in the building itself. A feeling gains upon one, after a time, of a certain emptiness, monotony, even poverty, in all this grandeur of height and space. The inadequacy of the short light arches of the nave, in comparison with the colossal shafts supporting them becomes visible, and the eye is offended by the shameless deception of the roof, which is painted to simulate open tracery, and give a false effect of added height. The endless repetition of line and arch ends by being wearisome, and one longs for the rich symmetric light and shade of triforium and clerestory, for the beautiful mouldings, the star blackness of trefoil and quatrefoil piercings, and for all that deep and varied interest which grows upon the eye slowly, and in just relation to general effect, in the best Gothic architecture. The curious and elaborate capitals, like huge rings, are the most conspicuous details here. Each in itself is a wonderful piece of Gothic ornament, with arcades and crocketed pinnacles and niches filled with statues, but they are so high up that one can hardly appreciate them in detail. As capitals, one must quarrel with them. They do not seem natural members of the columns, but things put on merely for effect, and look as if they were meant to slip up and down, and might be at the bottom as well as at the top. That on the great pier to the left of the High Altar is said to be the handiwork of Heinrich von Gmünd, and to have been the model of the rest. The statues which decorate the lofty interior of the cupola, high up, are in the characteristic manner of the late fifteenth century Lombard sculptors, and the busts of the Fathers of the Church in the spandrils are by Cristoforo Solari. The rest of the ornamentation in the church is mostly of the Borromean and later periods. It is the ascetic cardinal’s fault that all the picturesque incrustations which had gathered upon the old building, with priceless historic associations, are missing. He ruthlessly swept away the shades of the rich and lively past, its profanities and sincerities together. The tombs of the old Lords of Milan, Visconti and Sforza, in the ambulatory, were cleared away, and other monuments were destroyed or displaced in too zealous obedience to the decree of the Council of Trent, forbidding the burial of bodies in monuments in churches. The doors in the transepts were walled up, and his favourite sculptor, Pellegrino Tebaldi, a belated