The Franciscan churches of Italy have recently been made the subject of an inquiry by Thode, who enters also into the incidents of the saint’s life which were there represented. In the choice of these incidents the painters were apparently guided by the early accounts of the saint’s life, but there is considerable diversity in the scenes which they chose for representation and combined together into a series. The early accounts of St Francis include a life written by Thomas of Celano between 1228 and 1229, which was afterwards re-written; a life written by three of the companions of St Francis, which was finished in 1246; and a life in which St Francis’s great follower, Bonaventura, combined all that had previously been written of the saint. It was completed in the year 1260. But the development of the legend of St Francis did not stop here. The _Little Flowers of St Francis_, which were put into writing in the course of the fourteenth century, describe such incidents in the life of the saint as appealed to popular fancy, set down in a popular form. The thread of historical truth in this book is of the slenderest, and the incidents [Illustration: ENTRANCE TO LA VERNA] as they stand cannot claim to have happened. And yet the _Little Flowers_, in their bluntness and simplicity, have all the charm of an unreflective and uncritical belief in the beauty of the new teaching. They give a true picture of humble life in mediæval Italy and show us the early Franciscans in the light in which they saw themselves. The book was widely read, and the first part, which dealt with St Francis among his followers, was amplified by accounts of the mad and saintly freaks of Fra Ginepro, and of the steadfastness with which Fra Egidio kept to his resolve of living by the labour of his hands. The influence of the _Poverello_ of Assisi was, in fact, felt by the highest and the lowest alike. While current fables made popular heroes of him and his followers, Giotto at Assisi represented the decisive incidents of his life in a series of paintings, which have been likened to an epic, and Dante devoted an entire canto of the _Paradiso_ to his praise. In the _Paradiso_ the praise of St Francis is sung by St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the followers of St Dominic, while the praise of St Dominic is sung by St Bonaventura, the most influential of Franciscans, a proof of the bond which united the two orders in Dante’s mind. The jealousy which afterwards estranged them was never as pronounced in Italy as north of the Alps. In many churches the figures of St Francis and St Dominic still stand side by side. And Andrea della Robbia, in a most charming relief in the Piazza Santa Maria Novella at Florence, gave expression to the affection of the two orders by representing their founders embracing as they meet.