preparing an asylum for that terrible Savonarola, who was destined to dispute the dominion of Florence with his posterity. It was in the midst of these buildings that those great minds moved, the regenerators of Europe, "who first broke the universal gloom, sons of the morning." If the Florentine monuments indicate the revival of science and the consequent debasement of art, the most impressive proof relative to this point is presented in the famous church of St. Peter at Rome. Nothing more pagan in form was ever erected on the seven hills where roamed the primitive she-wolf. Not as the mausoleum of a Christian martyr, but as the stupendous temple of some classic deity, it is doubtless full of surpassing attractions. Nothing was ever done for Leonidas or Camillus, for Regulus or for Julius Cæsar, in comparison with this monument to a humble fisherman. But what stranger to the purpose of its erection would ever think of him in the presence of this gorgeous shrine? Of the magnificent inscriptions raised to the wise and mighty of time, the sublimest must yield to that which encircles the sky-suspended vault of St. Peters. A conqueror of the habitable world once wept at having reached the limits of his sway; for, vast as was his ambition, it conceived of no such trophy as is written around that golden horizon, consigning the keys of heaven to one who ruled the empire of earth. But before that huge inscription had been raised to its pride of place, the last great transition of human society in the age of Leo X. transpired, the most sudden and complete of all revolutions, the change from the middle age to the modern, from the world without printed books to the world with them. St. Peters was coeval with the invention of printing, and the universal revival of science. Before the sacristy was finished, the splendid endeavors of Watt had been crowned with success; and in the interval had occurred the discovery of America and the Reformation. The fall of Catholic domination and Gothic art was coeval with the ending of that mighty cycle of mutation wherein the web of society had been unraveled and rewoven for a yet more auspicious use.