Florence piercing gales-tramontane is the local name, which reminded me of winds I have felt blowing straight off the pack ice in northern latitudes and nothing else— fogs that would have done no discredit to London in November, and rains whereof the tropics might be proud. When the tramontane in its glory leaps and howls along the dusky streets of Florence, then indeed does the traveller think with a repentant affection of the very bleakest spot he knows upon England's eastern shores, yes, even on the bitterest day of March.

Is there anything in the wind line quite so deadly cold, I wonder? At least clothes cannot prevail against it, for wrap yourself up till you look like a very Falstaff and still the temperature within is that of a snow-man. To the bones it pierces, to the very marrow. Yet for generations these extraordinary Florentines built their houses without fireplaces. I remember noting the same phenomenon in Mexico City, another frigid spot; there, indeed, they swore that fires were unwholesome. Here the sole concession of a vast majority of the inhabitants to our common human weakness, consists of a scaldino, that is, a little pot full of glowing wood ashes which is placed under the owner's chair, or carried in any convenient fashion. Men, I gather, have not even the comfort of this instrument of joy, which among its many uses in the event of sickness, or of damp sheets, makes an excellent warming-pan. In this case it is suspended in a kind of enlarged wooden mouse-cage and plunged boldly between the blankets. Of all the domestic institutions in Tuscany, I think that the scaldino is most to be desired. There are others which strike me as far from admirable.

I do not wish, however, to asperse this climate, against which I may have been more or less prejudiced by the prevalent influenza, which hit us rather hard. I am instructed indeed that except for certain, or uncertain, outbursts of cold, it is really beautiful in April and May,

and even for the first part of June, after which it becomes too hot for the taste and comfort of most people. The autumns also are said to be fine.

Moreover, it is only Florence itself that is so severe. During the first few weeks of my stay there I visited some country villas, one "two mountains beyond Fiesole" (that was the local description and means very high indeed), and another on the lower slopes of the same ancient city, which is built among the hill-tops about three miles to the north-east of Florence. At each of these villas I found the most lovely satisfying sunshine, in which a man might bask like a lizard till at length the chill left his bones. There I was told that the crowning joy to the dwellers in these mansions of the blest, is to sit in golden light on their verandahs and for quite a considerable portion of the winter look at a damp, dark cloud far below, which cloud is Florence hid in icy fog. Decidedly a villa at Fiesole, where the mists cannot creep and because of its sheltered position the tramontane has no power, is a possession to be coveted-far above a palace on the Arno.

Yet when the winter voyager can forget the climate, what city has greater charm than Florence, if to some, its note seems one of melancholy? Here, so pervading is its presence, history seems to press upon the student with an actual sense of weight. The numberless churches, some of them still unfinished; the cold, stately palaces; the public buildings and piazzas; the statues, monuments, and pictures; all things distinguishing and distinguished belonging for the most part, as they do, to a single century, seem to bring the dead time and those who shaped it as it was, so near to us that in its shadow the present is made mean and dwarfed. All the intervening generations that the locust has eaten, those dim, quite forgotten generations which once in their hour furnished the daily bread of Time appear to drop away. In our garish modernity, wearing

no wedding garment of their art, we find ourselves unbidden guests at this banquet of the past-face to face with the age of Donatello and Fra Bartolommeo and Savonarola and the great Medici, and of the rest who lived when Florence was in flower. The effect is strange. Perhaps it does not strike the Italian thus, or even those foreigners who are constant residents. Perhaps in this case also, such as seek find, and the period which gave Florence her glory, is the period which oppresses us now that her sons are no longer mighty preachers, painters, or architects.

Why is it? Who can explain the mystery of the change? Why, when we look into a picture or sculpture shop on the Lung' Arno, for instance, do we see on the one side replicas of the famous and beautiful antique; and, on the other, marbles indeed, but what marbles! Simpering children in frilled dresses; young women with their nudity accentuated by means of bathing drawers; vulgar-looking busts of vulgar-looking men; coy creatures smirking at butterflies seated on their naked arms or bosoms, and other sculptured delights. But never a work that has a spark of the old Promethean fire, which elevates its student, or moves him-at any rate as art should move.

Of painting and buildings is it not the same? Where has the genius flown and will it ever return? I know the fashion is to decry our modern English art, and doubtless much of it is poor. Yet so far as my small experience goes, that art has, at any rate in some instances, more truth and spirit than any other of the day which I have found abroad.

I have said that I will not discourse upon the art treasures of Florence. Still I may be permitted to mention two, by no means of the best known, which perhaps impressed me most among them. Of these one is a certain life-sized Annunciation by Donatello, fashioned of a dark-coloured freestone, cut in high relief and set