346 MORE POT-POURRI 



portion of a book about Florence, is left out altogether, 

 or at any rate is only like a brilliant tapestry background 

 to his living, moving figures. It is so clear and so com- 

 prehensive that it satisfies the idle and whets the appe- 

 tite of those who wish to know more. Mr. Howells has 

 a masterly way of sketching, and his appreciation of the 

 cloisters is so real that, to my mind, he makes one feel 

 it would be worth while to go all the way to Florence to 

 see them and nothing else. Cloisters are, perhaps, the 

 most characteristic things in Italy. He thus writes : 



' The thing that was novel to me, who found the 

 churches of 1883 in Florence so like the churches of 

 1863 in Venice, was the loveliness of the deserted 

 cloisters belonging to so many of the former. These 

 enclose nearly always a grass -grown space, where daisies 

 and dandelions began to abound with the earliest con- 

 sent of spring. Most public places and edifices in Italy 

 have been so much photographed that few have any 

 surprise left in them ; one is sure that one has seen them 

 before. But the cloisters are not yet the prey of this 

 sort of pre -acquaintance. Whether the vaults and walls 

 of the colonnades are beautifully frescoed, like those of 

 Santa Maria Novella or Santa Annunziata or San Marco, 

 or the place has no attraction but its grass and sculp- 

 tured stone, it is charming ; and these cloisters linger in 

 my mind as something not less Florentine in character 

 than the Ponte Vecchio or the Palazzo Publico. I 

 remember particularly an evening effect in the cloister 

 of Santa Annunziata, when the belfry in the corner, 

 lifted aloft in its tower, showed with its pendulous bells 

 like a great graceful flower against the dome of the 

 church behind it. The quiet in the place was almost 

 sensible ; the pale light, suffused with rose, had a deli- 

 cate clearness ; there was a little agreeat)le thrill of cold 

 in the air ; there could not have been a more refined 



