77 
love or devotion— not for man's limited eyesight* 1 dld not G«t 
that impression at Plorenos. The conventional piety and affectation 
of the "old masters" seems to permeate the cathedral and everything 
in Florence. The pictures here are not so "Florentine" either. 
Coming out of the cathedral I was approached hy the most pictur- 
esque and dirty monk I had yet seen, one of a "begcing order , I 
suppose. He was hung with all manner of heads and cords and 
images, and he had the most ingratiating smile, like a pMite 
bandit—which indeed he was. I gave him a copper. She haptistry 
is just a "big rotunda. It is all wonderful inlaid work of marhle 
—inlaid is not the right term, it looks like inlaid wood, hut 
it is tiny pieces of marhle cut perfectly true and ptt together 
without the cement showing as it does in mosaic— the mosaic of 
the Songrassional lihrary, for example,— In the Campo Santo, 
which 3aedec>er says was Tauilt on 53 shiploads of earth brought fro 
from Jerusalem, are mural paintings that would make your hair 
stand on end. She center one I take to he the day of judgment. 
There are rows and rows of shaven heads with monk's habits, h£«- 
bishops with mitres on, and women with wimples, also a sprink- 
ling of kings and queens, to the riffrt hand of the throne with 
angels acting as ushers, ap„..crently. On the left hand are "knights 
an d beautiful ladies," as it says in"Aucassin and licollBtte," 
a few kings, and great masses of frightened people being sent to 
perdition, angels megaphoning their sentences through big trumpets. 
The next scene (to the left) is evidently hell with an enormous 
devil in the middle and poor souls undergoing every form of tor- 
ture imaginable. How a man conld have painted suoh a thing and 
not have gone crazy is incomprehensible— most likely he was crazy. 
With the exception of that one little group of "blessed 1 ; all the 
pictures are horrors, "death" in the form of hideous creatures, 
