life and miracles, are beyond any thing we have yet seen; one
compartment particularly, the workmanship, I think, of Sansovino, where
an old woman is represented to a degree of finished nicety and curiosity
of perfection which I knew not that marble could express.

The hall of justice, which they oppose to our Westminster-hall, but
between which there is no resemblance, is two hundred and fifty-six feet
long, and eighty-six broad; the form, of it a _rhomboid_: the walls
richly ornamented by Pietro d'Abano, who originally designed, and began
to paint the figures round the sides: they have however been retouched
by Giotto, who added the signs of the Zodiac to Peter's mysterious
performances, which meant to explain the planetary influences, as he was
a man deeply dipped in judicial astrology; and there is his own portrait
among them, dressed like a Zoroastrian priest, with a planet in the
corner. At the bottom of the hall hangs the famous crucifixion, for the
purpose of doing which completely well, it is told that Giotto fastened
up a real man, and justly incurred the Pope's displeasure, who coming
one day unawares to see his painter work, caught the unhappy wretch
struggling in the closet, and threatened immediately to sign the
artist's death; who with Italian promptness ran to the picture, and
daubed it over with his brush and colours;--by this method obliging his
sovereign to delay execution till the work was repaired, which no one
but himself could finish; mean time the man recovers of his wounds, and
the tale ends, whether true or false, according to the hearer's wish.

The debtor's stone at the opposite end of the hall has likewise many
entertaining stories annexed to it: the bankrupt is obliged to sit there
in presence of his creditors and judges, in a very disgraceful state;
and many accounts are told one, of the various effects such distresses
have had on the mind: but suicide is a crime rarely committed out of