nor town-glorification. They wanted places for preaching, prayer,
sacrifice, burial; and had no intention of showing how high they could
build towers, or how widely they could arch vaults. Strong walls, and the
roof of a barn,--these your Franciscan asks of his Arnolfo. These Arnolfo
gives,--thoroughly and wisely built; the successions of gable roof being
a new device for strength, much praised in its day.

This stern humor did not last long. Arnolfo himself had other notions;
much more Cimabue and Giotto; most of all, Nature and Heaven. Something
else had to be taught about Christ than that He was wounded to death.
Nevertheless, look how grand this stern form would be, restored to its
simplicity. It is not the old church which is in itself unimpressive.
It is the old church defaced by Vasari, by Michael Angelo, and by
modern Florence. See those huge tombs on your right hand and left, at
the sides of the aisles, with their alternate gable and round tops, and
their paltriest of all possible sculpture, trying to be grand by
bigness, and pathetic by expense. Tear them all down in your
imagination; fancy the vast hall with its massive pillars,--not painted
calomel-pill colour, as now, but of their native stone, with a rough,
true wood for roof,--and a people praying beneath them, strong in
abiding, and pure in life, as their rocks and olive forests That was
Arnolfo's Santa Croce. Nor did his work remain long without grace.

That very line of chapels in which we found our St. Louis shows signs
of change in temper. _They_ have no pent-house roofs, but true
Gothic vaults: we found our four-square type of Franciscan Law on one
of them.

It is probable, then, that these chapels may be later than the rest
--even in their stonework. In their decoration, they are so, assuredly;