repent, as calling men to account can be owing to the law.” (v.  Bishop Taylor’s Life of Christ.) Thus says the good Bishop Taylor, praising Joseph, that he was too truly just to call furiously for justice, and that, waiving the killing letter of the law, he was “minded to dismiss his wife privily;” and in this he emulated the mercy of his divine foster-Son, who did not cruelly condemn the woman whom he knew to be guilty, but dismissed her “to repent and sin no more.”  But while Joseph was pondering thus in his heart, the angel of the Lord, the prince of angels, even Gabriel, appeared to him in a dream, saying, “Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife!” and he awoke and obeyed that divine voice.

[Footnote 1:  There is, however, in the Liverpool Museum, a very exquisite miniature of the birth of St. John the Baptist, in which the female figure standing near represents, I think, the Virgin Mary.  It was cut out of a choral book of the Siena school.]

This first vision of the angel is not in works of art easily distinguished from the second vision but there is a charming fresco by Luini, which can bear no other interpretation.  Joseph is seated by the carpenter’s bench, and leans his head on his hand slumbering. (Milan, Brera.) An angel stands by him pointing to Mary who is seen at a window above, busied with needlework.

On waking from this vision, Joseph, says the legend, “entreated forgiveness of Mary for having wronged her even in thought.”  This is a subject quite unknown, I believe, before the fifteenth century, and not commonly met with since, but there are some instances.  On one of the carved stalls of the Cathedral of Amiens it is very poetically treated. (Stalles d’Amiens, p. 205.) Mary is seated on a throne under a magnificent canopy; Joseph, kneeling before her and presented by two angels, pleads for pardon.  She extends one hand to him; in the other is the volume of the Holy Scriptures.  There is a similar version of the text in sculpture over one of the doors of Notre-Dame at Paris.  There is also a picture by Alessandro Tiarini (Le repentir de Saint Joseph, Louvre, 416), and reckoned by Malvasia, his finest work, wherein Joseph kneels before the Virgin, who stands with a dignified air, and, while she raises him with one hand, points with the other up to heaven.  Behind is seen the angel Gabriel with his finger on his lip, as commanding silence, and two other angels.  The figures are life-size, the execution and colour very fine; the whole conception in the grand but mannered style of the Guido school.

THE NATIVITY.

Ital. Il Presepio.  Il Nascimento del Nostro Signore. Fr. La Nativite. Ger. Die Geburt Christi.  Dec. 25.

The birth of our Saviour is related with characteristic simplicity and brevity in the Gospels; but in the early Christian traditions this great event is preceded and accompanied by several circumstances which have assumed a certain importance and interest in the artistic representations.