seen anything which surprised and touched me more.  The religious earnestness of the young custode, the hushed adoration of the country-folk who had silently assembled round us, intensified the sympathy-inspiring beauty of the slumbering girl.  Could Julia, daughter of Claudius, have been fairer than this maiden, when the Lombard workmen found her in her Latin tomb, and brought her to be worshipped on the Capitol?  S. Chiara’s shrine was hung round with her relics; and among these the heart extracted from her body was suspended.  Upon it, apparently wrought into the very substance of the mummied flesh, were impressed a figure of the crucified Christ, the scourge, and the five stigmata.  The guardian’s faith in this miraculous witness to her sainthood, the gentle piety of the men and women who knelt before it, checked all expressions of incredulity.  We abandoned ourselves to the genius of the place; forgot even to ask what Santa Chiara was sleeping here; and withdrew, toned to a not unpleasing melancholy.  The world-famous S. Clair, the spiritual sister of S. Francis, lies in Assisi.  I have often asked myself, Who, then, was this nun?  What history had she?  And I think now of this girl as of a damsel of romance, a Sleeping Beauty in the wood of time, secluded from intrusive elements of fact, and folded in the love and faith of her own simple worshippers.  Among the hollows of Arcadia, how many rustic shrines in ancient days held saints of Hellas, apocryphal, perhaps, like this, but hallowed by tradition and enduring homage![6]

FOLIGNO

In the landscape of Raphael’s votive picture, known as the Madonna di Foligno, there is a town with a few towers, placed upon a broad plain at the edge of some blue hills.  Allowing for that license as to details which imaginative masters permitted themselves in matters of subordinate importance, Raphael’s sketch is still true to Foligno.  The place has not materially changed since the beginning of the sixteenth century.  Indeed, relatively to the state of Italy at large, it is still the same as in the days of ancient Rome.  Foligno forms a station of commanding interest between Rome and the Adriatic upon the great Flaminian Way.  At Foligno the passes of the Apennines debouch into the Umbrian plain, which slopes gradually toward the valley of the Tiber, and from it the valley of the Nera is reached by an easy ascent beneath the walls of Spoleto.  An army advancing from the north by the Metaurus and the Furlo Pass must find itself at Foligno; and the level champaign round the city is well adapted to the maintenance and exercises of a garrison.  In the days of the Republic and the Empire, the value of this position was well understood; but Foligno’s importance, as the key to the Flaminian Way, was eclipsed by two flourishing cities in its immediate vicinity, Hispellum and Mevania, the modern Spello and Bevagna.  We might hazard a conjecture that the Lombards, when they ruled the