The Cathedral Builders. Leader Scott

in the later Romanesque style. The arches are surrounded with intricate scrolls and interlaced work; some of them clearly copied from Byzantine designs. The spaces between the arches are enriched with allegorical subjects. In one, the emblems of the apostles; in another, a choir of angels, very mediæval and heavy-headed; in another, a winged archangel. At the corner is a man in Lombard dress, holding two animals, one in each hand. It is peculiarly suggestive of the Etruscan deity with the two leopards, which is so frequently seen on the black Chiusi vases, and confirms more than ever, the tendency in mediæval Christians to cling to ancient pagan forms, giving them a new Christian significance. The frieze above the arches which forms the base of the marble panels of the Ambone, is peculiarly Comacine. Here are all the mystic animals, representing the powers of evil;—dragons, wolves, etc., bound together in a knotted scroll of one continuous vine-branch, here and there training into foliage. Reading the ornamentation by the light of mediæval symbolism, the whole thing gives us lessons appropriate to a pulpit. It tells us that Christ the pillar of the Church, descended from David the lion of Judah, is the foundation of all Gospel; that angels and saints sing the glory of God; and that Christ the vine can bind and subdue the powers of evil. The fine early Christian tomb beneath the pulpit is not necessarily connected with it. It has been called the tomb of Stilicho, with how much reason I am not prepared to say. If so it must date from the early part of the fifth century, as it was on October 8, 405, that Stilicho marched up to Fiesole from Florence to his victory over Radagaisus the Goth. The Florentines had but just been converted to Christianity at that time. The sculpture, though Christian in subject, has many signs of debased Roman style mingled with much of the mediæval.