of the labouring months, as compared with the rude vaults and monstrous imaginations of the past, was again the victory of Meleager.
20. Secondly, take what value there is in the tradition that this sarcophagus was made the tomb of the mother of the Countess Matilda. If you look to the fourteenth chapter of the third volume of "Modern Painters," you will find the mythic character of the Countess Matilda, as Dante employed it, explained at some length. She is the representative of Natural Science as opposed to Theological.
21. Chance coincidences merely, these; but full of teaching for us, looking back upon the past. To Niccola, the piece of marble was, primarily, and perhaps exclusively, an example of free chiselling, and humanity of treatment. What else it was to him,—what the spirits of Atalanta and Matilda could bestow on him, depended on what he was himself. Of which Vasari tells you nothing. Not whether he was gentleman or clown—rich or poor—soldier or sailor. Was he never, then, in those fleets that brought the marbles back from the ravaged Isles of Greece? was he at first only a labourer's boy among the scaffoldings of the Pisan apse,-
