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The collection of pictures was unlike those usually brought from Europe by cultivated tourists, for it contained no Madonnas, no Magdalenes, no Holy Families, no Descents or Entombments, no Saints, or Sibyls, or martyrs; and consisted of wild mid-mountain scenery, of solemn surf-swept strands, of lonely moonlit moors, of crimson sunsets in Cobi or Sahara, and of a few gloomy, ferocious faces, among which the portrait of Salvator Rosa smiled sardonically, and a head of frenzied Jocasta was preëminently hideous.

In Rembrandt's and Terburg's Adoration of the Shepherds, the light emanates from the infant Christ; in Ribera's magnificent Deposition from the Cross, the dead Saviour and His companions are represented, not, as in the Entombments of Perugino and Raphael, in the open air, but in the ghastly light of the mouth of the sepulchre.

Yet this law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich.

Yet this law was frightful in its inexorable severity, which we cannot suppose to have been very greatly mitigated by humanity in practice, for it was really the law of the people; more terrible than Venetian -piombi- and chambers of torture was that series of living entombments which the poor man saw yawning before him in the debtors' towers of the rich.

Yet, sum it all, pang by pang, all that Etna ever wrought of woe to the sons of men, the agonies of her burnings, the terrors of her living entombments, all her manifold deaths at once, and what were it in comparison with the blood that has flowed on this hillside, the slaughter, the murder, the infinite pain here suffered at the hands of man. O Etna, it is not thou that man should fear!

Of Gentile da Fabriano, a very rare master, there hangs an Adoration of the Magi, marked May, 1423. One always feels grateful to such of the Quattrocentisti as enlarged the sphere of artistic action, by going out of the conventional circle of holy families, nativities, and entombments. There is a dash about Gentile, a fresh, cavalier-like gentility, quite surprising, and altogether his own.