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77 love or devotion--not for man's limited eyesight. I did not get that impression at Florence. The conventional piety and affectation of the "old masters" seems to permeate the cathedral and everything in Florence. The pictures here are not so "Florentine" either. Coming out of the cathedral I was approached by the most picturesque and dirty monk I had yet seen, one of a begging order, I suppose. He was hung with all manner of beads and cords and images, and he had the most ingratiating smile, like a polite bandit--which indeed he was. I gave him a copper. The baptistry is just a big rotunda. It is all wonderful inlaid work of marble--inlaid is not the right term, it looks like inlaid wood, but it is tiny pieces of marble cut perfectly true and put together without the cement showing as it does in mosaic--the mosaic of the Congressional Library, for example.--In the Campo Santo, which Baedecker says was built on 53 shiploads of earth brought from Jerusalem, are mural paintings that would make your hair stand on end. The center one I take to be the day of judgment. There are rows and rows of shaven heads with monk's habits, bishops with mitres on, and women with wimples, also a sprinkling of kings and queens, to the [[underline]] right hand [[/underline]] of the throne with angels acting as ushers, apparently. On the [[underline]] left hand [[/underline]] are "knights and beautiful ladies," as it says in "Aucassin and Nicollette," a few kings, and great masses of frightened people being sent to perdition, angels megaphoning their sentences through big trumpets. The next scene (to the left) is evidently hell with an enormous devil in the middle and poor souls undergoing every form of torture imaginable. How a man could have painted such a thing and not have gone crazy is incomprehensible--most likely he was crazy. With the the exception of that one little group of "blessed," all the pictures are horrors, "death" in the form of hideous creatures,