not meet the legal requirements for perfecting the bargain, because the monks, whose consent was indispensable, were all dispersed. The abbot dwelt alone in the deserted halls of the great monastery.16

With the return of tranquillity in the fifteenth century San Galgano experienced a revival. Enough monks returned to form a new nucleus, the offices were chanted as of old, and the damage done by the Companies of Adventure was gradually repaired. But the former splendor never returned. The melancholy story of the decline to the point of abandonment and ruin that now meets the eye is written legibly enough in the records, but can only be briefly indicated here. Before the new and vital interests which the Renaissance, now mounting to its meridian, popularized throughout Italy, the monastic idea began to pale. San Galgano, buried among thick woods in a remote valley, did not bulk so large as in a simpler age. Its revenues were still considerable, but its ranks represented a descending curve of efficiency and were no longer crowded with cheerful and self-sacrificing volunteers. The abbey worried along, however, as vested interests will, until presently it fell a victim to one of the growing diseases of the Roman system, the cancer of prelacy. With the passion for a princely scale of living, which the Renaissance fastened upon the Roman pontiffs, went the need of a court, of gorgeous palaces and of a numerous retinue of sycophants to shine as minor lights around the central sun. To meet the multifarious demands upon their budget the popes were driven to tap such questionable sources of income as the sale of indulgences, while to satisfy the covetous and luxurious prelates they were constrained to assign to them the revenues of fat bishoprics and abbacies. San Galgano, a rich foundation close at hand, was not likely to escape the general fate. In the year 1503 Pope Julius II., one of the most imposing personalities of the whole line of popes, but, as ill-luck would have it, always desperately in need of cash, gave the abbey in commendam to one of his cardinals. On the surface. the transaction signified no more than that the abbey was "commended" to the cardinal's paternal care; in reality it appropriated the entire revenue to his personal use. Whether the abbey was to be kept up depended henceforth on the distant commendatary's charity, supplemented by the begging talents of the monks. Some monks of an adventurous temper might still be inclined to take their chances with the institution under the nefarious absentee system, but they had no legal claim to anything. Their money flowed to Rome, and once at Rome was past reclaiming.

16 Canestrelli, p. 21.

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XIV.-3.

There is no reason for following closely the miserable tale of decay under the successive commendataries, though the story is not without its element of pathos. In the year 1576 a papal inspector, sent on a tour through Tuscany, found a single monk acting as caretaker of the vast establishment, reflecting in his rags the crying destitution of the monastery. The inspector reported to Rome that the refectory was without a roof, that many chapels were in decay, that of the four bells three could not be rung, and that through the broken windows the birds entered and made their nests in the church. In the year 1632 the pope, himself scandalized at the results of a prolonged exploitation but incapable of devising an effective policy of reform, reduced the dishonored monastery from its dignity of abbey, and, twenty years after, secularized it by organizing it as a simple benefice. The benefice, however, embracing the many estates which San Galgano had accumulated through the ages, produced an undiminished revenue, and this revenue continued to flow into the hands of a commendatary, who in return for an unmerited bounty assumed the meagre obligation of maintaining Christian worship in the cathedral and of making a few repairs at his discretion. The Cistercian order now definitely left the place which was associated with a not inglorious chapter of its past. The commendatary, looking for cheap labor, sent first some Vallombrosans, and later, occasional Franciscans to act as custodians of the edifice, but these uninterested guardians, drawing an infinitesimal wage, were glad if they could eke out a living without giving a thought to the maintenance of the splendid monument in whose ample enclosure they must have felt overwhelmed by a sense of their own insignificance.

And so we arrive through the long and painful stages of neglect at the last phase, the chapter of total abandonment. On January 22, 1786, a congregation of perhaps fifty peasants was gathered in the sacristy before the only altar which seems to have been kept in sufficient repair for the celebration of the mass. The rest of the edifice, we are informed, had become frightfully damp and unwholesome, owing to the fact that whenever it rained the water poured through the roof like a sieve. Suddenly on that January day "all' atto della consecrazione ",18 at the moment when the Franciscan caretaker and priest consecrated the bread, there came a tremendous roar, followed by a shock which threw the terrified worshipers upon their knees. The bell-tower, which rose just behind the sacristy and, 17 Canestrelli, Documento XXVIII.

15 Ibid., p. 61.

as was usual in Italy, stood free of the church, had given way and crashed to the ground. It must have seemed to the witnesses like a divine intervention that, instead of burying them under its ruins. in the sacristy, it had measured its length upon the open field behind the choir. After this catastrophe neither peasants nor caretaker would trust themselves in the dilapidated edifice. They got leave to transfer the worship, maintained in the crumbling abbey for the convenience of the scattered peasants of the neighborhood, to Monte Siepi, and the venerable though neglected round chapel, which marked the grave of San Galgano and had served as the original settlement of the Cistercians, was once more supplied with an altar and rang with the solemn music of the liturgy. To this day, on Sundays and other Christian festivals, it is visited by a thin congregation of silent, stoical-looking peasants, attended by their wives and children. With the withdrawal of the priest and his flock a formal deconsecration was required by the regulations of the church in sign that the great abbey was left to perish in peace. The bishop of Volterra, in whose diocese the abbey lay, in due time published the necessary decree, and on August 10, 1789, the pertinent ceremony was gone through with by two commissioners, accompanied by a notary to make the necessary legal attestation. It is interesting to observe that just six days before, some hundreds of miles away across the snow-capped barrier of the Alps, a body of Frenchmen, calling themselves the National Assembly, had swept the remnants of feudalism out of existence and inaugurated for Europe a new age, founded upon the bold belief, no less than blasphemous to the medieval mind, of the ability of reason to effect the salvation of the human race. The chronological coincidence, linking the farsounding pronouncement made on the Parisian stage with the abandonment unwept, unsung, of a monument which had its root in the warm heart of the Middle Ages, touches the imagination. Sunt lachrymae rerum.

Neglected since the days of the Renaissance by greedy and conscienceless commendataries, the doomed abbey was from the moment of deconsecration left unguarded and untenanted, a prey to the conquering elements. Not long before the tower came down in the manner we have seen, a cardinal commendatary, Feroni by name, had managed to persuade the pope to transfer the whole property of San Galgano as a private estate to his family, with the sole obligation of contributing to the maintenance of religious worship in the abbey. When the tower fell the family, in return for fitting up the chapel on Monte Siepi, got the maintenance clause abolished. The dis

avowal of the edifice was now complete; as far as the law was concerned, the owners were free to look upon the ancient monument as a useless encumbrance amidst their pleasant fields and meadows, and nothing hindered them from destroying it at pleasure. While balking at this extreme step, they freely resorted to it as a quarry, and the peasants, following the example of their enlightened masters, plundered it at will for such building material as their need required. Whenever a vault fell in, bullock carts rolled lumberingly to the scene to appropriate the fine blocks of travertine which littered the ground, and a heap of indistinguishable rubbish might be the only evidence of the existence of the abbey at this day, if the Italian government, sluggishly responding to the indignant appeal of a devoted lover of his country's history and art, had not, in the year 1894, stayed further demolition by declaring the ruin a national monument and by making meagre provision for its preservation.

Hardly a building testifying to the character and splendor of the Italian past is more worthy of close study than the ruined abbey of San Galgano. Unvisited by the casual tourist by reason of its remoteness from the common highways of travel, utterly untouched by the many vulgar influences of modern life, it has gathered about itself the atmosphere of silence which settles upon all noble works. On an afternoon in June, abandoning the hot and dusty post-road which I had followed for some hours, I mounted a grassy bank, and across a sun-lit meadow saw it lying, white and glittering like the gates of pearl. Around the level field, from whose thick clover came the riotous song of summer mounting to its acme, stood the wooded hills, grave and watchful. To the west, its defiant outline almost obliterated by the strong light, rose the cliff of Chiusdino. Fronting the lofty citadel and close at hand lay gently-sloping Monte Siepi with the purple roof of the old round chapel just visible above the tree-tops. Here at last in the silence of the white summer afternoon, broken only by the voices in the grass and the faint, clear call of the cuckoo, the long story of the monastery became perfectly intelligible by being lifted out of the conditions of material fact into the realm of beauty. To the wakeful inner vision will always come a moment when things, born in time, assume the aspect of eternity. From that westward rock, its sharp lines dissolving in the sun, had the knight Galgano ridden forth upon his quest of God, his golden hair, of which the legend tells, waving in the wind; in these peaceful hills had he wandered, carrying his heart in his hands like a sacrifice; and here, on brooding Monte Siepi, earth had gathered the exhausted body like a leaf of the dead year. Presently over the grave had

risen the round chapel of the Cistercian brotherhood and, in the due course of time, built of the prayers of men, the abbey yonder, lifting a pure front above the meadow. Even so. The crickets rehearse the tale to the cicadas shrilling in the hedges, the thrush and cuckoo inform the hills, which, when evening falls, will hold silent conference with the marching stars.

portal and stood in the dedisclosing the blue sky covA few blocks of weathered At

Just before sunset I entered the serted nave. The vaults had fallen in, ered with a web of delicate rose vapor. travertine, which had lately given way, littered the grassy floor. the entrance to the transept a brilliant patch of yellow marked a bed of buttercups, graciously planted by some wandering wind. At either hand the eye followed the rows of piers till it rested upon the marred choir wall with its ghostly apertures. Finer clustered columns one may not hope to find, each one composed of perfectly articulated members, simple, serviceable and beautiful. Equally simple, with an added grace of subtle rhythm, are the triforium and clere-story. If this was Italian workmanship it was at least directed by the delicate Gothic spirit which emanated from the Isle de France. In the days when the ribbed vault terminated the nave and aisles, the church must have produced an effect as rounded and complete as a sonata by some great master. But if completeness has been lost, its absence is not noticed by reason of a quality much more moving to us in our character of men, a quality which Wordsworth has called "the unimaginable touch of time". Daily as the light fails from the sky and dusk gathers within the spacious enclosure, time, and its kindred spirit, beauty, circle like great birds above the deserted home of men.

FERDINAND SCHEVILL.