ness of manner and graciousness of disposition that are so rare among men; and, withal, a spirit of independence that charmed the sturdy-minded people with whom he cast his lot. It was not long before the younger generation began to seek Mr. Underwood out, and after this the social ice, so to speak, thawed quickly.

In short, young Underwood, by reason of a strong and an attractive individuality, became a very prominent citizen of Hillsborough. He found time, in the midst of his own business enterprises, to look after the interests of the town and the county. One of his first movements was to organize an agricultural society which held its meeting four times a year in different parts of the county. It was purely a local and native suggestion, however, that made it incumbent on the people of the neighborhood where the society met to grace the occasion with a feast in the shape of a barbecue. The first result of the agricultural society - which still exists, and which has had a wonderful influence on the farmers of middle Georgiawas a county fair, of which Mr. Underwood was the leading spirit. It may be said, indeed, that his energy and his money made the fair possible. And it was a success. Young Underwood not only had canvassed the county, but he had "worked it up in the newspapers," as the phrase goes, and it tickled the older citizens immensely to see the dailies in the big cities of Atlanta, Macon, and Savannah going into rhetorical raptures over their fair.

As a matter of fact Francis Underwood, charged with the fiery energy of a modern American, found it a much easier matter to establish himself in the good graces of the people of Hillsborough and the surrounding country than did Judge Bascom when he returned to his old home with his lovely daughter. Politically speaking, he had committed the unpardonable sin when he accepted office under what was known as the carpet-bag government. It was an easy matter-thus the argument ran -to forgive and respect an enemy, but it was hardly possible to forgive a man who had proved false to his people and all their traditions—who had, in fact, "sold his birthright for a mess of pottage," to quote the luminous language employed by Colonel Bolivar Blasingame in discussing the return of Judge Bascom. It is due to Colonel Blasingame to say that he did not allude to the sale of the Bascom Place, but to the fact that Judge Bascom had drawn a salary from the State treas

ury while the Republicans were in power in Georgia.

This was pretty much the temper of the older people of Hillsborough even in 1876. They had no bitter prejudices against the old Judge; they were even tolerant and kindly; but they made it plain to him that he was regarded in a new light, and from a new standpoint. He was made to feel that his old place among them must remain vacant; that the old intimacies were not to be renewed. But this was the price that Judge Bascom was willing to pay for the privilege of spending his last days within sight of the old homestead. He made no complaints, nor did he signify by word or sign, even to his daughter, that everything was not as it used to be.

As for the daughter, she was in blissful ignorance of the situation. She was a stranger among strangers, and so was not affected by the lack of sociability on the part of the townspeople - if, indeed, there was any lack so far as she was concerned. The privations she endured in common with her father were not only sufficient to correct all notions of vanity or self-conceit, but they had given her a large experience of life; they had broadened her views and enlarged her sympathies, so that with no sacrifice of the qualities of womanly modesty and gentleness she had grown to be self-reliant. She attracted all who came within range of her sweet influence, and it was not long before she had broken down all the barriers that prejudice against her father might have placed in her way. She established a primary school, and what with her duties there and with her music class she soon had as much as she could do, and her income from these sources was sufficient to support herself and her father in a modest way; but it was not sufficient to carry out her father's plans, and this fact distressed her no little.

Sometimes Judge Bascom, sitting in the narrow veranda of the little house they occupied, would suddenly arouse himself, as if from a doze, and exclaim:

"We must save money, daughter; we must save money and buy the old Place back. It is ours. We must have it; we must save money." And sometimes, in the middle of the night, he would go to his daughter's bedside, stroke her hair, and say in a whisper:

"We are not saving enough money, daughter; we must save more. We must buy the old Place back. We must save it from ruin."

Joel Chandler Harris.

HE name of Fra Angelico stands with a large portion of the art loving public as the synonym of the highest attainment in religious art which the world has ever seen. And while in a certain sense I am not disposed to contest this judgment, though I believe it not to be founded on strictly artistic standards, it is necessary to give Fra Angelico his true place in the series of great painters the final result of whose united teachings we perceive only in the beginning of the sixteenth century. In imaginative power and in dramatic feeling he never approaches Giotto, Orcagna, Gentile da Fabriano, or even Spinello, of his own school: he is also inferior to Duccio and Lorenzetti of the Sienese; while in color he has a constant straining in the pitch which wearies the eye, but is, without doubt, the result of that ecstatic temperament to which he owes the peculiar gifts which separate him by a wide space from all his predecessors and contemporaries. I cannot resist the conviction that in Fra Angelico the ordinary action of the imagination was superseded by the most complete visionary subjectivity, and that what he painted was what he saw in the spirit. The seraphic glow, the unearthly serenity of his assemblages and the fixedness of the new type of beauty which he introduces, the rapture of his "Paradise" and the tameness of his " Inferno," the constant tension of his faculties, and the very monotony of his conceptions, are to my mind the evidence of a state of exaltation in which the visions of his ecstasy became the subjects of his art. And in the height of this exaltation and in the intensity of its vision are the compensations for the narrowness of his range and the feebleness of his grasp of ordinary human nature. I have no doubt that convent life and its morbid seclusion deepened greatly the groove in which he ran, and I think that a proof of it is in the larger naturalism which his work took on when he went to Orvieto, where with his pupil Benozzo, whose artistic nature was totally unlike his own, he painted the most vigorous and robust frescos we have by him. And this breath of a more vigorous life, which to his morbidly sensitive spirit must have been a stimulant too powerful to be long endured,

was possibly the reason for his abandonment of his work with his contract unfulfilled, and for his subsequent withdrawal from the work assigned to him at Prato, referred to farther on. The epithet "Angelic" was probably due to the belief that he was in communion with the angelic world; and that he himself had the fullest persuasion that his work was inspired is clear from his habit of never retouching a line once made, under the conviction that it was so ordered of God—a habit noticed by Vasari in the quotation given on page 620. The world for which he worked was hardly capable of finding the motive for the epithet in the artistic qualities of the painter, but it would naturally come from the persuasion of his being inspired and habitually in the presence of angels.

His long residence in Rome subsequently would not militate against the theory of this morbid sensitiveness, for he was of such devotional temper that residence in Rome was the next thing to being in heaven itself, and the opportunities for monastic seclusion were as complete as in Florence. We owe to this conviction of the inspiration of his work one of his most precious technical qualities -- the certainty of his touch and the purity of his lines; but in other technical attainments he does not seem to have advanced materially beyond the Giottesques, of whom he was the last to observe the doctrines in their purity, and he is inferior even to Orcagna, his immediate father in art, in knowledge of light and shade and perspective, in which term the painters of that epoch included not merely linear, but relief and aërial perspective. The pure subjectivity of his vision is seen in the "Last Judgment," from which Mr. Cole has engraved one of the most exquisite portions, where we see the blessed, all of one type; if they had been painted from the model, one would say that one model had served for all the heads. This was the flaming up into unexampled brilliancy and purity of the ecstatic school of art which began with Giotto - the flaming up of the sacred candle in the socket before it goes out.

Fra Angelico was born near the castle of Vicchio, not far from Vespignano,the birthplace of Giotto, and at the age of twenty entered the order of Dominicans, being received into the

new convent at Fiesole; but as the monastery was not yet fit for occupation, he was sent ad interim by the blessed Lorenzo da Ripafratta, master of the novices, to Cortona, where with his brother, who entered into the monastic life at the same time, he was under religious instruction, and took the vows in 1408. As the record of his reception into the convent refers to him as already a painter of some reputation and having done noteworthy work, it is most probable that he had previously received such instruction as he had in art.

As all the work which Fra Angelico did in Cortona, with the exception of the lunette in fresco over the door of the church of St. Dominic, is of his earlier style, it is likely that the ten years between the time of his taking the vows and his return to the convent at Fiesole in 1418 were passed at Cortona, the single work above excepted probably having been done about 1438, on one of his journeys to Rome, those being the only occasions on which he was away from his monastery.1

During the occupation of Cortona by the French,2 the frescos in the convent of St. Dominic, probably the first that Fra Angelico painted, were destroyed. Besides the lunette already mentioned as having been executed at a later period, and which remains over the door, the church possessed an altar-piece representing the Madonna and Child surrounded by angels; also a panel with the Annunciation, with scenes, in the predella, from the life of the Virgin, which was transferred to the church of the Gesù. In the same church is a gradino painted by Fra Angelico in his earliest style, with scenes from the life of St. Dominic, originally in the church of that saint, and, according to Cavalcaselle, showing the influence of the art of the Florentine school most markedly, confirming the opinion that the painter had begun his studies before his novitiate.

After his return to Fiesole, Fra Angelico lived there absorbed in his art and existing for it alone, for the state of the outer world was such that no spiritually minded man could endure it. Schisms and feuds within the Church, wars and invasions and civic discord without, the Renaissance already undermining the traditions of the art of Giotto and the puristsall these must have made the ecstatic of Fiesole content with the silence and seclusion of his convent. We know nothing of the details of his life at this time. Of the pictures executed during it we know the" Annunciation" of St. Alexander of Brescia (1432), and the tabernaculum painted for the corporation of flax merchants (1433),

1 Lord Lindsay ("Christian Art," Vol. II., p. 224) says that "Fra Angelico seems to have resided in most of the Dominican establishments between Florence and Rome." There does not seem to be any ground for this

where the painter represented the Virgin and Child surrounded by twelve angels of exquisite beauty playing on various instruments. On the sides of the doors are saints, and on the predella are the Adoration of the Magi, St. Peter preaching, with St. Mark taking notes of his sermon, and the persecutors of the latter in a storm at sea.

In the refectory of his monastery he painted a life-sized Crucifixion, the Virgin and St. John at the sides and St. Dominic kneeling at the foot of the cross, which he embraces. In the chapter-house of the convent is a Madonna and Child much damaged by restoration, and the altar-piece of the chapel represents a Virgin and Child enthroned and surrounded by various saints. The predella belonging to it, according to Cavalcaselle one of the most happy productions of the artist, is in the National Gallery, London. The "Coronation of the Virgin," now in the Louvre, was formerly in St. Dominic.

It is probable that during this period Fra Angelico executed the thirty-five little pictures for the doors of the cupboard belonging to the sacristy of the Santissima Annunziata at Florence, now in the Academy of Florence. They were ordered by Piero de' Medici, and illustrate several scenes from the life of the Saviour and from the Last Judgment.

The next noted date in the life of Fra Angelico is that of 1436, when the monastery of St. Mark in Florence was given to the Dominicans by Pope Eugene IV., and Fra Angelico left his cell at Fiesole to live in Florence. Cosimo de' Medici had the monastery rebuilt, the church restored, and the library added; the church being finished in 1441, the monastery in 1443. Before the architects had finished their work, Fra Angelico had begun the altar-piece for the choir- a Madonna and Child with two angels at the sides, St. Mark, St. John the Evangelist, and St. Stephen on her right; St. Dominic, St. Francis, and St. Peter on the left with Sts. Cosimo and Damiano before herdoubtless as a sign of gratitude to Cosimo de' Medici, who had used his influence with the Pope to obtain the concession of St. Mark for the Dominicans. This picture, in a bad state of preservation, is now in the Academy, the predella having been taken to pieces and the parts scattered abroad, many of them being lost so that it is impossible of reconstruction.

Vasari says that Nicholas V. wished to make Fra Angelico archbishop of Florence and that he humbly refused, saying that he was not capable of governing; but the story is incredible, for the archbishopric of Florence was not vacant conclusion, unless he means to say that the artist divided his life between Rome and Florence.

2 During the wars of the French republic, 17891805.