sequent loss of a vast majority of the beautifully decorated tavolette that served as covers for the treasury records. The French did not consider them "in the taste of the times." In more than one part of Italy sad evidence can be gathered to-day of the character of that vandal horde that overran the Peninsula under the Corsican adventurer. From a comparison of dates of such of the tavolette, or actual book covers, and of the larger panel pictures, as are now preserved in the Sienese archives, it is clear that this method of commemorating official terms of office continued for at least four hundred and thirtytwo years. As a new set of accounts was opened every six months, with each incoming administration of the offices of Biccherna and Gabella, there must have been an number of these panel pictures that have been lost, scattered, or destroyed. About fifty are now preserved in Siena of the pictorial book-covers; the Industrial Museum of Berlin possesses four of these pictorial covers of the fourteenth century and one of the fifteenth; three of the fourteenth century are in the department of manuscripts of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris; one hangs in the Christian Museum of the Lateran, in Rome.

enormous

After the first dispersion the pictorial book-covers of their records were so little appreciated, even by the Sienese themselves, that Ramboux, a German artist of Cologne, acquired thirty-one of them at very low prices, picking them up here and there at street corners and antiquity shops. The Ramboux collection was sold after that artist's death, in 1866. The city of Cologne purchased some and others passed to Berlin and Paris, there being added to the museum and library I have named. Thanks to the enlightened care and zeal of Signor L. Banchi, late director of the archives of Siena, the Sienese collection has been enlarged from various sources, notably by the generous addition of those formerly in the possession of Count Piccolomini of Pienza.

The archives of Siena, as at present constituted, are the outgrowth of a governmental effort to gather together in one place all records of a past rich in glorious or historic memories, immensely valuable in themselves, and forming, in their ensemble, a mine of interest or information to students of history, of biography, and of art. This work of the government has

dei Paschi, a powerful loan association, whose profits are expended in works of public utility, and by gifts of private individuals. In this way the archives have been successively enlarged in 1867, 1873, and again in 1885.

In 1867 an exposition hall was inaugurated in the Piccolomini Palace, with a view to placing before visitors important specimens of the varied letters, documents, manuscript books, etc., most characteristic of the different phases of Sienese life and history, in all their manifestations and many-sided activities. It was originally intended, by the late director, Signor Banchi, to change these exhibits from time to time, for the benefit of that increasing number of persons who make successive visits to Siena through the lapse of years. This last excellent idea has not, however, been carried out; at least, not for many years.

THE PERILS OF UNAUTHORIZED DOGMATISM.

BY CHARLES M. WESTCOTT.

BREADTH.

Who hath weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance. He taketh up the isles as a very little thing."-Isaias xi. 12.

Behold

T is well at times to "take wings of fancy and ascend" to God's throne and look down upon the littleness of created things with His eyes; to remember that the value which things bear (and

must and ought to bear) to us as great and important, is but relative to the smallness and narrowness of our life. Yet to dwell ever in so high and rarefied an atmosphere would paralyze our energies; and for the most part it is better for us to yield ourselves to the self magnifying illusions of our imagination, lest, wishing to be as gods, we should become as beasts. But to yield ourselves consciously, and not unconsciously, to this illusion, is what saves us from our pettiness; just as the knowledge of our ignorance and the sense of the inadequacy of our ideas redeem us from utter darkness and blindness. Therefore, from time to time we should "consider the heavens" and dwarf ourselves and our little earth by comparison with things sublime and immense, lest we should altogether give, instead of merely lending, ourselves to the play of life, in which we must bear our part with a certain outward seriousness, if the tragedy is not to be turned into burlesque. Without some such periodic bracing we shall not reach that divine magnanimity, that imperturbable tranquillity of which it is written: "They that trust in the Lord" (i. e., that believe in him as the one absolute reality, beside which all others are shadowy, that care for him as the as the one thing worth taking altogether seriously) "shall be as Mount Sion that shall never be moved"; they shall share God's own mountain-like immobility as regards events and concerns which, however relatively serious, are ultimately infinitesimal.

Behind all their clouds they will be ever conscious of this clear, untroubled ether; beneath life's surface storms they will

mountains in the scales and the hills in a balance, and will take up the islands as a very little thing.

"Qui multo peregrinantur," says À Kempis, "raro sanctificantur"-great pilgrims are rarely great saints; what they gain at the shrines is lost on the road. And yet travel, in some sense of the word, is a necessity for the soul. Its effect is to open the mind and cure its provincialism or parochialism; to convince us of our ignorance and insignificance, for in small surroundings we loom big. Even in a very large empty room we are shrivelled up and begin to long for some cosier apartment of which we shall fill a more appreciable fraction. The field of our total experiences, past and present, seems, like that of our vision, to be of a constant and limited compass; so that, as new items are added to the mosaic, the rest are crowded together to make room for them. Thus, roughly speaking, to a child of seven, a year, being one-seventh of its total experience, seems ten times longer than to a man of seventy; and he who has now a thousand interests, cares ten times less about any of them than had he only a hundred.

Hence, it is characteristic of those whose experience is narrow, owing to youth or to other circumstances, to lose that sense of proportion which is gained by viewing things, not from a personal, parochial, or national, but from an historical and more universal stand point. To travel through humanity, past and present; to view things as they constitute part of that universal experience; this gives us a most valuable aspect of truth. Yet, after all, it is but one, even if a more important aspect, and it needs to be complemented by the other and narrower aspect. If an event, relatively to humanity, is truly small, relatively to me it is none the less truly great; and only God, who can keep both the universal and the particular aspects co-present to his gaze, can judge events altogether justly. And even in the case of the widest outlook of which we are capable, events seem immeasurably larger than they would from the stand-point of the infinite, whence they would vanish into nothingness for minds constituted as ours are.

Thus the effect of a too great largeness of view is often weakening and enervating, except when the faculty of concrete imagination is relatively strong. Indecision and hesitancy