The lake is surrounded, except on the north, by black hills, and has a wicked-looking black island in it a few miles from the northern shore.

Soon we came to the edge of the plateau, and were looking west over the Hrafnagiá—the Raven's Rift-upon the plain of Thingvalla. The Raven's Rift is a rent in the lava, running north from the shore of the lake in a straight line for five or six miles. The rent is from a hundred to fifty yards broad, its eastern side being a clean-cut, perpendicular cliff, perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, its western side dilapidated, and a good deal lower. From the top of the western side a sharp slope brings one down to the level of the plain of Thingvalla. The plain is about five miles across from east to west, and is bounded on the west by a similar, but deeper, rift, the Almannagiá-the Allmen's Rift, or Great Rift-running north for five or six miles, exactly parallel to the Raven's Rift. The whole plain between the parallels must have subsided, in one piece, from the level of the outer brink of each rift-and must have subsided suddenly, for the outer wall of each rift is cut as by one decisive stroke of a sharp knife.

The path by which one gets down from the plateau to the shore of the lake, and across the southern end of the Raven's Rift, is so steep that we had to do what one seldom thinks of doing in Iceland-dismount and lead our ponies. Then we rode west across the plain, sometimes over sheets of bare wrinkled lava, sometimes along deep-worn paths among dwarfbirches; in front of us the long black wall of the Allmen's Rift -black, save for one thin white thread, the Oxará, hanging over it-in front of us the long black wall of the Allmen's Rift, bounding our view, stretching away to the north, as straight and uniform as a Roman aqueduct.

It was twilight when we reached the Thingvalla mead and forded the Öxará a little below where it issues from the Allmen's Rift, then rode down the west bank of the stream a short way, then crossed the stream again where it divides and makes the Holm-island, and so came at last to the little church and parsonage-homestead where we were to pass the night.

The window of our room looked west, across the tiny graveyard and the Öxará, to the lower meadow-about two hundred yards away-where Njal had his booth; and beyond the meadow, and the slope behind the meadow, to the stupendous western wall of the Allmen's Rift, where it towers highest in VOL. 87 (VII.-NEW SERIES). NO. 520.

44

the Mid Eve Peak, filling half the sky. Delphi under the white cliffs, and the meadow of the Althing under the black cliffs: these two places will always stand together in my memoryReligion and Justice embodied in awful rocks.

We spent the next morning till noon, under a very hot sun, examining the topography of the meadow on the west bank of the Öxará, and the slope of the inner side of the Rift immediately behind the meadow. The foundations of the booths of the Thingmen are easily traced. Njal's booth, a few paces south of where the Öxará bridge was in Saga-days, is the largest of them.

A little after noon we got our cavalcade under way—this time the boy riding the little chestnut, now called the Snark, on account of his snarkish qualities. We crossed the Öxará at the Holm-island ford, then rode up the steep path through the break in the inner wall of the Almannagiá, then, within the Almannagiá, rode over greensward for about a quarter of a mile, with the black cliffs, eighty or a hundred yards apart, on each side; then dismounted, and clambered-men and ponies-up the path, or rather stair, which at last brings the traveller out of the Almannagiá, on the western side.

The track-about seventeen miles in length-from the western brink of the Almannagiá to Seljadalr, where we were to take our mid-journey's rest, is rather dreary-over vast lava flats, and up and down bare stony hills; and we took a long time to do the distance, for we had to stop wherever there was a little grass, because our ponies had got hardly any grass during the night and morning at Thingvalla-the grass at Thingvalla having been nearly eaten up by recent droves of ponies which had halted there. When we got to Seljadalr—a long, sad-looking valley, with plenty of grass-we found the drove to which the Snark was to be consigned, halting there. When the time came to move on after our rest, we bade affectionate farewell to the dear little Snark-we had got to like him very much for his prettiness and his faults-and began the last stage of our ride which would bring us back to Reykjavik.

PART II.

TEN days after we said good-bye, at Seljadalr, to the little chestnut, he arrived at Newcastle, together with about two hundred other emigrants like himself. A few of these, perhaps, were to remain in the world of green grass and sunshine and wind and

rain; but the great majority of them, including our little friend, were destined for work in the coal-pits.

He was put into a railway-truck late one night and whirled away, over jarring points, past sudden lights, through regions of bad-smelling smoke; when the morning dawned, through green fields, here and there, till at last he came to the mouth of the coal-pit in which he was to spend the rest of his life.

The men and boys who worked with him in his gallery of the pit, and especially the man whose charge it was to feed him and the other ponies of his underground stable, were kind to him. He had always plenty to eat, which went far to make the darkness and heat tolerable; and, in course of time, devotion to duty-the duty of drawing a little truck along the gallery-became a second nature to him, and cast out snarkishness.

So his life went on, virtuously and usefully, for a good many years, till one winter morning, about nine o'clock, earth and air were shaken, and, at the sound, all hearts stood still in the village; then wives and children ran to their doors, and saw the pillar of smoke standing high over the pit mouth.

So this little pony-saga ends sadly, after the manner of Icelandic sagas: sadly, and yet well, for we know that heroic acts were done by men and boys in the pit before they died; and the little chestnut-' he died in harness' let that be his epitaph-and we have made him the hero of a saga, and we shall think of his life and death in some such way as we think of the lives and deaths of other more renowned heroes of saga -strenuous lives, and deaths in 'battles long ago.'

'Battles long ago': I see them riding east-Mord and his men-along the deep-worn tracks in the meadow between the Markarfljot and the black fell, and then up, beside the green turf-wall, to the homestead of Hlitharendi, to slay Gunnar. Two wimbrels are circling round the heads of the riders, shrilly whistling, and the old house-dog, who was lying asleep in the sunshine on the roof, is just beginning to stir.

J. A. STEWART.

IN THE NATIONAL GALLERY.

V. THE VALLEYS OF PEACE.

FAR away from Florence, that busy centre of commercial, intellectual, æsthetic, and political activity, the beautiful hills and plains of Umbria favoured a more restful and meditative spirit. Always the home of purely religious art, it became so more exclusively after the death of Fra Angelico, the last of the Florentines who devoted himself entirely to the older ideal of Italian painting-the perfection of spiritual expression. Umbria may, indeed, be said to have been the Fra Angelico of Italy, for it resisted more than other districts the tendency to secularisation in art, the claims of realism, and the fascination of pagan ideals.

It was at Assisi, near Perugia, the chief city of Umbria, that St. Francis was born. It was there that he died, and was buried under the double church dedicated to his name, a very shrine of art and religion, with walls painted all over by Giotto and Cimabue and Memmi, and other artists of the fourteenth century. At Perugia, in the paintings of its great artist Perugino, the Umbrian spirit of religious aspiration and ecstasy reached its purest height, but this spirit was not confined to Perugia, nor even to the geographical limits of Umbria, but it extended to the west and the north over the Appennines to Urbino and San Sepolcro to San Severino, Forli and Cortona, and the artists of these and other places situated in Tuscany, in Emilia and the Marches (Raphael and Piero della Francisca, Lorenzo da St. Severino, Melozzo da Forli and Signorelli), are all counted of the school of Umbria.

In all Umbrian pictures permeated by the true spirit of the locality, there is a hush as of the country, and of no common country, but of a land of sacred beauty and peace, a paradise on earth, and a special quiet seems to pervade Room VI., in which our Umbrian pictures are hung.

Art in Umbria during the fifteenth century moved more

gently than in Florence, but it did not stagnate. It had its centres of culture and its lordly art patrons at Gubbio and Perugia, at Urbino and elsewhere. It had its beginning long before the earliest Umbrian artist of whom we have an example in the National Gallery, viz. Pietro della Francesca. He was born about 1415, at Borgo San Sepolcro, a town in Tuscany on the border of Umbria, in the upper valley of the Tiber. He was evidently a man of strong individuality, a lover of nature and knowledge, a searcher after truth, as much a man of science as of art, and of a simple and reverent spirit. Little is known of him but that his real name was Pietro (or Piero) di Benedetto de' Franceschi, that he probably studied under Paolo Uccello; that he worked with Domenico Veneziano, from whom he learnt to paint in oils; that he studied perspective with ardour and wrote a treatise upon it; that he was one of the first painters of separate portraits, and that he worked in Florence, Arezzo, Urbino, Rimini, San Gemignano, Perugia, Rome, and also his native Borgo San Sepolcro, where he died, blind, on the 12th of October, 1492. In the feeling of his work he is Umbrian, but technically and intellectually he belongs rather to the scientific school of Florence, to the realists and experimentalists of the fifteenth century. A strange mixture of impulses makes his work unusually interesting. In the pictures by which he is represented in the National Gallery, the naturalistic and experimental sides of him are illustrated very clearly, as well as his great originality. If we compare the 'Baptism of Christ in the River Jordan' (No. 665), or 'The Nativity of Our Lord' (No. 908), with the similar subjects as treated by his nearest Florentine contemporaries, Fra Lippo Lippi, Benozzo Gozzoli, Pesellino, and Pollaiuolo, we shall find little affinity between him and them. His human types, his colour, his composition, his landscapes, are all his own. We get near to him in the battle-piece of Uccello (some eighteen or nineteen years his senior), where we see the same study of nature for her own sake, the same desire to be simply faithful to appearances, the same effort after correct perspective. He seems to have cast tradition to the winds and to have begun everything over again from personal observation and study. There is something that reminds one rather of Flanders than Italy in his resolute realism.

In the 'Nativity,' which is painted in oil colour, there is also much in the execution to suggest Flanders, especially in the