Leonardo made no answer. He gazed at the blue heavens shining through gaps in the Coliseum walls; and he reflected that nowhere did the azure sky seem so radiant and stainless as in the interstices of ruins. Birds were flitting in and out of the holes left where the barbarians had wrenched away the iron bars. Leonardo watched them fluttering to their roosting places; and he thought how the world-swaying Cæsars, who had erected the building, and the northern hordes who had pillaged it, had worked for those of whom it is written: 'They sow not, neither do they reap; and God feedeth them.'

Everything to Leonardo was joy, to Niccolò all was vexation; honey to one was gall to the other; perfected knowledge had bred love in the one, hatred in the other. But Machiavelli interrupted these musings, as usual anxious to end the conversation with a joke:—

'I perceive, Messer Leonardo, that they who think you impious stand in gross error. In the Judgment, when the angelic trump shall separate the lambs from the wolves, you will be among lambs.'

'Well,' said the painter, falling in with his humour, 'if I get to Paradise, you will come with me.'

'I cry you mercy! I have suffered overmuch in this world from tedium! My place I will give to any anxious for it. Hearken, good friend, and I will relate to you a dream. I was taken into an assembly of hungered, unwashen outcasts, monks with yellow faces, old beggars, slaves, cripples, idiots, and taught that these were they of whom it is written: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of Heaven." Then they had me to another place, where I saw an assembly of men in semblance like Senators. Among them were emperors, and popes, and captains, and lawgivers, and philosophers; Homer, Alexander the Great, Marcus Aurelius. They talked of learning and of statecraft. And to my wonderment I was told this was hell, and these were all sinners cast out by God, because they had loved the world and the wisdom of the world, which is foolishness with the Lord. And I was bidden to choose between hell and heaven, and I cried: "To hell with me! With the sages and the heroes!"'

'If the reality be as you describe it,' said Leonardo, 'I also should prefer ...'

'Nay, it is too late! You have made your choice. You will be rewarded for Christian virtues by a Christian heaven!'

They lingered in the Coliseum till dark. The yellow moon had sailed up from behind the stupendous arches of the Basilica of Constantine, severing with her rays a bed of cloud, transparent and delicately tinted as mother-o'-pearl. The three columns in front of St. Maria Liberatrice shone like phantoms. And the cracked bell sounding the Christian 'Angelus' seemed more than ever like a dirge over the trampled and forgotten Romans.