Page:Life in the Old World - Vol. II.djvu/177

Rh besides the testimony of his own heart, that he labored alone for the glory of the Highest.

Amongst the secular monuments of the side aisle is—to the right of the entrance-gate and not far from it—that of the Swedish Queen Christina, a monument of little beauty, for a remarkable but not beautiful character. On the top is a medallion-profile in bronze, and below a bas-relief in white marble, representing her abjuration of the faith of her great father and her conversion to the Catholic church.

At no great distance, on the same side, stands a monument of another female celebrity, a beautiful contrast to the last mentioned—the monument to the Countess Matilda, “the Great Matilda,” the daughterly friend of Gregory VII., who, by the gift of her hereditary lands, founded the temporal power of the States of the Church. The monument, by Bernini, represents her as a young woman, amiable and lovely as a goddess of youth, who embraces with one arm, protectingly, the papal tiara, and the papal keys, whilst with the other she raises a drawn sword. This monument, in all its parts, is of a cheerful, harmonious beauty, and the memory which it calls forth, belongs also to the most lovely and the most peculiar in the history of the world. For no one can think of this Matilda without, at the same time, thinking of Gregory VII., the head and hero of the popedom, the most arbitrary, the most inflexible, and, perhaps, in moral purity and will, the most elevated of all the Popes, after Gregory the Great. I confess that nothing is to me a stronger proof of his moral greatness, than the devoted attachment with which this man—unattractive in