The composition of these figures of boys and water-creatures is quite lovely; and the water, rising in a central jet from the drinking-cup, gushing from the mouths of the dolphins and slipping in slender runnels from the cunningly curved lips of the huge shells enhances, as it should, the joyous naturalness of the entire conception.

The popular appreciation of the beauty of the Tartarughe is shown by the wide-spread impression that it was designed by Raphael. It is painful to give up that belief, and in the face of facts which prove the hopelessness of such a contention the enthusiastic admirer can only assert that had Raphael designed a fountain this is the fountain he would have designed.

There is assuredly some excuse for this assertion. Raphael depicted often, and with peculiar tenderness, the gracious figures of youths. There is, also, a whimsicality in this conceit, a certain sympathy seems to unite the boys with the water-creatures; it is as if they were all joining in the sport of their own free will, and might at any moment break away from each other only to reunite in some fresh prank in splashing water under happy skies. All this is highly reminiscent of the art of Raphael. By virtue of it the Tartarughe belongs not to the end of the sixteenth century but to that great period of the High Renaissance when "for Leo X Raphael filled rooms, galleries, and chapels with the ideal forms of human beauty and the pure expression of existence."

This fountain was erected in the last year of the pontificate of Gregory XIII and the first year of the pontificate of Sixtus V, which would explain why its erection is attributed sometimes to the reign of one pope and sometimes to that of the other. It is difficult to understand how Sixtus V could have permitted the erection of any fountain so entirely devoid of scriptural suggestion, so purely pagan in its expression of joyous and irresponsible life, as is the Tartarughe. Possibly the play of the boys in the splashing water reminded the old man, who was in spite of his fierce enthusiasms so kindly and so human, of the far-off days of his childhood. As Cardinal Montalto he had done much for his native village, and many acts of his pontificate prove he had the poor always with him. He never forgot their sufferings or their simple pleasures, and in that old heart there lingered memories of his father's fruit garden at Formi, of the pear-trees which he placed in his coat of arms, and of the great cistern in which he dabbled with such happy recklessness that one day he fell in and had to be fished out like any other urchin des­tined or not for the papal chair.