Their gods looked down upon earth through the noblest forms of Phidias with serenity, heedless of the violent struggles of humanity—like grand and peaceful presences. Even in the Laocoön, which stepped to the utmost permitted bounds of the antique sculpture, there is the restraint of beauty, and suffering is modified to grace. But here in these Titans of Michel Angelo there is a new spirit—better or worse, it is new. It represents humanity caught in the terrible net of Fate, storming the heavens, Prometheus-like, breaking forth from the bonds of convention, and terrible as grand. But noble as these works are, they afford no proper school for imitation, and his followers have, as has been fitly said, only caught the contortions without the inspiration of the sibyl. They lift the spirit, enlarge the mind, and energize the will of those who feel them and are willing only to feel them; but they are bad models for imitation. It is only such great and original minds as Michel Angelo who can force the grand and powerful out of the wrong and unnatural; and he himself only at rare intervals prevailed in doing this violence to nature. Every man has a right to be judged by his best. It is not the number of his failures but the value of his successes which afford the just gauge of every man’s genius. Here in these great statues Michel Angelo succeeded, and they are the highest tide-mark of his power as a sculptor. The Moses, despite its elements of strength and power, is of a lower grade. The Pietà is the work of a young man who has not as yet grown to his full strength, and who is shackled by his age and his contemporaries. The David has high qualities of nobility, but it is constrained to the necessities of the marble in which it is wrought. The Christ in the Church of the Minerva is scarcely worthy of him. But in these impersonations of Day, Night, Twilight, and Dawn, his genius had full scope, and rose to its greatest height.