For St. Peter’s as it now stands Michel Angelo is not responsible. His idea was to make all subordinate to the dome; but after his death, the nave was prolonged by Carlo Maderno, the façade completely changed, and the main theme of the building was thus almost obliterated from the front. It is greatly to be regretted that his original design was not carried out. Every change from it was an injury. The only point from which one can get an idea of his intention is from behind or at the side, and there its colossal character is shown. We have thus far considered Michel Angelo as a sculptor, painter, and architect. It remains to consider him as a poet. Nor in his poetry do we find any difference of character from what he exhibited in his other arts. He is rough, energetic, strong, full of high ideas, struggling with fate, oppressed and weary with life. He has none of the sweet numbers of Petrarca, or the lively spirit of Ariosto, or the chivalric tones of Tasso. His verse is rude, craggy, almost disjointed at times, and with little melody in it, but it is never feeble. It was not his art, he might have said, with more propriety than when he thus spoke of painting and architecture. Lofty thoughts have wrestled their way into verse, and constrained a rhythmic form to obey them. But there is a constant struggle for him in a form which is not plastic to his touch. Still his poems are strong in their crabbedness, and stand like granite rocks in the general sweet mush of Italian verse. Such, then, was Michel Angelo,—sculptor, painter, architect, poet, engineer, and able in all these arts. Nor would it have been possible for him to be so great in any one of them had he not trained his mind to all; for all the arts are but the various articulations of the self-same power, as the fingers are of the hand, and each lends aid to the other. Only by having all can the mind have its full grasp of art. It is too often insisted in our days that a man to be great in one art must devote himself exclusively to that; or if he be solicited by any other, he must merely toy with it. Such was not the doctrine of the artists of old, either in ancient days of Greece or at the epoch of the Renaissance. Phidias was a painter and architect as well as a sculptor, and so were nearly all the men of his time. Giotto, Leonardo, Ghiberti, Michel Angelo, Verrocchio, Cellini, Raffaelle,—in a word, all the great men of the glorious age in Italy were accomplished in many arts. They more or less trained themselves in all. It might be said that not a single great man was not versed in more than one art. Thence it was that they derived their power. It does not suffice that the arm alone is strong; the whole body strikes with every blow.