One of his last works, if not the last, was the model of the famous cupola of St. Peter’s, which he never saw completed. In some respects this was departed from in its execution by his successors; but in every change it lost, and had it been carried out strictly as he designed it, it would have been even nobler and more beautiful than it is. Here was a long life of ceaseless study, of untiring industry, of never-flagging devotion to art. Though surrounded by discouragements of every kind, harassed by his family, forced to obey the arbitrary will of a succession of Popes, and, in accordance with their orders, to abandon the execution of his high artistic conceptions and waste months and years on mere mechanic labor in superintending mines and quarries—driven against his will, now to be a painter when he desired to be a sculptor, now to be an architect when he had learned to be a painter, now as an engineer to be employed on fortifications when he was longing for his art; through all the exigencies of his life, and all the worrying claims of patrons, family, and country, he kept steadily on, never losing courage even to the end—a man of noble life, high faith, pure instincts, great intellect, powerful will, and inexhaustible energy; proud and scornful, but never vain; violent of character, but generous and true,—never guilty through all his long life of a single mean or unworthy act: a silent, serious, unsocial, self-involved man, oppressed with the weight of great thoughts, and burdened by many cares and sorrows. With but a grim humor, and none of the lighter graces of life, he went his solitary way, ploughing a deeper furrow in his age than any of his contemporaries, remarkable as they were,—an earnest and unwearied student and seeker, even to the last. It was in his old age that he made a drawing of himself in a child’s go-cart with the motto “Ancora imparo”—I am still learning. And one winter day toward the end of his life, the Cardinal Gonsalvi met him walking down towards the Colosseum during a snowstorm. Stopping his carriage, the Cardinal asked where he was going in such stormy weather. “To school,” he answered “to try to learn something.” Slowly, as years advanced, his health declined, but his mind retained to the last all its energy and clearness; and many a craggy sonnet and madrigal he wrote towards the end of his life, full of high thought and feeling—struggling for expression, and almost rebelliously submitting to the limits of poetic form; and at last, peacefully, after eighty-nine long years of earnest labor and never-failing faith, he passed away, and the great light went out. No! it did not go out; it still burns as brightly as ever across these long centuries to illumine the world. Fitly to estimate the power of Michel Angelo as a sculptor, we must study the great works in the Medicean Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo, which show the culmination of his genius in this branch of art.