If the productions and style of Michael Angelo be compared with the great standards of excellence and of truth in sculpture--nature, and the remains of ancient art, he will be found to have deviated widely from both, or rather, perhaps, he has rendered both subservient to his own particular views of each. He has created to himself modes of imitation, which should in themselves claim a paramount importance, independent of all archetypes; while these latter are connected with the originals of reality, only as an intermediate step to the realms of fancy. Hence, round a false, though gorgeous and imposing art, his genius has swept a magic circle, within whose perilous bound no inferior spirit has dared with impunity to tread. Unfortunately, however, such was the fascination produced in his own age, when the forcible and imaginative were admired above the simple and the true, that his works became a standard by which the past was to be tried, and the future directed. As a necessary consequence, a prodigious and irreparable lapse was prepared for the art. The imitation of a natural style will ever be productive of good; it will ultimately lead to no imitation, by conducting to the primeval source. The very reverse is the effect of following a guide such as Buonarotti, who has departed from nature farther, we will venture to say, than any great name on record, whether in literature or in art. Irregularities and imperfections in almost every other instance of lofty genius, are forgotten amid the deep-thrilling pathos, or soothing loveliness, of natural expression; but amid the awe-inspiring, the commanding, the overpowering representations of the Tuscan, the soul languishes for nature. His creations are not of this world, nor does feeling voluntarily respond to the mysterious and uncontrollable mastery which they exert over it. The cause and progress of this dereliction of nature can also be traced. He had marked the perplexities and constraint under which his predecessors had laboured, in their endeavors to unite the forms and expressions of living nature with images of ideal beauty, overlooking the productions of classic sculpture, in which this union is so happily accomplished: because to his vigorous, rather than refined perceptions, its simplicity appeared poverty, he fearlessly struck into a line of art, where all was to be new--vehement--wonderful.