The following episode in the chequered fortunes of St. Angelo is especially interesting, for it brings upon the scene that strange but remarkable character, Benvenuto Cellini, who was to a great extent the hero of the siege. We have fortunately an ample and graphic record of his adventurous life, by his own hand, in the autobiographical memoirs which Horace Walpole thought “more amusing than any novel” and which are indeed, as they have been styled, “the most entertaining and delightful work in the whole compass of Italian literature.” The learned historian Roscoe, who edited these memoirs, ably summarises the advantages enjoyed by the author. Benvenuto Cellini belonged to a golden age of the arts, essentially that of the Old Masters; he was intimately associated with Michael Angelo, Titian and the most eminent sculptors and painters of the time; he was on friendly terms with popes and monarchs, great princes, powerful statesmen, distinguished commanders, lordly ecclesiastics, and braving displeasure, held his head high, speaking his mind freely to all. We are admitted behind the scenes and see these historic personages in their private and domestic life, betraying themselves unconsciously at their worst, exposing their small vices, their meanness, pettiness, ingratitude, and yielding to their greater passions which often impelled them to cruelty, injustice, rank oppression and violent crime. Cellini’s presentment of people and things in his epoch is extraordinarily vivid and forcible; he was a prominent actor in many of the eventful episodes of that stormy period; he had the gift of language and the power to describe with vigour and precision the moving scenes of which he was an eye-witness and frequently participated in. He is conceited, self-sufficient, bombastic; he blows his own trumpet continually and is always full of vain-glorious satisfaction at the supreme excellence of his work and his triumph over all competitors. Of mercurial disposition he is quick to quarrel with any one, to resent offence, not always intended, but ever ready to justify his ebullitions of ill temper, sword in hand to face his enemies and fight all comers. Withal he was a genius of the first water; his productions, as fully proved by the work that survives, were fine specimens of his versatile artistic power, and we need only refer to his principal achievement, the great bronze statue of Perseus, which all the world admires to-day in the Galeria dei Lanzi of Florence. Cellini was a Florentine, a subject of the Medicis, born in the days of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his father, an admirable artist in ivory, an engineer and a notable musician, was much favoured by that liberal patron of the arts. In his youth Benvenuto bound himself to a goldsmith, and according to Vasari, had “no equal in that branch for many years, nor in making fine figures of alto and basso relievo.... He set jewels and adorned them with