He was recognized as the first goldsmith of his time; yet as a man also his contemporaries speak well of him, for he embodied the virtues of his age, while his morals did not fall below the average code of the Renaissance. Vasari says:--"He always showed himself a man of great spirit and veracity; bold, active, enterprising, and formidable to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak with princes as to exert himself in his art." J. A. Symonds, that inspiring student of the Italian Renaissance, sums up his impressions of the book and the man as follows:-- "I am confident that every one who may have curiously studied Italian history and letters will pronounce this book to be at one and the same time the most perfect extant monument of vernacular Tuscan prose, and also the most complete and lively source of information we possess regarding manners, customs, ways of feeling, and modes of acting, in the Court. Those who have made themselves thoroughly familiar with Cellini's Memoirs possess the substance of that many-sided epoch in the form of an epitome. It is the first book which a student of the Italian Renaissance should handle in order to obtain the right direction for his more minute researches. It is the last book to which he should return at the close of his exploratory voyages. At the commencement he will find it invaluable for placing him at the exactly proper point of view. At the end he will find it no less invaluable for testing and verifying the conclusion he has drawn from various sources and a wide circumference of learning. From the pages of this book the genius of the Renaissance, incarnate in a single personality, leans forth and speaks to us. Nowhere else, to my mind, do we find the full character of the epoch so authentically stamped. That is because this is no work of art or of reflection, but the plain utterance of a man who lived the whole life of his age, who felt its thirst for glory, who shared its adoration of the beautiful, who blent its paganism and its superstition, who represented its two main aspects of exquisite sensibility to form and almost brutal ruffianism. We must not expect from Cellini the finest, highest, purest accents of the Renaissance.... For students of that age he is at once more and less than his contemporaries: less, inasmuch as he distinguished himself by no stupendous intellectual qualities; more, inasmuch as he occupied a larger sphere than each of them singly. He was the first goldsmith of his time, an adequate sculptor, a restless traveler, an indefatigable workman, a Bohemian of the purest water, a turbulent bravo, a courtier and companion of princes; finally, a Florentine who used his native idiom with incomparable vivacity of style." THE ESCAPE FROM PRISON From the 'Memoirs': Symonds's Translation