No one, perhaps, fully aware of Michael Angelo's celebrity, ever looked for the first time upon one of his principal works without a shade of disappointment. Inventions appealing to the intellect without sympathy from the feelings,--attitudes struggling with difficulty rather than aiming at elegance,--muscular masses, rugged as the blocks from which they are rudely hewn; such things surpass the comprehension of superficial observers, and disenchant common minds. Yet there is a spell around all of them which arrests the most careless, and recalls the most disappointed, and the longer they are examined, especially by persons of cultivated understanding, the more certain will be the final tribute to their transcendent qualities, the more unreserved the avowal that their author stands out among the foremost geniuses whom the world has seen. Feebleness or insipidity had no place in his conceptions, and no individual ever left the impress of his vigorous mind upon so many various arts. He was a poet of no mean pretensions. His architecture is as successful as bold. It is difficult to say whether his frescoes or his sculptures are the more admirable. Even his oil paintings are worthy of more notice than they have met with; and, the few ascertained specimens display a mastery of finish little to be looked for from their wayward and impetuous author, and develop in their execution, as well as in their design, an extraordinary pictorial science. The trite assertion that he never painted but three easel pictures seems fully negatived by the mechanical perfection which, notwithstanding a certain languor of colouring and flatness of surface, these exhibit, and which must have been gained by extensive practice. In his house, even a miniature on parchment is shown as his work; and not a few tiny productions in bronze and ivory bear the stamp of his invention, if not of his hand. These were probably labours of those early days when, with equal verity and shrewdness the Gonfaloniere Soderini recommended him to the Roman court as "a fine young man, unequalled in his art throughout Italy, or perhaps the world. He will do anything for good words and caresses; indeed, he must be treated with affection and favour, in which case he will perform things to astonish all beholders."[228] In the sacristy of S. Lorenzo, at Florence, these anticipations were amply realised on the monuments of two of the Medici, with whom an earlier portion of these pages has made us acquainted. These works were, however, no labour of love to the sculptor, whose sympathies had been alien to that race from the days when Pietro ceased to walk in the ways of his fathers. Accordingly, their greatest fault is, that the artist absorbs our interest almost to the exclusion of the personages commemorated, to whom the allegorical compositions appear to have no reference. It is, indeed, only their portraits that recall the purpose of the monuments. That of the elegant and gentle Giuliano