Cellini haunted the private rooms of popes and princes; he knew the chief actors of his day, just as the valet knows the hero; and the picturesque glimpses into their life we gain from him, add the charm of colour and reality to history. At the same time this book presents an admirable picture of an artist's life at Rome, Paris, and Florence. Cellini was essentially an Italian of the Cinque-cento. His passions were the passions of his countrymen; his vices were the vices of his time; his eccentricity and energy and vital force were what the age idealised as _virtù_. Combining rare artistic gifts with a most violent temper and a most obstinate will, he paints himself at one time as a conscientious craftsman, at another as a desperate bravo. He obeys his instincts and indulges his appetites with the irreflective simplicity of an animal. In the pursuit of vengeance and the commission of murder he is self-reliant, coolly calculating, fierce and fatal as a tiger. Yet his religious fervour is sincere; his impulses are generous; and his heart on the whole is good. His vanity is inordinate; and his unmistakable courage is impaired, to Northern apprehension, by swaggering bravado. The mixture of these qualities in a personality so natural and so clearly limned renders Cellini a most precious subject for the student of Renaissance life and character. Even supposing him to have been exceptionally passionate, he was made of the same stuff as his contemporaries. We are justified in concluding this not only from collateral evidence and from what he tells us, but also from the meed of honour he received. In Europe of the present day he could hardly fail to be regarded as a ruffian, a dangerous disturber of morality and order. In his own age he was held in high esteem and buried by his fellow-citizens with public ceremonies. A funeral oration was pronounced over his grave "in praise both of his life and works, and also of his excellent disposition of mind and body."[345] He dictated the memoirs that paint him as bloodthirsty, sensual, and revengeful, in the leisure of his old age, and left them with complacency to serve as witness of his manly virtues to posterity. Even Vasari, whom he hated, and who reciprocated his ill-will, records that "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 to princes as to exert himself in his art."