HAD Michelangelo been less poetic and more explicit in his language, he might have said there is nothing so conducive to mental and physical wholeness as saturation of body and mind with work. The great artist was so prone to over-anxiety and met (whether needlessly or not) with so many rebuffs and disappointments, that only constant absorption in manual labor prevented spirit from fretting itself free from flesh. He toiled "furiously" in all his mighty undertakings and body and mind remained one and in superior harmony--in abundant health--for nearly four score and ten years. This Titan got his start in life in the rugged country three miles outside Florence: a place of quarries, where stone cutters and sculptors lived and worked. His mother's health was failing and it was to the wife of one of these artisans that her baby was given to nurse. Half in jest, half in earnest, Michelangelo said one day to Vasari: 'If I have anything good in me, that comes from my birth in the pure air of your country of Arezzo, and perhaps also from the feet that with the milk of my nurse, I sucked in the chisels and hammers wherewith I make my figures.' He began his serious study of art (and with it his course in "physical training") at fourteen, when he became apprenticed to a painter. He was not vigorous as a child, but his bodily powers unfolded and were intensified through their active expression of his imagination. His life was devoted with passion to art. He had from the start no time for frivolity. Art became his religion--and required of him the sacrifice of all that might keep him below his highest level of power for work. His father early warned him to have a care for his health, "for," said he, "in your profession, if once you were to fall ill you would be a ruined man." To one so intent on perfection and so keenly alive to imperfection such advice must have been nearly superfluous, for the artist could not but observe the effect upon his work of any depression of his bodily well-being. He was, besides, too thrifty in all respects to think of lapsing into bodily neglect or abuse. He was severely temperate, but not ascetic, save in those times when devotion to work caused him to sleep with his clothes on, that he might not lose time in seizing the chisel when he awoke. He ate to live and to labor, and was pleased with a present of "fifteen marzolino cheeses and fourteen pounds of sausage--the latter very welcome, as was also the cheese." Over a gift of choice wines he is not so enthusiastic and the bottles found their way mostly to the tables of his friends and patrons. When intent on some work he usually "confined his diet to a piece of bread which he ate in the middle of his labors." Few hours (we have no accurate statement in the matter) were devoted to sleep. He ate comparatively little because he worked better: he slept less than many men because he worked better in consequence. Partly for protection against cold, partly perhaps