is better than appearances promise: “’Tis not the cowl that makes the monk.” We should not be too ready to take fright at an inconsistency, or to despair of men who err by excess of genuine sensibility. These are the easiest to convert. Anne of France believes in a method of princely candour. She objects to any woman, with the best intentions in the world, appearing to promise what she is firmly resolved never to grant; in this regard it would be better to retreat at once, with no false shame, and quietly await another occasion for giving battle. If, on the other hand, love presents itself under reassuring aspects, it may be accepted. Honourable love is so beautiful, so full of “benefits and honours”! But precisely because it is so delightful a condition it is rare, and the devil leaves nothing undone to poison it, and therefore it is well to advance with much practical prudence, even with distrust! The world is so vile! Sweet love has often come to a bad end! In discussing this tender and mournful psychology, the great princess would seem, under her mask of impassibility as a philosophical woman, to utter a cry of pain as though bleeding from an internal wound: “I have known a knight,” she says, “who heaped oath on oath of the most sacred character, even on the holy altars, on the gospel, and who did not keep them even till the evening.” She is one of those who, giving the heart, give it wholly, and how perilous that is is manifest. A genuine platonist, however, she acknowledges no degrees in honour; there is no splitting it up; it must be preserved in its entirety: and the primitive, strenuous, almost naïve lady concludes that chastity does not consist solely in “saving oneself from the overt act.” Among the women who skate more venturously near the danger point there is not one in a thousand, she thinks, but has lost something of her honour or of her illusions. Of this sculptural view of love—majestic, holy, like certain of Wagner’s harmonies, but necessarily very rare—Michelangelo is a practical exemplification. Madly smitten, at the age of fifty-one, with a lady of thirty-six, whom, however, he did not see till twelve years later; so mastered by his agitation as to pen two extraordinary letters—which, incomprehensible as they appear, Messieurs Milanesi, Gotti and Mézières have succeeded in interpreting—writing one letter three times over without making up his mind to send it (it never was sent)—that was the man known as Michelangelo.