ization offers for the adornment of our
race,--expelled from Paradise, and doomed to hard and bitter
toils,--without abdicating her more glorious office of raising the soul
to heaven.

Nor was Michael Angelo responsible for the vile mongrel architecture
which followed the Renaissance, and which disfigures the modern capitals
of Europe, any more than for the perversion of painting in the hands of
Titian. But the indiscriminate adoption of pillars for humble houses,
shops with Roman arches, spires and towers erected on Grecian porticoes,
are no worse than schoolhouses built like convents, and chapels designed
for preaching as much as for choral chants made dark and gloomy, where
the voice of the preacher is lost and wasted amid vaulted roofs and
useless pillars. Michael Angelo encouraged no incongruities; he himself
conceived the beautiful and the true, and admired it wherever found,
even amid the excavations of ruined cities. He may have overrated the
buried monuments of ancient art, but how was he to escape the universal
enthusiasm of his age for the remains of a glorious and forgotten
civilization? Perhaps his mind was wearied with the Middle Ages, from
which he had nothing more to learn, and sought a greater fulness and a
more perfect unity in the expanding forces of a new and grander era
than was ever seen by Pagan heroes or by Gothic saints.

But I need not expatiate on the new ideas which Michael Angelo accepted,
or the impulse he gave to art in all its forms, and to the revival of
which civilization is so much indebted. Let us turn and give a parting
look at the man,--that great creative genius who had no superior in his
day and generation. Like the greatest of all Italians, he is interesting
for his grave experiences, his dreary isolations, his vast attainments,
his creative imagination, and his lofty moral sentiments. Like Dante, he
stands apart from, and superior to, all other men of his age. He never
could sport with jesters, or laugh with buffoons, or chat with fools;
and because of this he seemed to be haughty and disdainful. Like Luther,
he had no time for frivolities, and looked upon himself as commissioned
to do important work. He rejoiced in labor, and knew no rest until he
was eighty-nine. He ate that he might live, not lived that he might eat.
For seventeen years after he was seventy-two he worked on St. Peter's
church; worked without pay, that he might render to God his last earthly
tribute without a