; and without a temperament of this sort how could an
artist of Michelangelo's calibre and intensity perform his life-work?
In old age he dwelt upon the thought of death, meditated in a
repentant spirit on the errors of his younger years, indulged a pious
spirit, and clung to the cross of Christ. But when a man has passed
the period allotted for the average of his race, ought not these
preoccupations to be reckoned to him rather as appropriate and
meritorious? We must not forget that he was born and lived as a
believing Christian, in an age of immorality indeed, but one which had
not yet been penetrated with scientific conceptions and materialism.
There is nothing hysterical or unduly ascetic in the religion of his
closing years. It did not prevent him from taking the keenest interest
in his family, devoting his mind to business and the purchase of
property, carrying on the Herculean labour of building the
mother-church of Latin Christendom. He was subject, all through his
career, to sudden panics, and suffered from a constitutional dread of
assassination. We can only explain his flight from Rome, his escape
from Florence, the anxiety he expressed about his own and his family's
relations to the Medici, by supposing that his nerves were sensitive
upon this point. But, considering the times in which he lived, the
nature of the men around him, the despotic temper of the Medicean
princes, was there anything morbid in this timidity? A student of
Cellini's Memoirs, of Florentine history, and of the dark stories in
which the private annals of the age abound, will be forced to admit
that imaginative men of acute nervous susceptibility, who loved a
quiet life and wished to keep their mental forces unimpaired for art
and thought, were justified in feeling an habitual sense of uneasiness
in Italy of the Renaissance period. Michelangelo's timidity, real as
it was, did not prevent him from being bold upon occasion, speaking
the truth to popes and princes, and making his personality respected.
He was even accused of being too "terrible," too little of a courtier
and time-server.

When the whole subject of Michelangelo's temperament has been calmly
investigated, the truth seems to be that he did not possess a nervous
temperament so evenly balanced as some phlegmatic men of average
ability can boast of. But who could expect the creator of the Sistine,
the sculptor of the Medicean tombs, the architect of the cupola, the
writer of the s