more
angry at this than if I had lost twenty-five ducats, because I saw
that his father had resolved to send him on mule-back like a
gentleman. Oh, I had never such good luck, not I! Then both the father
and the lad promised that he would do everything, attend to the mule,
and sleep upon the ground, if it was wanted. And now I am obliged to
look after him. As if I needed more worries than the one I have had
ever since I arrived here! My apprentice, whom I left in Rome, has
been ill from the day on which I returned until now. It is true that
he is getting better; but he lay for about a month in peril of his
life, despaired of by the doctors, and I never went to bed. There are
other annoyances of my own; and now I have the nuisance of this lad,
who says that he does not want to waste time, that he wants to study,
and so on. At Florence he said he would be satisfied with two or three
hours a day. Now the whole day is not enough for him, but he must
needs be drawing all the night. It is all the fault of what his father
tells him. If I complained, he would say that I did not want him to
learn. I really require some one to take care of the house; and if the
boy had no mind for this sort of work, they ought not to have put me
to expense. But they are good-for-nothing, and are working toward a
certain end of their own. Enough, I beg you to relieve me of the boy;
he has bored me so that I cannot bear it any longer. The muleteer has
been so well paid that he can very well take him back to Florence.
Besides, he is a friend of the father. Tell the father to send for him
home. I shall not pay another farthing. I have no money. I will have
patience till he sends; and if he does not send, I will turn the boy
out of doors. I did so already on the second day of his arrival, and
other times also, and the father does not believe it.

"_P.S._--If you talk to the father of the lad, put the matter to him
nicely: as that he is a good boy, but too refined, and not fit for my
service, and say that he had better send for him home."

The repentant postscript is eminently characteristic of Michelangelo.
He used to write in haste, apparently just as the thoughts came.
Afterwards he read his letter over, and softened its contents down, if
he did not, as sometimes happened, feel that his meaning required
enforcement; in that case he added a stinging tail to the epigram. How
little he could manage the people in his employ is clear from the last
not