:--

"Alas, my friend Donato! Our Cecchino is dead. All Rome weeps.
Michelangelo is making for me the design of a decent sepulture in
marble; and I pray you to write me the epitaph, and to send it to me
with a consolatory letter, if time permits, for my grief has
distraught me. Patience! I live with a thousand and a thousand deaths
each hour. O God! How has Fortune changed her aspect!" Giannotti
replied, enclosing three fine sonnets, the second of which,
beginning--

_Messer Luigi mio, di noi che fia
Che sian restati senza il nostro sole?_

seems to have taken Michelangelo's fancy. Many good pens in Italy
poured forth laments on this occasion. We have verses written by
Giovanni Aldobrandini, Carlo Gondi, Fra Paolo del Rosso, and Anton
Francesco Grazzini, called Il Lasca. Not the least touching is Luigi's
own threnody, which starts upon this note:--

_Idol mio, che la tua leggiadra spoglia
Mi lasciasti anzi tempo._

Michelangelo, seeking to indulge his own grief and to soothe that of
his friend Luigi, composed no fewer than forty-two epigrams of four
lines each, in which he celebrated the beauty and rare personal
sweetness of Cecchino in laboured philosophical conceits. They rank
but low among his poems, having too much of scholastic trifling and
too little of the accent of strong feeling in them. Certainly these
pieces did not deserve the pains which Michelangelo the younger
bestowed, when he altered the text of a selection from them so as to
adapt their Platonic compliments to some female. Far superior is a
sonnet written to Del Riccio upon the death of the youth, showing how
recent had been Michelangelo's acquaintance with Cecchino, and
containing an unfulfilled promise to carve his portrait:--

_Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes,
Which to your living eyes were life and light,
When, closed at last in death's injurious night,
He opened them on God in Paradise.
I know it, and I weep--too late made wise:
Yet was the fault not mine; for death's fell spite
Robbed my desire of that supreme delight
Which in your better memory never dies.
Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine
To make unique Cecchino smile in stone
For ever, now that earth hath made him dim,
If the beloved within the lover shine,
Since art without him cannot work alone,
You must I carve to tell the world of him._

The strange blending of artificial conceits with spontaneous fee