ent of a sonnet (No. lxxix.):----

_For Love's fierce wound, and for the shafts that harm,
True medicine 'twould have been to pierce my heart;
But my soul's Lord owns only one strong charm,
Which makes life grow where grows life's mortal smart.
My Lord dealt death, when with his-powerful arm
He bent Love's bow. Winged with that shaft, from Love
An angel flew, cried, "Love, nay Burn! Who dies,
Hath but Love's plumes whereby to soar above!
Lo, I am He who from thine earliest years
Toward, heaven-born Beauty raised thy faltering eyes.
Beauty alone lifts live man to heaven's spheres."_

Feeling like this, Michelangelo would have been justly indignant with
officious relatives and critics, who turned his _amici_ into _animi_,
redirected his Cavalieri letters to the address of Vittoria Colonna,
discovered Florence in Febo di Poggio, and ascribed all his emotional
poems to some woman.

There is no doubt that both the actions and the writings of
contemporaries justified a considerable amount of scepticism regarding
the purity of Platonic affections. The words and lives of many
illustrious persons gave colour to what Segni stated in his History of
Florence, and what Savonarola found it necessary to urge upon the
people from his pulpit.

But we have every reason to feel certain that, in a malicious age,
surrounded by jealous rivals, with the fierce light of his
transcendent glory beating round his throne, Buonarroti suffered from
no scandalous reports, and maintained an untarnished character for
sobriety of conduct and purity of morals.

The general opinion regarding him may be gathered from Scipione
Ammirati's History (under the year 1564). This annalist records the
fact that "Buonarotti having lived for ninety years, there was never
found through all that length of time, and with all that liberty to
sin, any one who could with right and justice impute to him a stain or
any ugliness of manners."

How he appeared to one who lived and worked with him for a long period
of intimacy, could not be better set forth than in the warm and
ingenuous words of Condivi: "He has loved the beauty of the human body
with particular devotion, as is natural with one who knows that beauty
so completely; and has loved it in such wise that certain carnally
minded men, who do not comprehend the love of beauty, except it be
lascivious and indecorous, have been led thereby to think and to speak
evil of him: