turned against himself,
as in the capitolo upon old age and its infirmities. The grotesqueness
of this lurid descant on senility and death is marked by something
rather Teutonic than Italian, a "Danse Macabre" intensity of loathing;
and it winds up with the bitter reflections, peculiar to him in his
latest years, upon the vanity of art. "My much-prized art, on which I
relied and which brought me fame, has now reduced me to this. I am
poor and old, the slave of others. To the dogs I must go, unless I die
quickly."

A proper conclusion to this chapter may be borrowed from the
peroration of Varchi's discourse upon the philosophical love-poetry of
Michelangelo. This time he chooses for his text the second of those
sonnets (No. lii.) which caused the poet's grand-nephew so much
perplexity, inducing him to alter the word _amici_ in the last line
into _animi_. It runs as follows:--

_I saw no mortal beauty with these eyes
When perfect peace in thy fair eyes I found;
But far within, where all is holy ground,
My soul felt Love, her comrade of the skies:
For she was born with God in Paradise;
Else should we still to transient love be bound;
But, finding these so false, we pass beyond
Unto the Love of loves that never dies.
Nay, things that die cannot assuage the thirst
Of souls undying; nor Eternity
Serves Time, where all must fade that flourisheth
_Sense is not love, but lawlessness accurst:
This kills the soul; while our love lifts on high
Our friends on earth--higher in heaven through death._

"From this sonnet," says Varchi, "I think that any man possessed of
judgment will be able to discern to what extent this angel, or rather
archangel, in addition to his three first and most noble professions
of architecture, sculpture, and painting, wherein without dispute he
not only eclipses all the moderns, but even surpasses the ancients,
proves himself also excellent, nay singular, in poetry, and in the
true art of loving; the which art is neither less fair nor less
difficult, albeit it be more necessary and more profitable than the
other four. Whereof no one ought to wonder: for this reason; that,
over and above what is manifest to everybody, namely that nature,
desirous of exhibiting her utmost power, chose to fashion a complete
man, and (as the Latins say) one furnished in all proper parts; he, in
addition to the gifts of nature, of such sort and so liberally
scattered, adde