has made me a present, which Urbino will
describe to you. I think you are a friend of his lordship: will you
then thank him in my name, when you find a suitable occasion, and do
so with those compliments which come easily to you, and to me are very
hard? Make me too your debtor for some tartlet."

The sonnet is No. ix of Signor Guasti's edition. I have translated it
thus:--

_The sugar, candles, and the saddled mule,
Together with your cask of malvoisie,
So far exceed all my necessity
That Michael and not I my debt must rule.
In such a glassy calm the breezes fool
My sinking sails, so that amid the sea
My bark hath missed her way, and seems to be
A wisp of straw whirled on a weltering pool.
To yield thee gift for gift and grace for grace,
For food and drink and carriage to and fro,
For all my need in every time and place,
O my dear lord, matched with the much I owe,
All that I am were no real recompense:
Paying a debt is not munificence._

In the chapter upon Michelangelo's poetry I dwelt at length upon Luigi
del Riccio's passionate affection for his cousin, Cecchino dei Bracci.
This youth died at the age of sixteen, on January 8, 1545.
Michelangelo undertook to design "the modest sepulchre of marble"
erected to his memory by Del Riccio in the church of Araceli. He also
began to write sonnets, madrigals, and epitaphs, which were sent from
day to day. One of his letters gives an explanation of the eighth
epitaph: "Our dead friend speaks and says: if the heavens robbed all
beauty from all other men on earth to make me only, as indeed they
made me, beautiful; and if by the divine decree I must return at
doomsday to the shape I bore in life, it follows that I cannot give
back the beauty robbed from others and bestowed on me, but that I must
remain for ever more beautiful than the rest, and they be ugly. This
is just the opposite of the conceit you expressed to me yesterday; the
one is a fable, the other is the truth."

Some time in 1545 Luigi went to Lyons on a visit to Ruberto Strozzi
and Giuliano de' Medici. This seems to have happened toward the end of
the year; for we possess a letter indorsed by him, "sent to Lyons, and
returned upon the 22nd of December." This document contains several
interesting details. "All your friends are extremely grieved to hear
about your illness, the more so that we cannot help you; especially
Messer Donato (Giannotti) and myself. Howe