tlas supporting the world.

On the elevation of Paul III. to the Papacy we again find Cellini at
Rome, working for the Pope and other eminent people. His extraordinary
abilities brought him not only into the notice of the courts, but also
drew him into the brilliant literary and artistic society of the
Eternal City. With unrivaled vividness he flashes before us in a few
bold strokes the artists of the decadent Renaissance, the pupils of
Raphael, led by Giulio Romano, with their worship of every form of
physical beauty and their lack of elevation of thought. In consequence
of the plottings of his implacable enemy, Pier Luigi, natural son of
Paul III., he was arrested on the charge of having during the sack of
Rome embezzled Pontifical gold and jewels to the amount of eighty
thousand ducats. Though the charge was groundless, he was committed to
the castle of San Angelo. His escape is narrated in one of the most
thrilling chapters of the 'Memoirs.' He went in hiding to the Cardinal
Cornaro, but was delivered up again to the Pope by an act of most
characteristic sixteenth-century Italian policy, and was cast into a
loathsome underground dungeon of the castle. It was damp, swarming
with vermin, and for two hours of the day only received light through
a little aperture. Here he languished for many months, with only the
chronicles of Giovanni Billani and an Italian Bible to solace him. Now
at last his recklessness and bravado forsook him. He took on the airs
of a saint, gave himself up to mysticism, grew delirious and had his
famous visions--angels visiting him, who talked with him about
religion.

In 1539 he was finally released at the intercession of the cardinal
Ippolito d'Este, who came from France to invite him to enter the
King's service. Cellini's account of his residence in France has great
historic value as throwing vivid side-lights on that interesting
period in the development of French social life, when Francis I. was
laying the foundation of the court society which was later on brought
to perfection by Louis XIV. Cellini was one among that crowd of
Italian artists gathered at the court in Paris and Versailles, whose
culture was to refine the manners of the French warrior barons. He
worked for five years at Fontainebleau and in Paris. Among his works
there, still extant, are a pair of huge silver candelabra, the gates
of Fontainebleau, and a nymph in bronze, reposing among trophies of
the chase, now in the Louvre