expect from
Cellini the finest, highest, purest accents of the
Renaissance.... For students of that age he is at once more
and less than his contemporaries: less, inasmuch as he
distinguished himself by no stupendous intellectual qualities;
more, inasmuch as he occupied a larger sphere than each of
them singly. He was the first goldsmith of his time, an
adequate sculptor, a restless traveler, an indefatigable
workman, a Bohemian of the purest water, a turbulent bravo, a
courtier and companion of princes; finally, a Florentine who
used his native idiom with incomparable vivacity of style."

THE ESCAPE FROM PRISON

From the 'Memoirs': Symonds's Translation

The castellan was subject to a certain sickness, which came upon him
every year and deprived him of his wits. The sign of its approach was
that he kept continually talking, or rather jabbering, to no purpose.
These humors took a different shape each year; one time he thought he
was an oil-jar; another time he thought he was a frog, and hopped
about as frogs do; another time he thought he was dead, and then they
had to bury him; not a year passed but he got some such hypochondriac
notions into his head. At this season he imagined that he was a bat,
and when he went abroad to take the air he used to scream like bats in
a high thin tone; and then he would flap his hands and body as though
he were about to fly. The doctors, when they saw the fit was coming on
him, and his old servants, gave him all the distractions they could
think of; and since they had noticed that he derived much pleasure
from my conversation, they were always fetching me to keep him
company. At times the poor man detained me for four or five stricken
hours without ever letting me cease talking. He used to keep me at his
table, eating opposite to him, and never stopped chatting and making
me chat; but during those discourses I contrived to make a good meal.
He, poor man, could neither eat nor sleep; so that at last he wore me
out. I was at the end of my strength; and sometimes when I looked at
him, I noticed that his eyeballs were rolling in a frightful manner,
one looking one way and the other in another.

He took it into his head to ask me whether I had ever had a fancy to
fly. I answered that it had always been my ambition to do those things
which offer the greatest difficulties to men, and that I had done
them; as to flying, the God of Nature had g