drove her greatest poet from her gates to find a grave in Ravenna, patriis extorris ab urbe, here tardily and in penitence raised to him a monument, after vainly striving to reclaim his bones. Here, too, among others, are the statues and monuments of Michel Angelo, Macchiavelli, Galileo, Lanzi, Aretino, Guicciardini, Alfieri, Leon Battista Alberti, and Raffaelle Morghen.
Of all the great men who shed a lustre over Florence, no one so domineers over it and pervades it with his memory and his presence as Michel Angelo. The impression he left upon his own age and upon all subsequent ages is deeper, perhaps, than that left by any other save Dante. Everything in Florence recalls him. The dome of Brunelleschi, impressive and beautiful as it is, and prior in time to that of St Peter's, cannot rid itself of its mighty brother in Rome. With Ghiberti's doors are ever associated his words. In Santa Croce we all pause longer before the tomb where his body is laid than before any other – even that of Dante. The empty place before the Palazzo Yecchio, where his David stood, still holds its ghost. All places which knew him in life are still haunted by his memory. The house where he lived, thought, and worked is known to every pilgrim of art. The least fragment which his hand touched is there preserved as precious, simply because it was his; and it is with a feeling of reverence that we enter the little closet where his mighty works were designed. There still stands his folding desk, lit by a little slip of a window; and there are the shelves and pigeon-holes where he kept his pencils, colours, tools, and books. The room is so narrow that one can scarcely turn about in it; and the contrast between this narrow, restricted space and the vastness of the thoughts which there were born, and the extent of his fame which fills the world, is strangely impressive and affecting. Here, barring the door behind him to exclude the world, he sat and studied and wrote and drew, little dreaming that hundreds of thousands of pilgrims would in after-centuries come to visit it in reverence from a continent then but just discovered, and peopled only with savages.
But more than all other places, the Church of San Lorenzo is identified with him; and the Medicean Chapel, which he designed, is more a monument to him than to those in honour of whom it was built.
Here, therefore, under the shadow of these noble shapes, and in the silent influence of this solemn place, let us cast a hurried glance over the career and character of Michel Angelo as exhibited in his life and his greatest works. To do more than this would be impossible within the brief limits we can here command. We may then give a glance into the adjoining and magnificent Hall, which is the real mausoleum of the Medici, and is singularly in contrast with it.
Michel Angelo was born at Caprese, in the Casentino, near Florence, on March 6, 1474 or 1475, according as we reckon from the nativity or the incarnation of Christ. He died at Rome on Friday, February 23, 1564, at the ripe age of eighty-nine or ninety. He claimed to be of the noble family of the Counts of Canossa. He certainly was of the family of the Berlinghi. His father was one of the twelve Buonomini, and was Podestà of Caprese when Michel Angelo was born. From his early youth he showed a strong inclination to art, and vainly his father
