It soon became abundantly clear, however, that the Pontiff did not mean to lose him. He despatched in all haste no fewer than five couriers after him. But the young artist had ridden so well, that he was not overtaken till he was safe at Poggibonsi within the Florentine Republic. There he wrote a reply to the orders brought by the couriers, to the effect that he had not deserved the treatment he had met with, and would never return. And he rode forward to Florence, where he immediately began to occupy himself with the frescoes for the Municipality which he had left unfinished at his previous departure for Rome. The Pope meantime continued his efforts to induce him to return, by means of negotiation through his firm friend Giuliano da San Gallo, as well as by putting pressure on the Florentine Government. Thou hast tried an experiment with the Pope,' said his friend Gonfaloniere Soderini, which a king of France would not have ventured; but the time is passed for entreaty. We will not go to war with him on thy account, or expose our State to risk. So, prepare thyself to return.' Michelangelo meantime proposed that all the marble should be brought to Florence, and the work executed there! But this of course did not suit the Pontiff, who wished to avail himself of the artist's genius in various other matters besides the erection of his own sepulchre. Soderini also offered to send Michelangelo as an ambassador from Florence to Rome, thereby ensuring his personal safety. For his resentment towards the Pontiff was far from the only, and apparently, after the first heat of his anger, by no means the principal, cause of his refusal to return to Rome. He had received hints which led him to believe that his life would be in danger from assassination there. And such a crime would not have been at all an unprecedented circumstance in the history of the artistic rivalries and jealousies of those days. Not long after the flight of Michelangelo from Rome, the Pontiff left Rome himself at the head of an army, for the subjugation of Perugia and Bologna, and entered the latter city on the 11th of November, 1506. Thither he once again invited Michelangelo to come to him; which at last the artist consented to do, carrying with him letters from the Signory, as also one from his friend Soderini to his brother the Cardinal of that name, which characterizes the bearer in terms so remarkable that some of the expressions in it must be given. He is an excellent young man,' says the Gonfaloniere, and in his profession unequalled in Italy, perhaps in the whole world. . . . He is of such a disposition that, if kindly spoken to, and well treated, he will do anything. It is necessary to show him affection and favour, and in return he will do works which will astonish all who see them.' The said Michelangelo,' it was added, 'proceeds upon the pledge of our faith.' At Bologna, Michelangelo executed the model for a statue in bronze of Julius, to be placed over the western door of the Cathedral; which, after one failure in the casting, was successfully accomplished. In 1508 he returned to Florence, and established a studio and workshop in the Borgo Pinti, and would fain have remained there. But hardly had he settled himself, before a summons once more came from Pope Julius, which this time the artist at once obeyed; but found, on arriving once more at Rome, that he was to be occupied, not as he had hoped and expected on the Pontiff's unfinished monument, but on the painting of the Sistine Chapel. He endeavoured to persuade Julius to employ Raphael on the work. But the high-handed Pontiff would take no denial, and . . . the world knows the result. The story of the execution of this vast work, told by Mr. Heath Wilson as it has never been told before, is a most interesting one. But no room can be found for the telling of it here. When the great work was finished he once more set himself to the completion of the monument. But it was very far from completed when the Pope died in 1513, owing sums to Michelangelo which were never paid. Leo the Tenth, the first of the Medicean Popes, Michelangelo's Tuscan compatriots, ascended the throne of St. Peter, and by him also the great sculptor, painter, and architect was employed on a variety of undertakings, the manifold negotiations and business connected with which caused fully as much trouble and vexation to the artist, as had his relations with the Pontiff's predecessor. But Popes passed one after the other; and the artist remained and worked. Leo reigned his eight years and eight months (1513-1521); Adrian VI., his twenty months; Clement VII. his ten years (1523-1534); Paul III., the Farnese, his fifteen years (1534-1549); Julius III. his five years (1550-1555); Marcellus II. his twenty-three days; Paul IV. his four years (1555-1559); and Pius IV. had begun his reign, while still the years beat against the grand old oak-like figure of Michelangelo, which occupied even in the eyes of his own generation, and much more in those of succeeding generations, a space as large as any of them, and much larger than some of them. More or less, all employed him; and more or less, all worried and vexed him with caprices, uncertainties, changes of plans and purposes, and above all by being one and all abominable paymasters! It was under Paul the Third that he was formally constituted architect of St. Peter's. It was under Clement the Seventh that he executed the most beautiful and perhaps not the least noble of his works in marble—the statues in the Medicean chapel designed by him in the church of San Lorenzo at Florence. One of those beautiful figures, that of Night,' gave rise to a quatrain by the artist, which may serve as a specimen of his verse, and far more strikingly of the tone of his mind and temperament. Giovan battista Strozzi had written the following somewhat banale quatrain on the statue in question La Notte che tu vedi in si dolci atti In questo sasso; e, perche dorme, ha vita; Which may be thus Englished The 'Night' which sweetly sleeping thou dost see Was by an 'Angel' carved in marble fair, And since she sleeps, life also must be there! Thou doubtest? Wake her, she will speak to thee! To which Michelangelo replied as follows, speaking in the character of his statue Grato m'è 'l sonno, e più l'esser di sasso, I joy to sleep, joy more to be of stone; Break not my slumber, therefore, but speak low! The lines express but too accurately the prevailing tone of Michelangelo's mind during a large portion of his prolonged career! There is something wrong somewhere, something that needs examination and explanation by a skilled and philosophical sociologist in the indisputable fact that that age and social system in which Michelangelo lived, while magnificent and many would say matchless in art, was morally as base and corrupt an age and society as the world ever saw. And Michelangelo was accordingly ever at war with it. In truth, save in so far as his temper was rendered rugged and morose, he seems to have walked his path amid the moral slough arcund him unsoiled by it, and undeteriorated; a truly rare and edifying example! During the reigns of the above-enumerated popes, he was constantly called backwards or forwards on their artistic affairs, and those of his Florentine employers; and under the reign of the ever infamous Clement, the perfidious destroyer of his country's liberties, there was the wonderful episode of the siege of Florence, with Michelangelo in the character of military engineer fortifying the hill of San Miniato! And there is no portion of this long life of eighty-nine years, he died in 1564-not an incident of his dealings with Popes and Municipal authorities, of his troubles with the jealousies, treacheries, and calumnies of rival artists, of his dangers and labours amid the mountains of Serravezza, whose quarries had been then recently discovered, that is not interesting in no ordinary degree. But all this story would need a couple or more of volumes, to tell as well and as amusingly as it might be told. And here we are at the end of our article. But there is one chapter of his eventful life which must be more specially adverted to, because it very mainly influenced him as a poet. I mean, of course, his friendship for Vittoria Colonna. It is unnecessary to say anything of her, or of the nature and circumstances of that truly noble and pure friendship, because these things have been already discoursed on in the preceding article of this series. It may suffice to advert to the fact, that his intimacy with her coloured altogether the style and tone of thought of his poetry, some seventy sonnets and eighty or so of 'Madrigals,' and the choice of his subjects, mainly religious. It was not till he was far advanced in life that Michelangelo solaced himself with poetry; and it is evident that the character of his mind, grave and serious at all times, became deeply tinged with religious feeling after his acquaintance with Vittoria. It is well known that her religious feelings leaned strongly towards the doctrines of the reformers, which prevailed in Italy at that day to a degree that has never been the case since. And there are many passages in the sonnets and madrigals, the purely Calvinistic sentiment of which might have obtained a guarantee of orthodoxy from Newton or Toplady. The sincerity and earnestness of them is unmistakable, and they differ in this respect very remarkably from his love poetry, which in truth consists of little else than the cold, make-believe, Platonic conceits so dear to the academies of that period. Nevertheless, I may well end, as I began, this notice of Michelangelo as a poet, by saying that he is, to the best of my knowledge, the only writer of verses of those days who never wrote a line that in his eighty-ninth year he need have wished to blot! 326 Fables and their Sequels. BY MARK TWAIN. ALL my life, from boyhood up, I have had the habit of reading a certain set of anecdotes, written in the quaint vein of the World's ingenious Fabulist, for the lesson they taught me and the pleasure they gave me. They lay always convenient to my hand, and whenever I felt meanly of my kind I turned to them, and they banished that sentiment; whenever I felt myself to be selfish, sordid, and ignoble I turned to them, and they told me what to do to win back my self-respect. Many times I wished that these charming anecdotes had not stopped with their happy climaxes, but had continued the pleasing history of their several benefactors and beneficiaries. This wish rose in my breast so persistently that at last I determined to satisfy it by seeking out the sequels of those anecdotes myself. So I set about it, and after great labour and tedious research accomplished my task. I will lay the result before you, giving you each anecdote in its turn, and following it with its sequel as I gathered it through my investigations. THE GRATEFUL POODLE. One day, a benevolent physician (who had read the books), having found a stray poodle suffering from a broken leg, conveyed the poor creature to his home, and after setting and bandaging the injured limb gave the little outcast its liberty again, and thought no more about the matter. But how great was his surprise, upon opening his door one morning, some days later, to find the grateful poodle patiently waiting there, and in its company another stray dog, one of whose legs, by some accident, had been broken. The kind physician at once relieved the distressed animal, nor did he forget to admire the inscrutable goodness and mercy of God, who had been willing to use so humble an instrument as the poor outcast poodle for the inculcating of, etc., etc., etc. SEQUEL. The next morning the benevolent physician found the two dogs, beaming with gratitude, waiting at his door, and with them two other dogs,-cripples. The cripples were speedily healed, |