Vittoria. I wonder that poets who have encountered what they call the injustice of the world, hold with such pertinacity to the objects of attack. Michel-Angelo. We are unwilling to drown our blind puppies, because they are blind; we are then unwilling to throw them into the pond, because they are just beginning to open their eyes; lastly, we refuse idle boys, who stand ready for the sport, the most mis-shapen one of the litter, he having been trodden on in the stable, and kicked about by the grooms for his lame ness. children of Niobe fell by the arrows of Diana under a bright and cloudless sky. Vittoria. Alas! the intellectual, the beautiful, and the happy, are always the nearest to danger. Michel-Angelo. I come to you at all times, my indulgent friend, to calm my anxieties whensoever they oppress me. You never fail; you never falter. Sometimes a compassionate look, sometimes a cheerful one, alights on the earthly thought, and dries up all its noxiousness. Music, and a voice that is more and better, are its last resorts. The gentleness of your nature has led you to them when we both had paused. There Vittoria. Pretty tropes indeed! and before one are songs that attract and melt the heart more who dabbles in poetry. Michel-Angelo. So the silver-footed Thetis dabbled in the sea, when she could descend at pleasure to its innermost depths. sweetly than the Siren's. Ah! there is love too, even here below, more precious than immortality; but it is not the love of a Circe or a Calypso. Vittoria. Nor were they happy themselves; and yet perhaps they were not altogether undeserving of it, they who could select for the object of their affections the courageous, the enduring, and the intelligent. There are few men at any Vittoria. You must certainly think in good earnest that I lay high claims to poetry. Here is more than enough flattery for the vainest woman, who is not a poetess also. Speak, if you please, about others, particularising or general-time whom moral dignity and elevation of genius ising. Michel-Angelo. Then to generalise a little. In our days poetry is a vehicle which does not carry much within it, but is top-heavy with what is corded on. Children, in a hurry to raise plants, cover their allotment of border with all the seeds the pinafore will hold so do small authors their poetry-plots. Hence what springs up in either quarter has nothing of stamen, but only sickly succulence for grubs to feed on. Vittoria. Never say in our days, unless you include many other days in most ages. In those when poetry was very flourishing there were complaints against it, as we find by Horace and Aristophanes. I am afraid, Michel-Angelo, some idle boy has been putting a pebble into his sling and aiming at your architraves; in other words, some poetaster or criticaster has been irreverent toward you. I do not mean about your poetry, which perhaps you undervalue, but about the greater things in which you are engaged. Michel-Angelo. Nothing more likely; but as only the worst can be guilty of it, I shall let them fall into other offences, that heavier punishment than I ever take the trouble to inflict, may befall them. It is only the few that have found the way into my heart, who can wound it! Vittoria. You are safe then. Michel-Angelo. Whoever is engaged in great and difficult works, as I am, must inevitably meet with rivals and enemies! Vittoria. Enemies! yes! Say that word only. What a pyramid of skulls from the insanely hostile does every predominant genius erect! Leave those of your light assailants to whiten in their native deserts; and march on. Indeed it is unnecessary to exhort you to magnanimity, for you appear unusually at ease and serene. Michel-Angelo. Serenity is no sign of security. A stream is never so smooth, equable, and silvery, as at the instant before it becomes a cataract. The have made conspicuous above the mass of society; and fewer still are the women who can distinguish them from persons of ordinary capacity, endowed with qualities merely agreeable. But if it happens that a man of highest worth has been read attentively and thoroughly by those eyes which he has taught the art of divination, let another object intervene and occupy their attention, let the beloved be induced to think it a merit and a duty to forget him, yet memory is not an outcast nor an alien when the company of the day is gone, but says many things and asks many questions which she would not turn away from if she could. Michel-Angelo. The morning comes, the fresh world opens, and the vestiges of one are trodden out by many: they were only on the dew, and with the dew they are departed. Vittoria. Although you are not alluding to yourself at the present time, nor liable to be interrupted in the secreter paths of life, yet I think you too susceptible in those you are pursuing, and I was anxious to discover if anything unpleasant had occurred. For, little minds in high places are the worst impediments to great. Chestnuts and esculent oaks permit the traveller to pass onward under them; briars and thorns and unthrifty grass entangle him. Michel-Angelo. You teach me also to talk figuratively; yet not remotely from one of the arts I profess. We may make a large hole in a brick wall and easily fill it up; but the slightest flaw in a ruby or a crysolite is irreparable. Thus it is in minds. The ordinary soon take offence and (as they call it) make it up again; the sensitive and delicate are long-suffering, but their wounds heal imperfectly, if at all. Vittoria. Are you quite certain you are without any? Michel-Angelo. You and Saint Peter insure me. The immortal are invulnerable! Vittoria. Evader! but glad am I that you have spoken the word, although you set at nought thereby the authority of Homer. For you remind me that he, like Dante, often has a latent meaning by the side of an evident one, which indeed is peculiar to great poets. Unwise commanders call out all their forces to the field; the more prudent have their reserves posted where it is not everybody that can discover them. In the Iliad two immortals are wounded; Venus slightly, Mars severely. The deities of Love and War are the only ones exposed to violence. In the former, weakness is shown to be open to aggression; in the latter, violence to resistance and repulse; and both are subject to more pain than they can well endure. At the same time, Juno and Pallas, Mercury and Apollo and Neptune, do not stand aloof, but stand unassailable. Here we perceive that sometimes the greater gods are subtilised and attenuated into allegories. Homer bestows on them more or less potency at his pleasure. One moment we see a bright and beautiful god stand manifest before us; presently his form and radiance are indistinct; at last, in the place where he was standing, there are only some scattered leaves, inscribed with irregular and uncouth characters; these invite our curiosity with strange similitudes; we look more attentively, and they seem brought closer together: the god has receded to deliver the oracle of his wisdom. Michel-Angelo. Homer left a highway, overshadowed with lofty trees and perennial leafage, between the regions of Allegory and Olympus. The gloom of Dante is deeper, and the boundaries even more indiscernible. We know the one is censured for it; perhaps the other was. Vittoria. To the glory of our Italy be it spoken, we are less detractive than our forefathers the Romans. Dante and Petrarca were estimated highly by those nearest them. Indeed, to confess the truth, Petrarca has received for his poetry what ought rather to have been awarded him for rarer and sublimer deserts. Dante has fared less sumptuously, and there are fewer who could entertain him. Petty latin things called classics, as their betters are, smooth, round, light, hollow, regularly figured like pasteboard zodiacs, were long compared and even preferred to the triple world of Dante. I speak not of Grecian literature, because I know it not sufficiently; but I imagine Rome is to Greece what a bull-ring is to a palæstra, the games of the circus to the Olympic, fighting bondmen to the brothers of Helen, the starry twins of Jupiter and Leda. Michel-Angelo. Boccaccio first scattered the illusion by which the guide seemed loftier and grander than the guided. The spirit of the immortal master, our Tuscan, no longer led by the hand, nor submissively following, soared beyond Italy, and is seen at last, in his just proportions, right against the highest pinnacle of Greece. Ariosto has not yet been countenanced by the Italian potentates, nor fostered in the genial fur of our Holy Fathers, with the same tenderness as some minute poets, who dirty their cold fingers with making little clay models after old colossal marbles. But Ariosto is too marked in his features to be fondled, and too broad in his shoulders for the chairs they occupy. He is to Ovid what Sicily is to Italy; divided by a narrow channel; the same warm climate, the same flowery glebe; less variety, less extent. Not only these, but perhaps all poets excepting Pindar and Eschylus, want compression and curtailment; yet the parings of some would be worth the pulp of others. Vittoria. Those to whom, I will not say genius, but splendid talents have been given, are subject to weaknesses to which inferior men are less liable; as the children of the rich are to diseases from which those of the poorer generally are exempt. Michel-Angelo. The reason, I conceive, is this. Modern times have produced no critic contemporary with an eminent poet. There is a pettishness and frowardness about some literary men, in which, at the mention of certain names, they indulge without moderation or shame. They are prompt and alert at showing their sore places, and strip for it up to the elbow. They feel only a comfortable warmth when they are reproved for their prejudices and antipathies, which often are no more to be traced to their origin than the diseases of the body, and come without contact, without even breathing the same air. No remedy being sought for them, they rapidly sink into the mental constitution, weakening its internal strength and disfiguring its external character. In some persons at first they are covered and concealed; but afterward, when they are seen and remarked, are exhibited in all their virulence with swaggering effrontery. Vittoria. Geese and buffaloes are enraged at certain colours; there are certain colours also of the mind lively enough to excite choler at a distance in the silly and ferine. I have witnessed in authors the most vehement expression of hatred against those whose writings they never read, and whose persons they never approached: all these are professors of Christianity, and some of moral philosophy. Michel-Angelo. Do not wonder then if I take my walk at a distance from the sibilant throat and short-flighted wing; at a distance from the miry hide and blindly directed horn. Such people as you describe to me may be men of talents; but talents lie below genius. Occasionally we attribute to a want of benevolence what in reality is only a want of discernment. The bad sticks as closely as the good, and often more readily. If we would cover with gold a cornice or a statue, we require a preparation for it; smoke does its business in a moment. Vittoria. Sometimes we ourselves may have exercised our ingenuity, but without any consciousness of spleen or ill-humour, in detecting and discussing the peculiar faults of great poets. This has never been done, or done very clumsily, by our critics, who fancy that a measureless and shapeless phantom of enthusiasm leaves an impression of a powerful mind, and a quick apprehension of the beautiful. "Who," they ask us, "who would look for small defects in such an admirable writer? who is not transported by his animation, and blinded by his brightness?" To this interrogation my answer is, "Very few indeed; only the deliberate, the instructed, and the wise. Only they who partake in some degree of his nature know exactly where to find his infirmities." We perhaps on some occasions have spoken of Dante in such a manner as would make the unwary, if they heard us, believe that we estimate him no higher than Statius, Silius, Valerius, and the like. On the other hand, we have admired the versatility, facility, and invention of Ovid, to such a degree as would excite a suspicion that we prefer him even to Virgil. But in one we spoke of the worst parts, in the other of the best. Censure and praise can not leave the lips at the same breath: one is caught before the other comes: our verdict is distributed abroad when we have summed up only one column of the evidence. Michel-Angelo. Surely I have heard you declare that you could produce faults out of Virgil graver than any in Ovid. Vittoria. The faults of Ovid are those of a playful and unruly boy; the faults of Virgil are those of his master. I do not find in Ovid (as you may remember I then observed) the hypallage; such for instance as Virgil's, The odour brought the wind,' instead of The wind brought the odour. No child could refrain from laughter at such absurdity, no pedagogue from whipping him for laughing at such authority. This figure (so the grammarians are pleased to call it) far exceeds all other faults in language, for it reverses the thing it should represent. If I buy a mirror, I would rather buy one which has fifty small flaws in it, than one which places my feet where my head should be. There are poems of Ovid which I have been counselled to cast aside, and my curiosity has never violated the interdict. But even in Homer himself nothing of the same extent is more spirited, or truly epic, than the contest of Ajax and Ulysses. You shall hear in this apartment, some day soon, what our Bembo thinks about it. No Roman, of any age, either has written more purely, or shown himself a more consummate judge both of style and matter. Michel-Angelo. I think so too; but some have considered him rather as correct and elegant than forcible and original. Vittoria. Because he is correct; of which alone they can form a notion, and of this imperfectly. Had he written in a negligent and disorderly manner, they would have admired his freedom and copiousness, ignorant that, in literature as in life, the rich and noble are as often frugal as the indigent and obscure. The cardinal never talks vaguely and superficially on any species of composition; no, not even with his friends. Where a thing is to be admired or censured, he explains in what it consists. He points to the star in the ascendant, and tells us accurately at what distance other stars are from it. In lighter mood, on lighter matters, he shakes the beetle out of the rose, and shows us what species of insect that is which he has thrown on its back at our feet, and in what part and to what extent the flower has been corroded by it. He is too noble in his nature to be habitually sarcastic, and too conscious of power to be declamatory or diffuse. Michel-Angelo. Nevertheless, in regard to sarcasm, I have known him to wither a fungus of vanity by a single beam of wit. Vittoria. He may indeed have chastised an evildoer, but a glance of the eye or a motion of the hand is enough. Throughout the ample palace of his mind not an instrument of torture can be found. Michel-Angelo. Perhaps in the offices below, a scourge may be suspended for intrusive curs, or for thieves disguised in stolen liveries. I wish my friend of this morning had met the Cardinal instead of me. Possessing no sense of shame or decency, and fancying that wherever he has thrust a book he has conferred a distinction, he would have taken the same easy liberty with his Eminence. Vittoria. If he continues to be so prolific, we shall soon see another island emerging from the Tiber. Our friend the Cardinal has indeed no time to squander on those who, like your waylayer, infest the public roads of literature, by singing old songs and screaming old complaints. But I wish his political occupations would allow him to pursue his pleasanter studies, and especially in exercising his acute judgment on our primary poets. For our country, both anciently and of late, has always wanted a philosophical critic on poetical works, and none are popular in the present day but such as generalise or joke. Ariosto, in despite of them, is, however tardily and difficultly, coming into favour. There is quite enough in him for our admiration, although we never can compare him with some among the ancients. For the human heart is the world of poetry; the imagination is only its atmosphere. Fairies, and genii, and angels themselves, are at best its insects, glancing with unsubstantial wings about its lower regions and less noble edifices. Michel-Angelo. You have been accustomed, O Madonna, to contemplate in person those illustrious men who themselves were the destinies of nations, and you are therefore less to be satisfied with the imaginative and illusory. Vittoria. There are various kinds of greatness, as we all know; however, the most part of those who profess one species is ready to acknowledge no other. The first and chief is intellectual. But surely those also are to be admitted into the number of the eminently great, who move large masses by action, by throwing their own ardent minds fully of the middle ages, in the very centre of the enchantment thrown over them by the magician of Ferrara, never think how much we owe, not only to him, but also to those ages; never think by what energies, corporeal and mental, from the barbarous soldier rose the partially polished knight, and high above him, by slower degrees, the accomplished and perfect gentleman, the summit of nobility. into the midst of popular assemblies or conflicting | antiquity ours are little to be improved. Scholars armies, compelling, directing, and subjecting. who scorn the levity of Ariosto, and speak disdainThis greatness is indeed far from so desirable as that which shines serenely from above, to be our hope, comfort, and guidance; to lead us in spirit from a world of sad realities into one fresh from the poet's hand, and blooming with all the variety of his creation. Hence the most successful generals, and the most powerful kings, will always be considered by the judicious and dispassionate as invested with less dignity, less extensive and enduring authority, than great philosophers and great poets. Michel-Angelo. By the wise indeed; but little men, like little birds, are attracted and caught by false lights. Vittoria. It was beautifully and piously said in days of old, that, wherever a spring rises from the earth, an altar should be erected. Ought not we, my friend, to bear the same veneration to the genius which springs from obscurity in the loneliness of lofty places, and which descends to irrigate the pastures of the mind with a perennial freshness and vivifying force? If great poets build their own temples, as indeed they do, let us at least offer up to them our praises and thanks givings, and hope to render them acceptable by the purest incense of the heart. Michel-Angelo. First, we must find the priests, for ours are inconvertible from their crumbling altars. Too surely we are without an Aristoteles to precede and direct them. Michel-Angelo. O that Pescara were present! Pescara! whom your words seem to have embodied and recalled! Pescara! the lover of all glory, but mostly of yours, Madonna! he to whom your beauty was eloquence and your eloquence beauty, inseparable as the influences of deity. Vittoria. Present! and is he not? Where I am there is he, for evermore. Earth may divide, Heaven never does. The beauty you speak of is the only thing departed from me, and that also is with him perhaps. He may, I hope he may, see me as he left me, only more pacified, more resigned. After I had known Pescara, even if I had never been his, I should have been espoused to him; espoused to him before the assembled testimonies of his innumerable virtues, before his genius, his fortitude, his respectful superiority, his manly gentleness. Yes, I should have been married to his glory; and, neither in his lifetime nor when he left the world, would I have endured, O Michel-Angelo, any other alliance. The very thought, the very words conveying it, are impiety. But friendship helps to support that heavy pall to which the devoted cling tenaciously for ever. Vittoria. We want him not only for poetry, but philosophy. Much of the dusty perfumery, which thickened for a season the pure air of Attica, was dissipated by his breath. Calm reasoning, deep investigation, patient experiment, succeeded Michel-Angelo. Oh! that at this moment . . . to contentious quibbles and trivial irony. The Vittoria. Hush! hush! Wishes are by-paths sun of Aristoteles dispersed the unwholesome on the declivity to unhappiness; the weaker tervapour that arose from the garden of Academus. minate in the sterile sand, the stronger in the Instead of spectral demons, instead of the mons-vale of tears. If there are griefs, which we know trous progeny of mystery and immodesty, there arose tangible images of perfect symmetry. Homer was recalled from banishment: Eschylus followed the choruses bowed before him, divided, and took their stands. Symphonies were heard; what symphonies! So powerful as to lighten the chain that Jupiter had riveted on his rival. The conquerors of kings until then omnipotent, kings who had trampled on the towers of Babylon and had shaken the eternal sanctuaries of Thebes, the conquerors of these kings bowed their olivecrowned heads to the sceptre of Destiny, and their tears ran profusely over the immeasurable wilderness of human woes. Michel-Angelo. We have no poetry of this kind now, nor have we auditors who could estimate or know it if we had. Yet, as the fine arts have raised up their own judges, literature may, ere long, do the same. Instead of undervaluing and beating down, let us acknowledge and praise any resemblance we may trace to the lineaments of a past and stronger generation. Vittoria. But by the manners and habitudes of there are, so intense as to deprive us of our intellects, griefs in the next degree of intensity, far from depriving us of them, amplify, purify, regulate, and adorn them. We sometimes spring above happiness, and fall on the other side. This hath happened to me; but strength enough is left me to raise myself up again, and to follow the guide who calls me. Michel-Angelo. Surely God hath shown that mortal what his own love is, for whom he hath harmonised a responsive bosom, warm in the last as in the first embraces. One look of sympathy, one regret at parting, is enough, is too much; it burdens the heart with overpayment. You can not gather up the blossoms which, by blast after blast, have been scattered and whirled behind you. Are they requisite? The fruit was formed within them ere they fell upon the walk; you have culled it in its season. Vittoria. Before we go into another state of existence, a thousand things occur to detach us imperceptibly from this. To some (who knows to how many?) the images of early love return with an inviting yet a saddening glance, and the breast that was laid out for the sepulchre bleeds afresh. Such are ready to follow where they are beckoned, and look keenly into the darkness they are about to penetrate. all, and am unwilling to give you credit for any fresh variety. But come, tell me, what is it? Michel-Angelo. I am apprehensive that I sometimes have written to you with an irrepressible gush of tenderness, which is but narrowed and Did we not begin to converse on another sub- deepened and precipitated by entering the chanject? Why have you not spoken to me this half-nel of verse. This, falling upon vulgar ears, might hour? be misinterpreted. Michel-Angelo. I see, O Donna Vittoria, I may close the volume we were to read and criticise. Vittoria. Then I hope you have something of your own for me instead. Michel-Angelo. Are you not tired of my verses? Your smile is too splendid a reward, but too indistinct an answer. Pray, pray tell me, Madonna! and yet I have hardly the courage to hear you tell me .. have I not sometimes written to you?.. Vittoria. My cabinet can answer for that. Lift up your sphinx if you desire to find it. Anything in particular? Michel-Angelo. I would say, written to you with... Vittoria. With what? a golden pen? Fittoria. An adamantine one? You child! you child! are you hiding it in my sleeve? An eagle's plume? a nightingale's? a dove's? I must have recourse to the living sphinx, if there is any, not to the porphyry. Have you other pens than these? I know the traces of them Vittoria. If I have deserved a wise man's praise and a virtuous man's affection, I am not to be defrauded of them by stealthy whispers, nor deterred from them by intemperate clamour. She whom Pescara selected for his own, must excite the envy of too many; but the object of envy is not the sufferer by it: there are those who convert it even into recreation. One star hath ruled my destiny and shaped my course. Perhaps. . no, not perhaps, but surely, under that clear light I may enjoy unreproved the enthusiasm of his friend, the greatest man, the most ardent and universal genius, he has left behind him. Courage! courage! Lift up again the head which nothing on earth should lower. When death approaches me, be present, Michel-Angelo, and shed as pure tears on this hand as I did shed on the hand of Pescara. Michel-Angelo. Madonna! they are these; they are these! endure them now rather! Merciful God! if there is piety in either, grant me to behold her at that hour, not in the palace of a hero, not in the chamber of a saint, but from thine everlasting mansions! MELANCTHON AND CALVIN. Melancthon. In my heart. Calvin. Without this page however. Melancthon. When we are wiser and more docile, that is, when we are above the jars and turmoils and disputations of the world, our Saviour will vouchsafe to interpret what, through the fumes of our intemperate vanity, is now indistinct or dark. He will plead for us before no inexorable judge. He came to remit the sins of man; not the sins of a few, but of many; not the sins of many, but of all. Calvin. What! of the benighted heathen too? of the pagan? of the idolater? Melancthon. I hope so; but I dare not say it. Calvin. You would include even the negligent, the indifferent, the sceptic, the unbeliever. Melancthon. Pitying them for a want of happiness in a want of faith. They are my brethren: they are God's children. He will pardon the presumption of my wishes for their welfare; my sorrow that they have fallen, some through their blindness, others through their deafness, others through their terror, others through their anger peradventure at the loud denunciations of unforgiving man. If I would forgive a brother, may not he, who is immeasurably better and more merciful, have pity on a child? He came on earth to take our nature upon him: will he punish, will he reprehend us, for an attempt to take as much as may be of his upon ourselves? Calcin. There is no bearing any such fallacies. Melancthon. Is it harder to bear these fallacies (as they appear to you, and perhaps are, for we all are fallible, and many even of our best thoughts are fallacies), is it harder, O my friend, to bear these, than to believe in the eternal punishment of the erroneous? Calvin. Erroneous indeed! Have they not the Book of Life, now at last laid open before them, for their guidance? Melancthon. No, indeed; they have only two or three places, dog-eared and bedaubed, which they |