We have verses written by Giovanni Aldobrandini, Carlo Gondi, Fra Paolo del Rosso, and Anton Francesco Grazzini, called Il Lasca.

Not the least touching is Luigi's own threnody, which starts upon this note:-- _Idol mio, che la tua leggiadra spoglia Mi lasciasti anzi tempo._ Michelangelo, seeking to indulge his own grief and to soothe that of his friend Luigi, composed no fewer than forty-two epigrams of four lines each, in which he celebrated the beauty and rare personal sweetness of Cecchino in laboured philosophical conceits.

They rank but low among his poems, having too much of scholastic trifling and too little of the accent of strong feeling in them.

Certainly these pieces did not deserve the pains which Michelangelo the younger bestowed, when he altered the text of a selection from them so as to adapt their Platonic compliments to some female.

Far superior is a sonnet written to Del Riccio upon the death of the youth, showing how recent had been Michelangelo's acquaintance with Cecchino, and containing an unfulfilled promise to carve his portrait:-- _Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes, Which to your living eyes were life and light, When, closed at last in death's injurious night, He opened them on God in Paradise.
I know it, and I weep--too late made wise: Yet was the fault not mine; for death's fell spite Robbed my desire of that supreme delight Which in your better memory never dies.
Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine To make unique Cecchino smile in stone For ever, now that earth hath made him dim, If the beloved within the lover shine, Since art without him cannot work alone, You must I carve to tell the world of him._ The strange blending of artificial conceits with spontaneous feeling in these poetical effusions, the deep interest taken in a mere lad like Cecchino by so many eminent personages, and the frank publicity given to a friendship based apparently upon the beauty of its object, strike us now as almost unintelligible.