Look to preserving your life and health, but let your fortunes go to ruin rather than suffer hardships; for I would sooner have you alive and poor; if you were dead, I should not care for all the gold in the world.

If those chatterboxes or any one else reprove you, let them talk, for they are men without intelligence and without affection." References to public events are singularly scanty in this correspondence.

Much as Michelangelo felt the woes of Italy--and we know he did so by his poems--he talked but little, doing his work daily like a wise man all through the dust and din stirred up by Julius and the League of Cambrai.

The lights and shadows of Italian experience at that time are intensely dramatic.

We must not altogether forget the vicissitudes of war, plague, and foreign invasion, which exhausted the country, while its greatest men continued to produce immortal masterpieces.