"I am greatly distressed to hear of the fancies you have got into your head.

What hurts me most is that they should prevent your working, for that rejoices your ill-wishers, and confirms them in what they have always gone on preaching about your habits." He proceeds to tell him how absurd it is to suppose that Baccio Bandinelli is preferred before him.

"I cannot perceive how Baccio could in any way whatever be compared to you, or his work be set on the same level as your own." The letter winds up with exhortations to work.

"Brush these cobwebs of melancholy away; have confidence in his Holiness; do not give occasion to your enemies to blaspheme, and be sure that your pension will be paid; I pledge my word for it." Buonarroti, it is clear, wasted his time, not through indolence, but through allowing the gloom of a suspicious and downcast temperament--what the Italians call _accidia_--to settle on his spirits.
Skipping a year, we find that these troublesome negotiations about the tomb were still pending.

He still hung suspended between the devil and the deep sea, the importunate Duke of Urbino and the vacillating Pope.
Spina, it seems, had been writing with too much heat to Rome, probably urging Clement to bring the difficulties about the tomb to a conclusion.