IX.  Line 4:  ’The Archangel’s scales alone can weigh my gratitude against your gift.’  Lines 5-8:  ’Your courtesy has taken away all my power of responding to it.  I am as helpless as a ship becalmed, or a wisp of straw on a stormy sea.’

X. Michael Angelo, when asked to make a portrait of his friend’s mistress, declares that he is unable to do justice to her beauty.  The name Mancina is a pun upon the Italian word for the left arm, Mancino.  This lady was a famous and venal beauty, mentioned among the loves of the poet Molsa.

XI.  Date, 1550.

XII.  This and the three next sonnets may with tolerable certainty be referred to the series written on various occasions for Vittoria Colonna.

XIII.  Sent together with a letter, in which we read:  l’aportatore di questa sara Urbino, che sta meco.  Urbino was M. A.’s old servant, workman, and friend.  See No.  LXVIII. and note.

XIV.  The thought is that, as the sculptor carves a statue from a rough model by addition and subtraction of the marble, so the lady of his heart refines and perfects his rude native character.

XV.  This sonnet is the theme of Varchi’s Lezione.  There is nothing to prove that it was addressed to Vittoria Colonna.  Varchi calls it ’un suo altissimo sonetto pieno di quella antica purezza e dantesca gravita.’

XVI.  The thought of the fifteenth is repeated with some variations.  His lady’s heart holds for the lover good and evil things, according as he has the art to draw them forth.

XVIII.  In the terzets he describes the temptations of the artist-nature, over-sensitive to beauty.  Michelangelo the younger so altered these six lines as to destroy the autobiographical allusion.—­Cp.  No.  XXVIII., note.

XIX.  The lover’s heart is like an intaglio, precious by being inscribed with his lady’s image.

XX.  An early composition, written on the back of a letter sent to the sculptor in Bologna by his brother Simone in 1507.  M.A. was then working at the bronze statue of Julius II.  Who the lady of his love was, we do not know.  Notice the absence of Platonic concetti.

XXIII.  It is hardly necessary to call attention to Michael Angelo’s oft-recurring Platonism.  The thought that the eye alone perceives the celestial beauty, veiled beneath the fleshly form of the beloved, is repeated in many sonnets—­especially in XXV., XXVIII.

XXIV.  Composed probably in the year 1529.

XXV.  Written on the same sheet as the foregoing sonnet, and composed probably in the same year.  The thought is this:  beauty passing from the lady into the lover’s soul, is there spiritualised and becomes the object of a spiritual love.

XXVII.  To escape from his lady, either by interposing another image of beauty between the thought of her and his heart, or by flight, is impossible.

XXVIII.  Compare Madrigal VII. in illustration of lines 5 to 8.  By the analogy of that passage, I should venture to render lines 6 and 7 thus: