of the lintel.”  And in southern climates especially there was no need of those steep Gothic roofs which were intended to prevent a great weight of rain and snow, and where the graceful portico of the Greeks was more appropriate than the heavy tower of the Lombards.  He would seize on everything that the genius of past ages had indorsed, even as Christianity itself appropriates everything human,—­science, art, music, poetry, eloquence, literature,—­sanctifies it, and dedicates it to the Lord; not for the pride of priests, but for the improvement of humanity.  Civilization may exist with Paganism, but only performs its highest uses when tributary to Christianity.  And Christianity accepts the tribute which even Pagan civilization offers for the adornment of our race,—­expelled from Paradise, and doomed to hard and bitter toils,—­without abdicating her more glorious office of raising the soul to heaven.

Nor was Michael Angelo responsible for the vile mongrel architecture which followed the Renaissance, and which disfigures the modern capitals of Europe, any more than for the perversion of painting in the hands of Titian.  But the indiscriminate adoption of pillars for humble houses, shops with Roman arches, spires and towers erected on Grecian porticoes, are no worse than schoolhouses built like convents, and chapels designed for preaching as much as for choral chants made dark and gloomy, where the voice of the preacher is lost and wasted amid vaulted roofs and useless pillars.  Michael Angelo encouraged no incongruities; he himself conceived the beautiful and the true, and admired it wherever found, even amid the excavations of ruined cities.  He may have overrated the buried monuments of ancient art, but how was he to escape the universal enthusiasm of his age for the remains of a glorious and forgotten civilization?  Perhaps his mind was wearied with the Middle Ages, from which he had nothing more to learn, and sought a greater fulness and a more perfect unity in the expanding forces of a new and grander era than was ever seen by Pagan heroes or by Gothic saints.

But I need not expatiate on the new ideas which Michael Angelo accepted, or the impulse he gave to art in all its forms, and to the revival of which civilization is so much indebted.  Let us turn and give a parting look at the man,—­that great creative genius who had no superior in his day and generation.  Like the greatest of all Italians, he is interesting for his grave experiences, his dreary isolations, his vast attainments, his creative imagination, and his lofty moral sentiments.  Like Dante, he stands apart from, and superior to, all other men of his age.  He never could sport with jesters, or laugh with buffoons, or chat with fools; and because of this he seemed to be haughty and disdainful.  Like Luther, he had no time for frivolities, and looked upon himself as commissioned to do important work.  He rejoiced in labor, and knew no rest until he was eighty-nine.