treasures acquired during his lifetime, buying autographs wherever it was possible to find them, and causing copies to be made.  In the year 1508 the friars of S. Marco sold this inestimable store of literary documents, in order to discharge the debts contracted by them during their ill-considered interference in the state affairs of the Republic.  It was purchased for the sum of 2652 ducats by the Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, a second son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and afterwards Pope Leo X. He transferred them to his Roman villa, where the collection was still further enlarged by all the rarities which a prince passionate for literature and reckless in expenditure could there assemble.  Leo’s cousin and executor, Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII., fulfilled his last wishes by transferring them to Florence, and providing the stately receptacle in which they still repose.

The task assigned to Michelangelo, when he planned the library, was not so simple as that of the new sacristy.  Some correspondence took place before the west side of the cloister was finally decided on.  What is awkward in the approach to the great staircase must be ascribed to the difficulty of fitting this building into the old edifice; and probably, if Michelangelo had carried out the whole work, a worthier entrance from the piazza into the loggia, and from the loggia into the vestibule, might have been devised.

II

Vasari, in a well-known passage of his Life of Michelangelo, reports the general opinion of his age regarding the novelties introduced by Buonarroti into Italian architecture.  The art of building was in a state of transition.  Indeed, it cannot be maintained that the Italians, after they abandoned the traditions of the Romanesque manner, advanced with certitude on any line of progress in this art.  Their work, beautiful as it often is, ingenious as it almost always is, marked invariably by the individuality of the district and the builder, seems to be tentative, experimental.  The principles of the Pointed Gothic style were never seized or understood by Italian architects.  Even such cathedrals as those of Orvieto and Siena are splendid monuments of incapacity, when compared with the Romanesque churches of Pisa, S. Miniato, S. Zenone at Verona, the Cathedral of Parma.  The return from Teutonic to Roman standards of taste, which marked the advent of humanism, introduced a hybrid manner.  This, in its first commencement, was extremely charming.  The buildings of Leo Battista Alberti, of Brunelleschi, and of Bramante are distinguished by an exquisite purity and grace combined with picturesqueness.  No edifice in any style is more stately, and at the same time more musical in linear proportions, than the Church of S. Andrea at Mantua.  The Cappella dei Pazzi and the Church of S. Spirito at Florence are gems of clear-cut and harmonious dignity.  The courtyard of the Cancelleria at Rome, the Duomo at Todi, show with what