in order to avoid drowning, I would gladly retrace my steps to the dry land whence I started.  Still, as I am here, I will e’en make of my heart a rock, and proceed farther; and if I shall not display the art of sailing on the sea of your powerful genius, that genius itself will excuse me, nor will be disdainful of my inferiority in parts, nor desire from me that which I do not possess, inasmuch as he who is unique in all things can have peers in none.  Therefore your lordship, the light of our century without paragon upon this world, is unable to be satisfied with the productions of other men, having no match or equal to yourself.  And if, peradventure, something of mine, such as I hope and promise to perform, give pleasure to your mind, I shall esteem it more fortunate than excellent; and should I be ever sure of pleasing your lordship, as is said, in any particular, I will devote the present time and all my future to your service; indeed, it will grieve me much that I cannot regain the past, in order to devote a longer space to you than the future only will allow, seeing I am now too old.  I have no more to say.  Read the heart, and not the letter, because ’the pen toils after man’s good-will in vain.’

“I have to make excuses for expressing in my first letter a marvellous astonishment at your rare genius; and thus I do so, having recognised the error I was in; for it is much the same to wonder at God’s working miracles as to wonder at Rome producing divine men.  Of this the universe confirms us in our faith.”

It is clear that Michelangelo alludes in this letter to the designs which he is known to have made for Cavalieri, and the last paragraph has no point except as an elaborate compliment addressed to a Roman gentleman.  It would be quite out of place if applied to Vittoria Colonna.  Gotti finds the language strained and unnatural.  We cannot deny that it differs greatly from the simple diction of the writer’s ordinary correspondence.  But Michelangelo did sometimes seek to heighten his style, when he felt that the occasion demanded a special effort; and then he had recourse to the laboured images in vogue at that period, employing them with something of the ceremonious cumbrousness displayed in his poetry.  The letters to Pietro Aretino, Niccolo Martelli, Vittoria Colonna, Francis I., Luca Martini, and Giorgio Vasari might be quoted as examples.

As a postscript to this letter, in the two drafts which were finally rejected, the following enigmatical sentence is added:—­“It would be permissible to give the name of the things a man presents, to him who receives them; but proper sense of what is fitting prevents it being done in this letter.”