Idol mio, che la tua leggiadra spoglia
  Mi lasciasti anzi tempo.

Michelangelo, seeking to indulge his own grief and to soothe that of his friend Luigi, composed no fewer than forty-two epigrams of four lines each, in which he celebrated the beauty and rare personal sweetness of Cecchino in laboured philosophical conceits.  They rank but low among his poems, having too much of scholastic trifling and too little of the accent of strong feeling in them.  Certainly these pieces did not deserve the pains which Michelangelo the younger bestowed, when he altered the text of a selection from them so as to adapt their Platonic compliments to some female.  Far superior is a sonnet written to Del Riccio upon the death of the youth, showing how recent had been Michelangelo’s acquaintance with Cecchino, and containing an unfulfilled promise to carve his portrait:—­

  Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes,
    Which to your living eyes were life and light,
    When, closed at last in death’s injurious night,
    He opened them on God in Paradise. 
  I know it, and I weep—­too late made wise: 
    Yet was the fault not mine; for death’s fell spite
    Robbed my desire of that supreme delight
    Which in your better memory never dies. 
  Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine
    To make unique Cecchino smile in stone
    For ever, now that earth hath made him dim,
  If the beloved within the lover shine,
    Since art without him cannot work alone,
    You must I carve to tell the world of him.

The strange blending of artificial conceits with spontaneous feeling in these poetical effusions, the deep interest taken in a mere lad like Cecchino by so many eminent personages, and the frank publicity given to a friendship based apparently upon the beauty of its object, strike us now as almost unintelligible.  Yet we have the history of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and the letters addressed by Languet to young Sidney, in evidence that fashion at the end of the sixteenth century differed widely from that which prevails at the close of the nineteenth.

IX

Some further light may here be thrown upon Michelangelo’s intimacy with young men by two fragments extracted independently from the Buonarroti Archives by Milanesi and Guasti.  In the collection of the letters we find the following sorrowful epistle, written in December 1533, upon the eve of Michelangelo’s departure from Florence.  It is addressed to a certain Febo:—­

“Febo,—­Albeit you bear the greatest hatred toward my person—­I know not why—­I scarcely believe, because of the love I cherish for you, but probably through the words of others, to which you ought to give no credence, having proved me—­yet I cannot do otherwise than write to you this letter.  I am leaving Florence to-morrow, and am going to Pescia to meet the Cardinal di Cesis and Messer Baldassare.  I shall journey with them to Pisa, and thence to Rome, and I shall never return again to Florence.  I wish you to understand that, so long as I live, wherever I may be, I shall always remain at your service with loyalty and love, in a measure unequalled by any other friend whom you may have upon this world.