The Life of Michael Angelo Buonarotti, with Translations of many of his Poems and Letters.  Also Memoirs of Savonarola, Raphael, and Victoria Colonna.  By JOHN S. HARFORD, Esq., D.C.L., F.R.S., etc., etc. 2 vols. 8vo.  London. 1857.

Autobiographies are not the only memoirs in which there is scope for the display of vanity.  Some men flatter themselves by connecting their names on a title-page with the name of some great character of the past.  Self-love quickens their admiration of their hero, and admiration for their hero gratifies their self-love.  Mr. Harford belongs to this class of biographers.  The title and the appearance of his volumes excite expectations which acquaintance with them disappoints.  The book is not a mere harmless piece of literary presumption; it is a positive evil, as cumbering ground which might be better occupied, and as giving such authority as it may acquire to false views of Art and to numerous errors of fact.  There was need of a good biography of Michel Angelo, and Mr. Harford has made a bad one.  The defects of the book are both external and essential.  Mr. Harford’s mind is of the commonplace order, and incapable of a true appreciation either of the character or the works of such a man as Michel Angelo.  He has no sympathetic insight into the depths of human nature.  Nor has he the method and power of arrangement, such as may often be found in otherwise second-rate biographers, which might enable him to set forth the external facts of a life in such lucid and intelligible order as to exhibit the force of circumstances and position in moulding the character.  His learning, of which there is a considerable display, appears on examination shallow and superficial, and his style of writing is often clumsy, and never elegant.

Michel Angelo, like all great men of genius, is the reflex and express image of many of the ruling characteristics and tendencies of his time.  The strongest natures receive the strongest impressions, and the most marked individuality pervades the character which is yet the clearest and best defined type of its own age.  The decline of religious faith, the vagueness of the prevailing religious philosophy, and the approach of the Reformation, are all to be predicated from the “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel; the impending fall of Art is to be read in the form of the “Moses” of San Pietro in Vincoli; the luxury and pomp of the Papal Court and Church are manifest in the architecture of St. Peter’s, whose dome is swollen with earthly pride; the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel betrays the recoil toward heathenism from the vices and corruptions that then hung round Christianity; and the Sacristy of San Lorenzo is the saddest and grandest exhibition that those days afforded of the infidelity into which the best men were forced.

Vasari and Condivi are the great providers of facts in relation to Michel Angelo, and they have left little to be desired in this respect.  The garrulous fondness of Vasari leads him into delightful Boswellian details, and gives us more than a mere outline narrative.  Mr. Harford has transferred much of Vasari’s writing to his own pages, but has succeeded in translating or mistranslating all vitality out of it.