Michael Angelo found that the ornamentations of the ancient temples were as rich and varied as those of Mediaeval churches.  Mouldings were discovered of incomparable elegance; the figures on entablatures were found to be chiselled accurately from nature; the pillars were of matchless proportions, the capitals of graceful curvatures.  He saw beauty in the horizontal lines of the Parthenon, as much as in the vertical lines of Cologne.  He would not pull down the venerable monuments of religious zeal, but he would add to them.  “Because the pointed arch was sacred, he would not despise the humble office 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 builders, but 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.