[Footnote A:  It is delightful to note the warm affection displayed by the great sculptor toward his old servant on his death-bed.  The man who would beard princes and the pope himself, when he felt it necessary to assert his independent character as an artist, and through life evinced a somewhat hard exterior, was soft as a child in affectionate attention to his dying domestic, anticipating all his wants by a personal attendance at his bedside.  This was no light service on the part of Michael Angelo, who was himself at the time eighty-two years of age.—­ED.]

MICHAEL ANGELO TO VASARI.

“My Dear George,—­I can but write ill, yet shall not your letter remain without my saying something.  You know how Urbino has died.  Great was the grace of God when he bestowed on me this man, though now heavy be the grievance and infinite the grief.  The grace was that when he lived he kept me living; and in dying he has taught me to die, not in sorrow and with regret, but with a fervent desire of death.  Twenty and six years had he served me, and I found him a most rare and faithful man; and now that I had made him rich, and expected to lean on him as the staff and the repose of my old age, he is taken from me, and no other hope remains than that of seeing him again in Paradise.  A sign of God was this happy death to him; yet, even more than this death, were his regrets increased to leave me in this world the wretch of many anxieties, since the better half of myself has departed with him, and nothing is left for me than this loneliness of life.”

Even the throne has not been too far removed from this sphere of humble humanity, for we discover in St. George’s Chapel a mural monument erected by order of one of our late sovereigns as the memorial of a female servant of a favourite daughter.  The inscription is a tribute of domestic affection in a royal bosom, where an attached servant became a cherished inmate.

King George III. 
Caused to be interred near this place the body of
MARY GASCOIGNE,
Servant to the Princess Amelia;
and this stone
to be inscribed in testimony of his grateful sense
of the faithful services and attachment
of an amiable young woman to
his beloved Daughter.

This deep emotion for the tender offices of servitude is not peculiar to the refinement of our manners, or to modern Europe; it is not the charity of Christianity alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed this equality of affection, which the domestic may participate:  monumental inscriptions, raised by grateful masters to the merits of their slaves, have been preserved in the great collections of Graevius and Gruter.[A]