CELLINI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY. Eng lish readers are fortunate in that the transla tion by John Addington Symonds has made the 'Autobiography of Benvenuto (1500-71) a piece of English literature. The translation is prefaced by an admirable critical introduction, to which the student is referred for all questions of text and historical setting. We learn that the book has been valued by such a mind as Goethe's, who translated it into German; by Horace Walpole, who found it "more amusing than any novel,'" and by Au guste Comte, who placed it upon his list of necessary works. In the opening sentences Cellini states his opinion "that all men . . . who have done anything of excellence . . . ought, if they are persons of truth and honesty, to describe their life with their own hand)) He stands before us painted in vivid colors, the typical artist-soldier of the Renaissance, vain and violent, industrious and energetic, sensitive to beauty if not to goodness, often the bully and braggart, but always the exquisite and in defatigable artist. One is interested to note the contrast between his character and his art — the latter, in such pieces as remain to us, appears florid, elaborated, sophisticated; while the former, in its grim lines, seems to be the exact reverse. gA terrible man P someone termed him, and Cellini records the phrase with pleasure, liking to be thought formidable. But at least we feel him to be as honest a craftsman on paper as on his forge; he has wrought his own strange shape with the same amount of care and candor as he gave to the Pope's gold button. His story is full of vitality. When he
struggles to cast his bronze Perseus and is successful, we rejoice in his triumph. We dwell with him in the violent Italy of his day, following the jests of his rowdy supper-parties, his brawls, duels and escapes, his journeys into France, his encounters with those kings, Popes and dukes who roused him to such impatience. His careless amours, his candid vices, his fears and superstitions, his illnesses and recoveries, his injuries and revenges, are all told with the quality of life; and the same vividness lies in his incessant grumbling at his bad luck, in his rough and savage humor, his quarrels with Vasari and Bandinelli, his hearty admiration for Michelangelo. Great persons pass across his pages — Cosimo di Medici, Lorenzino, Francis I of France. What turbulent vigor in the episode of the bronze Perseus, or in that of his return to find his family dead in plague stricken Florence! Such incidents as those of the necromancer raising devils in the Coliseum, or of the mad castellan, who fancied himself a bat, are unforgettable etchings; while the effect of the whole book is to revive for us a period in the world's history which has incalculable interest for the dissimilar world of to-day.