od and wholesome colour. Of stature he
is as follows: height middling; broad in the shoulders; the rest of
the body somewhat slender in proportion. The shape of his face is
oval, the space above the ears being one sixth higher than a
semicircle. Consequently the temples project beyond the ears, and the
ears beyond the cheeks, and these beyond the rest; so that the skull,
in relation to the whole head, must be called large. The forehead,
seen in front, is square; the nose, a little flattened--not by nature,
but because, when he was a young boy, Torrigiano de' Torrigiani, a
brutal and insolent fellow, smashed in the cartilage with his fist.
Michelangelo was carried home half dead on this occasion; and
Torrigiano, having been exiled from Florence for his violence, came to
a bad end. The nose, however, being what it is, bears a proper
proportion to the forehead and the rest of the face. The lips are
thin, but the lower is slightly thicker than the upper; so that, seen
in profile, it projects a little. The chin is well in harmony with the
features I have described. The forehead, in a side-view, almost hangs
over the nose; and this looks hardly less than broken, were it not for
a trifling proturberance in the middle. The eyebrows are not thick
with hair; the eyes may even be called small, of a colour like horn,
but speckled and stained with spots of bluish yellow. The ears in good
proportion; hair of the head black, as also the beard, except that
both are now grizzled by old age; the beard double-forked, about five
inches long, and not very bushy, as may partly be observed in his
portrait."

We have no contemporary account of Michelangelo in early manhood; but
the tenor of his life was so even, and, unlike Cellini, he moved so
constantly upon the same lines and within the same sphere of patient
self-reserve, that it is not difficult to reconstruct the young and
vigorous sculptor out of this detailed description by his loving
friend and servant in old age. Few men, notably few artists, have
preserved that continuity of moral, intellectual, and physical
development in one unbroken course which is the specific
characterisation of Michelangelo. As years advanced, his pulses beat
less quickly and his body shrank. But the man did not alter. With the
same lapse of years, his style grew drier and more abstract, but it
did not alter in quality or depart from its ideal. He seems to me in
these respects to be like Milton: wholly unlike