said,
'I have no friends, I need none, I wish for none;' but that was in
feeling himself 'alone before Heaven;' and of the friends whom he did
possess, he loved them all the more devotedly and faithfully, because
they were few in number.

One need only be told of his love for his old servant Urbino, whom he
presented with two thousand crowns to render him independent of service;
and when the servant was seized with his last illness Michael Angelo
nursed him tenderly, sleeping in his clothes on a couch that he might be
ready to attend his patient. When his cares were ended, Michael Angelo
wrote to a correspondent--'My Urbino is dead--to my infinite grief and
sorrow. Living, he served me truly; and in his death he taught me how to
die. Of Michael Angelo's more equal friendship with Vittoria Colonna I
hope my readers will read at leisure for themselves. No nobler, truer
friendship ever existed. It began when the high-born and beautiful,
gifted, and devout Marchesa de Pescara--most loyal of wives and widows,
was forty-eight, and Michael Angelo sixty-four years of age. After a few
years of privileged intercourse and correspondence, which were the
happiest years in Michael Angelo's life, it ended for this world when he
stood mourning by her lifeless clay. 'I was born a rough model, and it
was for thee to reform and re-make me,' the great painter had written
humbly of himself to his liege lady.[7]

Italy, in Michael Angelo's time, as Germany in Albert Duerer's, was all
quickened and astir with the new wave of religious thought which brought
about the Reformation. Ochino and Peter Martyr, treading in the
footsteps of Savonarola, had preached to eager listeners, but 'in Italy
men did not adopt Lutheranism, though they approached it;' and in all
the crowd of great Italian artists of the day, Michael Angelo shows
deepest traces of the conflict--of its trouble, its seriousness, its
nobleness. He only, among his brethren, acted out his belief that the
things of the world sank into insignificance before those thoughts of
God and immortality which were alone fully worthy of the soul. And it
was, as to a religious work for which he was fitted, that he at last
gave himself up to the raising of St Peter's. We shall have next in
order the life of a man who had all the winning qualities which Michael
Angelo wanted, but we shall hardly, through the whole range of history,
find a nobler man than Michael Angelo.

After his first visit to R