writing, and going back to
his earliest boyhood, he set down the facts of his long career as he
remembered them. Of course he is the hero who recounts his own story,
and like all heroes of romance he plays the leading part, is always in
the right, and comes out handsomely in the end. Carping critics who
tax him with lack of truth in dealing with his enemies, and with
pleading his own cause too well, are apt to forget that he wrote long
after the events were past, and that to an ever-active imagination
ruminating over bygone happenings, facts become unconsciously colored
to assume the hue the mind wishes them to have. Yet the fidelity and
accuracy of his memory are remarkable, and his faculty for seeing,
combined with his dramatic way of putting things most vividly,
flashes before our eyes the scenes he recounts. He does not describe
much; he indicates a characteristic feature, habit, or attitude; as
for example, in referring to a man he disliked, as having "long
spidery hands and a shrill gnat-like voice"--all that is needed to
make us see the man from Cellini's point of view. Again, he adds much
to the vivacity of the narrative by reporting conversation as a
dialogue, even if he has it himself at second-hand. So in his
trenchant, nervous manner this keen observer, while aiming to recount
only the facts of his own life and to set himself on a becoming
pedestal in the eyes of posterity, gives us at the same time
flash-lights of the whole period in which he played a part. Popes
Clement VII. and Paul III., Cosimo de' Medici and his Duchess, the
King of France and Madame d' Estampes, cardinals, nobles, princes, and
courtiers, artists of every description, burghers and the common
folk,--all with whom he came in contact,--are brought before us in a
living pageant. Looking back over his checkered career, he lives his
intense life over again, and because he himself saw so vividly at the
time, he makes us see now. We have here invaluable pictures, by an
eye-witness and actor, of the sack of Rome, the plague and siege of
Florence, the pomp of Charles V. at Rome. He withdraws the curtains
from the Papal policies and court intrigues, not with a view to
writing history, but because he happened to have some relations with
those princes and wished to tell us about them. Again, he was no
critic of the manners of his time, yet he presents most faithful
pictures of artist life in Rome, Paris, and Florence. He was not given
to introspect