ion and self-criticism, but he describes himself as well
as others, not by analysis but by deeds and words. He had no literary
training; he wrote as he talked, and gained his effect by simplicity.

He was recognized as the first goldsmith of his time; yet as a man
also his contemporaries speak well of him, for he embodied the virtues
of his age, while his morals did not fall below the average code of
the Renaissance. Vasari says:--"He always showed himself a man of
great spirit and veracity; bold, active, enterprising, and formidable
to his enemies; a man, in short, who knew as well how to speak with
princes as to exert himself in his art."

J. A. Symonds, that inspiring student of the Italian Renaissance, sums
up his impressions of the book and the man as follows:--

"I am confident that every one who may have curiously studied
Italian history and letters will pronounce this book to be at
one and the same time the most perfect extant monument of
vernacular Tuscan prose, and also the most complete and lively
source of information we possess regarding manners, customs,
ways of feeling, and modes of acting, in the Court. Those who
have made themselves thoroughly familiar with Cellini's
Memoirs possess the substance of that many-sided epoch in the
form of an epitome. It is the first book which a student of
the Italian Renaissance should handle in order to obtain the
right direction for his more minute researches. It is the last
book to which he should return at the close of his exploratory
voyages. At the commencement he will find it invaluable for
placing him at the exactly proper point of view. At the end he
will find it no less invaluable for testing and verifying the
conclusion he has drawn from various sources and a wide
circumference of learning. From the pages of this book the
genius of the Renaissance, incarnate in a single personality,
leans forth and speaks to us. Nowhere else, to my mind, do we
find the full character of the epoch so authentically stamped.
That is because this is no work of art or of reflection, but
the plain utterance of a man who lived the whole life of his
age, who felt its thirst for glory, who shared its adoration
of the beautiful, who blent its paganism and its superstition,
who represented its two main aspects of exquisite sensibility
to form and almost brutal ruffianism. We must not