false ambition.
Our old friends of humanistic learning--Cyrus, Alexander, Caesar--meet us
in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are
thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole
epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that
excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to
scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his
manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse
the rancour of his fellow-humanists.

I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the
peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more
especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon the
masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty from
Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine art, in
part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least: the phrase is
pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for "diuturnity in monuments,"
who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by humanistic jealousy,
expressing its malevolence with humanistic crudity of satire, was
destined after all to be defrauded of his well-paid tomb. The monument,
a master work of Donatello and his collaborator, was duly erected. The
oxen and the contractors, it appears, had floundered through the mud of
Valdichiana, and struggled up the mountain-slopes of Montepulciano. But
when the church, which this triumph of art adorned, came to be repaired,
the miracle of beauty was dismembered. The sculpture for which Aragazzi
spent his thousands of crowns, which Donatello touched with his
immortalising chisel, over which the contractors vented their curses and
Bruni eased his bile; these marbles are now visible as mere _disjecta
membra_ in a church which, lacking them, has little to detain a
traveller's haste.

On the left hand of the central door, as you enter, Aragazzi lies, in
senatorial robes, asleep; his head turned slightly to the right upon the
pillow, his hands folded over his breast. Very noble are the draperies,
and dignified the deep tranquillity of slumber. Here, we say, is a good
man fallen upon sleep, awaiting resurrection. The one commanding theme
of Christian sculpture, in an age of Pagan feeling, has been adequately
rendered. Bartolommeo Aragazzi, like Ilaria del Carretto at Lucca, like
the canopied doges in S. Zanipolo at Venice, like the Acciauoli in the
Flor