e great variety that
circumstances introduced into their existence. Change and variety are
favourable to creative genius as they are unfavourable to uncreative
study. The scholar and the historian are best left among their books for
twenty years at a time, to execute the labour of patient thought which
needs perpetual concentration on one subject. If Gibbon had continued to
be an amateur soldier and a man of the world, as he began, he might have
written a history, but it would not have been the most astonishing
history of modern times. In Macaulay's brilliant and often too creative
work, one sees the influence of his changing political career, to the
detriment of sober study. For the more the creative man sees and lives
in his times, the more he is impelled to create. In the midst of his
best years of painting, Lionardo da Vinci was called off to build
canals, and Caesar Borgia kept him busy for two years in planning and
constructing fortifications. Immediately before that time he had
finished his famous Last Supper, in Milan, and immediately afterwards he
painted the Battle of Anghiari--now lost--which was the picture of his
that most strongly impressed the men of his day.

Similarly, Michelangelo was interrupted in his work when, the Constable
of Bourbon having sacked Rome, the Medici were turned out of Florence,
and the artist was employed by the Republic to fortify and defend the
city. It was betrayed, and he escaped and hid himself--and the next
great thing he did was the Last Judgment, in the Sixtine Chapel. He did
stirring work in wild times, besides painting, and hewing marble, and
building Saint Peter's.

That brings one back to thinking how much those men knew. Their
universal knowledge seems utterly unattainable to us, with all our
modern machinery of education. Michelangelo grew up in a suburb of
Florence, to which his father moved when he was a child, at a notary's
desk, his father trying to teach him enough law to earn him a
livelihood. Whenever he had a chance, he escaped to draw in a corner, or
to spend forbidden hours in an artist's studio. He was taught Latin and
arithmetic by an old schoolmaster, who was probably a priest, and a
friend of his father's. At fourteen he earned money in Ghirlandajo's
studio, which means that he was already an artist. At twenty-five he was
probably the equal of any living man as sculptor, painter, architect,
engineer and mathematician. Very much the same might be said of