joying in his subordinate pursuits the protection of a more powerful race, with which there will be no cause of conflict. Should the black man die out in the end, as he probably will, of weak lungs and from the want of congenial air in the more elevated region to which he has been raised, and to which he cannot be acclimated, let it not be recorded that it is due to bad treatment on our part. But if, contrary to the teachings of history and science, the negro should rise to an equality of intelligence and energy with the Caucasian, should the struggle for power inaugurate a war of races, the Trojans and Greeks having the same weapons and being matched in courage and skill, the conflict will be intensified, and become more terrible. In the end one of the two, more favored by adventitious circumstances, and it is easy to foresee on which side those circumstances are to be,- will destroy the other, according to all known laws and precedents. The love of power, like the love of woman, cannot be shared; it is implacable in its jealousy,- no two men, no two nations, no two races, ever divided it in peace. President Lincoln, in his first allocution to a negro deputation, after his Proclamation of Emancipation, warned them that they could not aspire to live on a footing of equality with the whites. He predicted that the attempt would be fatal to their race. The advice was the unpalatable one of a true friend. The prediction may yet be that of a true prophet.

Every century has had its question. Those questions have settled themselves, most of them in an unforeseen manner. The free-negro question is a terrible one for us of the South. But it will have a solution also in the course of events. The Fates weave slowly the web of destiny for individuals, for families, and for nations. In the mean time let us do like a skilful physician. When he is perplexed by the disease of his patient, he confines himself to careful nursing, and, refraining from hazardous remedies, relies on the curative powers of nature. Let us also rely on that Providence which has a solution for everything. There are crises where the cry of wisdom should be, "Hands off, mortals!" Ecce Deus.

The author of this article would not have written it, if his determination had not been to speak "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," as he understands it to be. If, with President Lincoln, he predicts to the black race that it will never live in peace with the white on a footing of equality, whilst possessing

equality of number, and claiming the exercise of the equality of political, civil, and social rights, the latter of which is the complement of the two former, it is not from a feeling of hostility to the inevitably doomed, doomed like the Indians, doomed like many other races. His object is to guard the weak against aspirations and efforts which will end in disappointment and hasten a more active and deadly struggle. The writer was just and friendly to the free colored population, when, in 1831, a mere youth then, he made in the State legislature a report against a bill ordering their expulsion, and providing that no slave should be emancipated, except to be sent by his master to Liberia. It was a popular bill which was defeated only by the most strenuous efforts. In 1863 the author proposed to set free all the negroes who should take up arms for the South, and advised a treaty with England and France, by which the Confederate States, in consideration of these two powers recognizing their independence, should bind themselves to a gradual and final emancipation of their slaves, and should join their moral influence, after their complete independence, to that of France and England, with a view of inducing Spain and Brazil to abolish African bondage, so that contemporaneous with the appearance of the Southern Confederacy in the family of nations would be the abolition of slavery throughout the civilized world. On those occasions, as on this, the motto of this writer was the one adopted by this Review:

"Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur."

CHARLES GAYARRÉ

ART. VI. MICHELANGELO AND THE BUONNARROTI ARCHIVES.

THE Cavaliere Cosimo Buonnarroti was the lineal descendant of Buonnarroto Buonnarroti, the younger brother of Michelangelo, and the possessor of the house which had belonged to him in the Via Ghibellina at Florence. He died on the 12th of February, 1858, bequeathing his house and the Michelangelesque Museum contained in it to the city of Florence. In truth, the collection of memorials existing there might well be called a Museum. Not only was the mass of manuscripts extremely voluminous, but there were many works of art from the hand of the master, models especially, and first ideas for several of his larger works, especially one most interesting first sketch in wax of the "David," besides other relics, his chair, his walking-stick, his writing-desk, and the like.

The house and all its contents, as has been said, were left by the Cavaliere Cosimo, who had been Minister of Public Instruction. under the last Grand Duke, to the city of Florence, to the exclusion of certain collateral relatives, who, it was known, would have dispersed and sold the collection. But in consequence of a curious circumstance the city did not enter into possession of the property under the will. The Tuscan law required (and the Italian law may still require, but there were differences in the legislation at that time); that the witnesses to the execution of a holograph will, such as that which the Cavaliere Buonnarroti made, should be in the same room with the testator at the time of his making the will in question. Now the Cavaliere Buonnarroti being very ill, and suffering much from the heat in the room in which he was dying, in which there were several persons, a portion of those present were requested to pass into an adjoining room, communicating with the sick-man's room by large folding-doors, which were open. Several of those present did so, and the persons who subsequently signed the will as witnesses were among the number. Hence it was afterwards objected, on the behalf of those who were the heirsat-law, and would have inherited the Buonnarroti house and its

contents but for the will, that the document was invalid on the ground which has been mentioned. The case was brought before the courts, and was given against the city, which, however, succeeded in compromising the matter by the payment of a large sum to the heirs-at-law.

When the papers had become public property, the task of editing the letters was intrusted to the Cavaliere Gaetano Milanesi; the task of writing a new life based in part on the new materials was assigned to the Commendatore Aurelio Gotti, while Count Luigi Passerini, the librarian of the National Library, undertook to prepare a Michelangelesque bibliography, with an addition thereto of a list of all the engravers who have produced engravings from his works. Previously, however, it was arranged that an English translation of the "Life" should be executed by Mr. Charles Heath Wilson, a well-known artist and man of letters, long resident at Florence.

Born in 1475, in the lovely district of the Casentino, the upper valley of the Arno, — that lush and green valley which Dante has described so well and so fondly, where his father was serving the office of podestà or chief magistrate of the little town of Caprese, the infant Michelangelo was carried, at the expiration of his father's six months' tenure of office, to Florence, and was placed with a wet-nurse, the wife of a stone-cutter in the village of Settigrano, amid the quarries on the hillside above the Arno valley, not far from Fiesole. The circumstance is not without interest. The woman from whose breast the infant Michelangelo was nourished was the wife, and doubtless the daughter, of a stone-cutter, in all probability the descendant of a long line of stone-cutters ; for all the people at Settigrano are stone-cutters, and some of them were sculptors, equally calling themselves lapicida. For the hierarchy of art had not in those days shaped itself into any defined table of precedence; and it would have been difficult, if any one had dreamed of attempting it, to draw the line between the artist and the artisan. With what degree of mastery and deftness the fathers of her whose breast supplied the elements of growth to the great artist may have cut the Settigrano stone there is no saying, but that they were engaged in that art from time out of mind may be reckoned as certain; and physiological theorists may make a note of it.

As usual, the tradesman-father wanted to make a tradesman of his lapicida-suckled boy, and as usual failed. Little Michelangelo would do nothing but draw and model. Wiser than many another father suffering from the same misfortune, the elder Buonnarroti soon gave up the struggle, and placed the boy in the workshop of Domenico and David Ghirlandaio. At the age of fourteen he had already so distinguished himself that Lorenzo the Magnificent was attracted by his unmistakable genius, and made him a member of his family, where among other advantages he had that of the literary instruction of Politian. In 1496 (aged twenty-one) he goes to Rome at the invitation of the Cardinal St. Giorgio, and remains there nearly five years, executing a variety of statues and groups, and increasing daily in reputation. In 1501 (aged twenty-six) he returns to Florence at the request of his father, and we find cardinals and municipalities at once bidding for his services. But in 1504 he again goes to Rome on the invitation of Pope Julius II., becomes dissatisfied with that headstrong and masterful Pope's caprices, returns to Florence, and refuses to obey the Pope's summons to go back to Rome, but at length does so on the receipt of a new invitation in the year 1508; and in that same year, the thirty-third of his age, begins the immortal works in the Sistine Chapel, which are completed in 1512. Pope Julius dies in 1513, and Michelangelo continues to labor, sometimes at Rome, sometimes at Carrara, and sometimes at Florence, chiefly for Pope Leo X., during the whole of his reign. And if the historians, who are continually claiming the toleration and indulgence of mankind for this Pope, and other "art-loving" popes and princes, on the score of their patronage and protection of artists, would make themselves a little better acquainted with that back-stairs view of such transactions, which are only to be come at in the records and familiar letters of the patronized, it is probable that the world would feel less enthusiasm of admiration for the "magnificent" popes and princes in question! In 1523 Clement VII. succeeded to the Papal throne, after the very short reign of Adrian VI., which divided that of Clement from that of his relative, Leo X. And Michelangelo continued to work for Pope Clement. In 1529, however, when Pope Clement, in disgraceful alliance with Charles V., is besieging his ancestral city, the great artist is found on the popular side, and is appointed by the city director of the fortifications. After the restoration