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Rh Although the Perseus may not be a great work of plastic design, worthy of sculpture in its best periods, it can never cease to be the most characteristic product of the vehement, ambitious artist's soul which throbbed in the writer of Cellini's Memoirs. It remains the final effort of Florentine genius upon the wane, striking a last blow for the ideals, mistaken, perchance, but manfully pursued, which Florence followed through the several stages of the Renaissance.

Cellini's autobiography circulated in MS. and was frequently copied before its first committal to the press in 1730. The result is that the extant MSS. differ considerably in their readings, and that the editions, of which I am acquainted with six, namely, those of Cocchi, Carpani, Tassi, Molini, Bianchi, and Camerini, have by no means equal value. The