Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/61

Rh asserts, in all his difficulties with hearty faith to God. But, like the majority of Italians in his age, he kept religion as far apart from morality as can be. His God was not the God of holiness, chastity, and mercy, but the fetish who protected him and understood him better than ungrateful men. He was emphatically, moreover, the God who "aids such folk as aid themselves"—a phrase frequently used in these Memoirs. The long and painful imprisonment which Cellini endured without just cause in the Castle of S. Angelo made a deep and, to some extent, a permanent impression on his mind. He read the Bible and composed psalms, was visited by angels and blessed with consolatory visions. About the truth of these experiences there is no doubt. The man's impressible, imaginative nature lent itself to mysticism and spiritual exaltation no less readily than to the delirium of homicidal excitement. He was just as inclined to see heaven opened when dying of misery in a dungeon as to "see red," if I may use that French term, when he met an enemy upon the burning squares of Rome in summer. The only difference was, that in the former case he posed before himself as a martyr gifted with God's special favour, in the latter as a righteous and wronged hero, whose hand and dagger God would guide. There was nothing strange in this mixture of piety and murder. The assassin of Lorenzino de' Medici—whose short narrative, by the way, reads like a chapter of Cellini's Memoirs—relates how, while he was running drenched with blood through Venice after the event, he took refuge in a crowded church, and fervently