Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/79

Rh This forces me to accept as genuine many of those powerful and humorous descriptions of character which we cannot check. How true to life is the history of young Luigi Pulci, who came to grief in Rome, after wasting exceptional talents in disgraceful self-indulgence! That episode reads like a pièce justificative in illustration of Aretino's Dialogo delle Corti. The story too of the mad Castellan of S. Angelo, who thought he was a bat, deserves like credence. The ruffianly postmaster at Siena, shot dead by Cellini in a quarrel; the Milanese simpleton who entreated the surgeon, while sewing up a wound in his mouth, not to close the whole orifice but of spite; the incomparable dilettante at Ferrara, Alfonso de' Trotti, who made such a fool of himself about some old models from Cellini's vases; Tribolo, the quaking coward; Busbacca, the lying courier; Cellini's father, with his fixed idea about Benvenuto's flute-playing; Ascanio and his sweetheart hidden in the head of the great statue of Mars at Paris—hundreds of such rapidly traced silhouettes, with all the force of life and all the comicality of satiric genius, cross these pages and enliven them at every turn. We have faith in their veracity, partly because they correspond to human nature in the times which Cellini knew, and partly because his descriptions of character, when verified by external evidence, are found so faithful.

The trustworthiness of Cellini's Memoirs might be submitted to yet another test. Numerous details, as, for instance, the episode of his brother's death and