Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/91

Rh eulogy can hardly be called exaggerated: "The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, written by himself in the pure and unsophisticated idiom of the Florentine people, surpasses every book in our literature for the delight it affords the reader."

In truth, without multiplying passages of panegyric, I am confident that every one who may have curiously studied Italian history and letters will pronounce this book to be at one and the same time the most perfect extant monument of vernacular Tuscan prose, and also the most complete and lively source of information we possess regarding manners, customs, ways of feeling, and modes of acting in the sixteenth century. Those who have made themselves thoroughly familiar with Cellini's Memoirs, possess the substance of that many-sided epoch in the form of an epitome. It is the first book which a student of the Italian Renaissance should handle in order to obtain the right direction for his more minute researches. It is the last book to which he should return at the close of his exploratory voyages. At the commencement he will find it invaluable for placing him at the exactly proper point of view. At the end he will find it no less invaluable for testing and verifying the conclusions he has drawn from various sources and a wide circumference of learning. From the pages of this book the Genius of the Renaissance, incarnate in a single personality, leans forth and speaks to us. Nowhere else, to my mind, whether in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel or on Palladian palace fronts, in Ariosto's cantos or in Machiavelli's dissertations, do we find