Page:Vasari - Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, volume 2.djvu/432

424 others appeared to him to be mere slavery, in comparison with his own. He was much disturbed by the cries of children, the sound of bells, the singing of the monks, and even by the coughing of men. When the rain was falling in torrents, he delighted to see the water streaming down from the roofs and pour splashing to the ground: but lightning caused him excessive terror, insomuch that he would shut himself up when he heard thunder, and, fastening the window and door of his room, would wrap his head in his cloak and crouch in a corner until the storm had subsided. Piero di Cosimo was extremely amusing and varied in conversation, and would sometimes say things so facetious and original that his hearers would be ready to die with laughing; but when he had attained to old age, and was near his eightieth year, he became so strangely capricious that no one could endure to be with him. He would not sulfer even his scholars to be about him, so that his unsocial rudeness of manner caused him to be destitute of all aid in the helplessness of his age. He would sometimes be seized with a desire to get to his work, when, his palsied state preventing him, he would fall into fits of rage, and labour to force his trembling hands to exertions of which they were no longer capable: while thus raving or muttering, the mahl-stick would drop from his grasp, or even the pencils themselves would fall from his fingers, so that it was pitiable to behold. The files on the wall would sometimes arouse him to anger, nay, even the very shadows became an ofience to him, and thus, sickening of mere old age, the few friends who still continued to visit him exhorted the dying man to make his peace with Grod; but he put them off from day to day, not that he was an impious or unbelieving person; he was, on the contrary, a very zealous Christian, though of so rude a life, but he did not believe himself be so near death; nay, was convinced to the contrary. He would sometimes discourse largely of the torments endured by those who die oi lingering diseases, and remark how deplorably they must suffer who find their strength, mental and bodily, alike gradually decaying, and see themselves to be dying by little and little, which he declared must needs be a great affliction: he would then abuse all physicians, apothecaries, and sicknurses, declaring that they suffered their patients to die of