Gallo's.

"Oh!" said my young lady, with a superb air of omniscience. "It
was all Michael Angelo's design. _The others only tinkered away
at it afterwards_."

After receiving this brickbat I took my leave.

To console myself I looked up, during the evening, Michael
Angelo's noble letter about Bramante.

"One cannot deny," says he, "that Bramante was as excellent in
architecture as any one has been from the ancients to now. He
placed the first stone of St. Peter's, not full of confusion, but
clear, neat, and luminous, and isolated all round in such a way
that it injured no part of the palace, and was held to be a
beautiful thing, as is still apparent, in such a way that any
one who has departed from the said order of Bramante, as San
Gallo has done, has departed from the truth."

Michael Angelo did not like San Gallo; neither did he like
Bramante-who was his senior by thirty years-but this makes his
appreciation of the elder's work all the more generous.

Tinkered away at it, indeed!


May 21st.

I spent all the morning at work by the open window.