energy found vent more in the planning and supervising of
architectural works, culminating in the building of St.
Peter's, but even in these later years he took up the chisel as
an outlet for superfluous energy and to induce sleep. Though
the product of his hand was not good, his health was the better
for this mutual exercise of mind and body. In his eighty-sixth
year he is said to have sat drawing for three consecutive hours
until pains and cramps in his limbs warned him that he had not
the endurance of youth. For exercise, when manual labor proved
a disappointment, he often took horseback rides. There was no
invalidism about this great spirit, and it was not until the
day before his death that he would consent to go to bed.

In a poem of his last years he burlesques his infirmities in
his usual vigorous manner.

'I live alone and wretched, confined like the pith within the
bark of the tree.... My voice is like a wasp imprisoned within
a sack of skin and bone. ... My teeth rattle like the keys of
an old musical instrument.... My face is a scarecrow.... There
is a ceaseless buzzing in my ears--in one a spider spins his
web, in the other a cricket chirps all night.... My catarrh,
which causes a rattle in my throat, will not allow me to
sleep.--Fatigue has quite broken me, and the hostlery which
awaits me is Death.'

Few men at his age have had less reason to find in themselves
other than the changes to be expected with the passing of years
and in prose he acknowledged that he had no more affections of
the flesh than were to be expected at his age. Codiva pictures