ten for Luigi del Riccio on the death of his friend, Cecchino Bracci, we can also trace, as Mr Symonds points out, the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, and of beauty asa form that finds its immortality within the lover's soul. Cecchino was a lad who died at the age of seventeen, and when Luigi asked Michael Angelo to make a portrait of him, Michael Angelo answered, “I can only do so by drawing you in whom he still lives.”
“If the beloved in the lover shine,
Since Art without him cannot work alone,
Thee must I carve, to tell the world of him.”
Thesame idea isalso put forward in Montaigne’s noble essay on Friendship, a passion which he ranks higher than the love of brother for brother, or the love of man for woman. He tells us—I quote from Florio's translation, one of the books with which Shakespeare was familiar—how “perfect amitie” is indivisible, how it “possesseth the soule, and swaies it in all soveraigntie,’ and how “by the interpasition of a spiritual beauty the desire of a spiritual conception is engendered in the beloved.” He writes of an “internall beauty, of difftcile knowledge, and
