Page:The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Vol 1.djvu/44

developments of the Renaissance, but there were still great spirits on earth sojourning when he was born, and even those public figures that were not precisely great had characteristics, or filled positions, significant to the modern reader. Cellini fills his canvas with a generous hand. He is himself his best theme, but he draws a friend or an enemy with the same care that he bestows upon his own traits or mischances, and though he has a due sense of the powers of the great ones with whom he comes in contact, it is with a quite unhampered brush that he introduces Pope or mundane potentate upon the scene. He speaks of artists and their work with the intimate accent of Vasari, and with a robuster, warmer, more roughly human element of appreciation in his voice. He is, as I said at the beginning, every inch a man, and it is a man's report of what he did and felt and saw that he gives us,—a report wanting in the niceties of literary form, darkened by prejudice and passion, but, in its spirit, a thing genuine as the man himself was genuine.