more from publicity. The sonnets which Vittoria Colonna and Michelangelo exchanged, the converse these two great minds held in the garden of the Villa Colonna, of which Francesco d' Ollanda has left us an account, were the last flickerings of a spirit which had once controlled and enriched the Renaissance.
What comparisons must have forced themselves on Michelangelo as all the events since the days of Lorenzo il Magnifico, his first patron, whom he never forgot, passed in review before his great and lonely spirit, now sunk in gloom. We know from Condivi that the impressions Buonarotte had received in his youth exercised a renewed power over his old age. Dante and Savonarola were once his leaders, they had never entirely forsaken him. Now the favole del mondo, as his last poems bear witness, fell entirely into the background before the earnest thoughts that had once filled his mind at the foot of the pulpit in San Marco. His Giudizio Universale sums up the account for his whole existence, and is at the same time the most terrible reckoning, made in the spirit of Dante, with his own nation and its rulers. All that Italy might have become, had she followed the dictates of Dante and Savonarola, floated before his eyes as his brush created that Judge of all the world whose curse falls on those that have exiled and murdered His prophets, neglected the Church, and bartered away the freedom of the nation. His Last Judgment was painted at the bidding of the Pope. Paul III can scarcely have guessed how the artist was searching into the consciences of that whole generation, which was called to execute what Julius had bidden Raffaelle and Michelangelo depict for all Christendom, and which had ignored and neglected its high office.
Since 1541 the Schism was an accomplished fact, a misfortune alike for North and South. The defection of the Germanic world deprived the Catholic Church of an element to which the future belonged after the exhaustion of the Latin races. Perhaps the greatest misfortune lay and still lies, as Newman has said, in the fact that the Latin races never realised, and do not even yet realise, what they have lost in the Germanic races. From the time of Paul III, and still more from that of Paul IV onwards, the old Catholicism changes into an Italianism which adopts more and more the forms of the Roman Curialism. The idea of Catholicity, once so comprehensive, was sinking more and more into a one-sided, often despotic insistence on unity, rendered almost inevitable by the continual struggle with opponents. And this was due, not to the doctrines of the Church, but to her practice. Romanism alone could no longer carry out a scheme such as that of which Julius II had dreamed. It is now clear to all minds what intellectual, moral, and social forces the schism had drawn away; this is manifest even in the fate of Italy. The last remnant of Italian idealism took refuge in the idea of national unity and freedom which had been shadowed forth in the policy of Alexander VI and Julius II, and which Machiavelli had
