selection. We are, in fact, still somewhat in the same position as
Michelangelo the younger. Whether any application of the critical
method will enable us to do again successfully what he so clumsily
attempted--that is, to reproduce a correct text from the _debris_
offered to our selective faculty--I do not feel sure. Meanwhile I am
quite certain that his principle was a wrong one, and that he dealt
most unjustifiably with his material. For this reason I cordially
accept Signor Guasti's labours, with the reservation I have attempted
to express in this note. They have indeed brought us far closer to
Michael Angelo's real text, but we must be careful to remember that we
have not even now arrived with certainty at what he would himself have
printed if he had prepared his own edition for the press.

[4] As far as I am aware, no complete translation of Michael Angelo's
sonnets has hitherto been made in English. The specimens produced by
Southey, Wordsworth, Harford, Longfellow, and Mr. Taylor, moreover,
render Michelangelo's _rifacimento._

[5] 'Lezione di Benedetto Varchi sopra il sottoscritto Sonetto di
Michelagnolo Buonarroti, fatta da lui pubblicamente nella Accademia
Fiorentina la Seconda Domenica di Quaresima l'anno MDXLVI.' The sonnet
commented by Varchi is Guasti's No xv.

[6] I have elsewhere recorded my disagreement with Signer Guasti and
Signer Gotti, and my reasons for thinking that Vaichi and Michelangelo
the younger were right in assuming that the sonnets addressed to
Tommaso de' Cavalieri (especially xxx, xxxi, lii) expressed the poet's
admiration for masculine beauty. See 'Renaissance in Italy, Fine Arts,'
pp. 521, 522. At the same time, though I agree with Buonarroti's first
editor in believing that a few of the sonnets 'risguardano, come si