The ‘Rivista Europea’ of June 1875 publishes an article by Signor V. de Tivoli concerning an inedited sonnet of Michael Angelo, which he deciphered from the Autograph, written upon the back of one of the original drawings in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford.  This drawing formed part of the Ottley and Lawrence Collection.  It represents horses in various attitudes, together with a skirmish between a mounted soldier and a group of men on foot.  Signor de Tivoli not only prints the text with all its orthographical confusions, abbreviations, and alterations; but he also adds what he modestly terms a restoration of the sonnet.  Of this restoration I have made the subjoined version in rhyme, though I frankly admit that the difficulties of the text, as given in the rough by Signor de Tivoli, seem to me insuperable, and that his readings, though ingenious, cannot in my opinion be accepted as absolutely certain.  He himself describes the MS. as a palimpsest, deliberately defaced by Michael Angelo, from which the words originally written have to be recovered in many cases by a process of conjecture.  That the style of the restoration is thoroughly Michael Angelesque, will be admitted by all students of Signor Guasti’s edition.  The only word I felt inclined to question, is donne in line 13, where I should have expected donna.  But I am informed that about this word there is no doubt.  The sonnet itself ranks among the less interesting and the least finished compositions of the poet’s old age.

    Thrice blest was I what time thy piercing dart
      I could withstand and conquer in days past: 
      But now my breast with grief is overcast;
      Against my will I weep, and suffer smart. 
    And if those shafts, aimed with so fierce an art,
      The mark of my frail bosom over-passed,
      Now canst thou take revenge with blows at last
      From those fair eyes which must consume my heart. 
    O Love, how many a net, how many a snare
      Shuns through long years the bird by fate malign,
      Only at last to die more piteously! 
    Thus love hath let me run as free as air,
      Ladies, through many a year, to make me pine
      In sad old age, and a worse death to die.

APPENDIX III.

The following translations of a madrigal, a quatrain, and a stanza by Michael Angelo, may be worth insertion here for the additional light they throw upon some of the preceding sonnets—­especially upon Sonnets I. and II. and Sonnets LXV.-LXXVII.  In my version of the stanza I have followed Michelangelo the younger’s readings.

DIALOGUE OF FLORENCE AND HER EXILES.

Per molti, donna.

    ’Lady, for joy of lovers numberless
      Thou wast created fair as angels are. 
      Sure God hath fallen asleep in heaven afar,
      When one man calls the bliss of many his!