Excerpt from Michelangelo: A Record of His Life as Told in His Own Letters and Papers Then, too, there are other gaps in his correspondence which can only be due to the loss of some of his letters, and these I have endeavoured to bridge as lightly as possible in order to avoid the imputation of having myself taken an unfair share of the space at my disposal for the whole work. Such notes as these serve only to link one letter to the other and do not pretend to deal with all or any of the events which occurred in the intervals, and which will be found fully dealt with by such writers as Grimm, Symonds, Sir Charles Holroyd and Mr. Gerald S. Davies. Even with these omissions my task has been by no means an easy one, for Michelangelo made no pre tence at being a polished writer - I exclude, of course, his poems, to which I have made no reference in this volume - and frequently employed phrases and idioms which, to say the least, are unusual and often Open to more than one interpretation. The bewildering interchange of the tu and the voi made it imperative that the English equivalents of thou and ye should be adopted so as to preserve the sense of the original, with the result that the letters appear more stilted in diction than is really the case. In the spelling of proper names I have preferred to use the forms adopted by Michelangelo, giving the correct orthography within parentheses wherever it appeared to be required. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.