She told me it was built by Michael Angelo.

I suggested that some credit might be given to Bramante, not to speak of Rosellino, Baldassare Peruzzi and the two San Gallo's.
"Oh!" said my young lady, with a superb air of omniscience.

"It was all Michael Angelo's design.

_The others only tinkered away at it afterwards_." After receiving this brickbat I took my leave.
To console myself I looked up, during the evening, Michael Angelo's noble letter about Bramante.
"One cannot deny," says he, "that Bramante was as excellent in architecture as any one has been from the ancients to now.

He placed the first stone of St.Peter's, not full of confusion, but clear, neat, and luminous, and isolated all round in such a way that it injured no part of the palace, and was held to be a beautiful thing, as is still apparent, in such a way that any one who has departed from the said order of Bramante, as San Gallo has done, has departed from the truth." Michael Angelo did not like San Gallo; neither did he like Bramante-who was his senior by thirty years-but this makes his appreciation of the elder's work all the more generous.
Tinkered away at it, indeed! May 21st.
I spent all the morning at work by the open window.
I have a small house in Lingfield Terrace, on the north side of the Regent's Park, so that my drawing-room, on the first floor, has a southern aspect.