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114 in the power of the treacherous and unscrupulous King of Naples for the sake of his country. Nor had Lorenzo, like Augustus, ever occasion to pass the sponge over an abortive tragedy. His compositions are of different degrees of merit, but all are fluent and graceful.

We have entered a different period from that of the Uberti and Frezzi; the tree of poetry, so long stiff and dry, now swells with sap, and buds with the prophecy of a coming summer. Two distinct impulses are observable in Lorenzo and his literary mate, Politian: in one point of view the artistic, in the other the poetical spirit predominates. As artists, they strove successfully to attain perfect elegance of expression, and to improve the metrical forms which had descended from the fourteenth century. As poets, they seized upon the songs and catches current in the mouths of the people, and elevated them by judicious treatment into the region of art. This could be possible only to men of great poetic sensitiveness. Had Lorenzo and Politian been less refined by culture, had the one been no scholar and the other no prince, either might have been an Italian Burns; as it is, their work as lyric poets is more nearly comparable to Goethe's. They made the popular Muse acceptable to men of breeding, while gratifying their own tastes by work marked with the stamp of study and erudition, and yet not beyond the intelligence of the average educated man.

Lorenzo's part as the patron of art and letters is so considerable, that his writings, important as they are, appear almost insignificant in comparison. The most elaborate of his poems might be classed as idylls. They comprise the Ambra, a graceful and fanciful Ovidian allegory on the metamorphosis of the nymph Ambra into