Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/361

Rh P L P L 345 1726 lie received the archbishopric of Auch, and he died at Paris in 1742. He left unfinished a metrical refutation of Lucretius which was published after his death by the Abbe de Rothelin (Anti-Lucretius, 1745), and had consider able vogue in its day. Count JULES DE POLIGNAC (ob. 1817), grand-nephew of the preceding, was created duke by Louis XVI. in 1780, and in 1782 was made postmaster- general. His position and influence at court were largely due to his wife, the bosom friend of Marie Antoinette ; the duke and duchess alike shared the unpopularity of the court, and were among the first who were compelled to &quot; emigrate &quot;in 1789. The duchess died shortly after the queen, but her husband, who had received an estate from Catherine II. in the Ukraine, survived till 1817. Of their three sons the second, Prince JULES DE POLIGNAC (1780- 1847), held various offices after the restoration of the Bourbons, received from the pope his title of &quot; prince &quot; in 1820, and in 1823 was made ambassador to the court of St James s. In August 8, 1829, he was called by Charles X. to the ministry of foreign affairs, and in the following November he became president of the council. On the revolution of July 1830 he fled for his life, hut after wandering for some time among the wilds of Normandy was arrested at Granville. His trial before the chamber of peers resulted in his condemnation to perpetual imprisonment (at Ham), but he benefited by the amnesty of 1836, when the sentence was com muted to one of exile. During his captivity he wrote Considerations politiques (1832). He afterwards spent some years in England, but finally was permitted to re- enter France on condition that he did not take up his abode in Paris. He died at St Germain on March 29, 1847. POLILLO. See PHILIPPINE ISLANDS. POLITIAN (1454-1494). Angelo Ambrogini, known in literary annals as ANGELO POLIZIANO or POLITIANUS from his birth-place, was born at Montepulciano in Tuscany in the year 1454. His father, Benedetto, a jurist of good family and distinguished ability, was murdered by political antagonists for adopting the cause of Piero de Medici in Montepulciano ; and this circumstance gave his eldest son, Angelo, a claim on the family of Medici. At the age of ten the boy came to prosecute his studies at Florence, where he learned Latin under Cristoforo Landino, and Greek under Argyropulos and Andronicos Kallistos. From Marsilio Ficino he imbibed the rudiments of philo sophy. The precocity of his genius for scholarship and poetry was early manifested. At thirteen years of age he began to circulate Latin letters ; at seventeen he sent forth essays in Greek versification ; at eighteen he published an edition of Catullus. In 1470 he won for himself the title of Homericus juvenis by translating four books of the Iliad into Latin hexameters. Lorenzo de Medici, who was then the autocrat of Florence and the chief patron of learning in Italy, took Poliziano into his household, made him the tutor of his children, and secured him a distin guished post in the university of Florence. Before he reached the age of thirty, Poliziano expounded the humani ties with almost unexampled lustre even for that epoch of brilliant professors. Among his pupils could be numbered the chief students of Europe, the men who were destined to carry to their homes the spolia opima of Italian culture. Not to mention Italians, it will suffice to record the names of the German Picuchlin, the English Grocyn and Linacre, and the Portuguese Tessiras. Poliziano had few advantages of person to recommend him. He was ungainly in form, with eyes that squinted, and a nose of disproportionate length. Yet his voice was rich and capable of fine modu lation ; his eloquence, ease of utterance, and copious stream of erudition were incomparable. It was the method of professors at that period to read the Greek and Latin authors with their class, dictating philological and critical notes, emending corrupt passages in the received texts, offer ing elucidations of the matter, and pouring forth stores of acquired knowledge regarding the laws, manners, reli gious and philosophical opinions of the ancients. Poliziano covered nearly the whole ground of classical literature during the years of his professorship, and published the notes of his courses upon Ovid, Suetonius, Statius, the younger Pliny, Quintilian, and the writers of Augustan histories. He also undertook a recension of the text of the Pandects of Justinian, which formed the subject of one of his courses ; and this recension, though it does not rank high in the scale of juristic erudition, gave an impulse to the scholarly criti cism of the Iloman code. At the same time he was busy as a translator from the Greek. His versions of Epictetus, Herodian, Hippocrates, Galen, Plutarch s Eroticus, and Plato s Charmides delighted contemporaries by a certain limpid fluency of Latin style and grace of manner which dis tinguished him also as an original writer. Of these learned labours the most universally acceptable to the public of that time were a series of discursive essays on philology and criti cism, first published in 1489 under the title of Miscellanea. They had an immediate, a lasting, and a wide renown, encouraging the scholars of the next century and a half to throw their occasional discoveries in the field of scholarship into a form at once so attractive and so instructive. Poli ziano was not, however, contented with these simply pro fessorial and scholastic compositions. Nature had endowed him with literary and poetic gifts of the highest order. These he devoted to the composition of Latin and Greek verses, which count among the best of those produced by men of modern times in rivalry with ancient authors. The Manto, in which he pronounced a panegyric of Virgil ; the Ambra, which contains a beautiful idyllic sketch of Tuscan landscape, and a studied eulogy of Homer ; the Rusticus, which celebrated the pleasures of country life in no frigid or scholastic spirit ; and the Nutricia, which was intended to serve as a general introduction to the study of ancient and modern poetry, these are the masterpieces of Poliziano in Latin verse, displaying an authenticity of inspiration, a sincerity of feeling, and a command of metrical resources which mark them out as original productions of poetic genius rather than as merely professorial lucubrations. Exception may be taken to their style, when compared with the best work of the Augustan or even of the Silver age. But what renders them always noteworthy to the student of modern humanistic literature is that they are in no sense imitative or conventional, but that they convey the genuine thoughts and emotions of a born poet in Latin diction and in metre moulded to suit the character istics of the singer s temperament. Poliziano was great as a scholar, as a professor, as a critic, and as a Latin poet at an age when the classics were still studied with the passion of assimilative curiosity, and not with the scientific industry of a later period. He was the representative hero of that age of scholarship in which students drew their ideal of life from antiquity and fondly dreamed that they might so restore the past as to compete with the classics in production and bequeath a golden age of resuscitated paganism to the modern world. Yet he was even greater as an Italian poet. Between Boccaccio and Ariosto, no single poet in the mother tongue of Italy deserves so high a place as Poliziano. What he might have achieved in this department of literature had he lived at a period less preoccupied with humanistic studies, and had he found a congenial sphere for his activity, can only be guessed. As it is, we must reckon him as decidedly the foremost and indubitably the most highly gifted among the Italian poets who obeyed Lorenzo XIX. - 44