Page:The Oxford book of Italian verse.djvu/15

INTRODUCTION his early experience when the Pazzi daggers were gleaming in Santa Maria del Fiore was enough to excuse him for employing any method to strengthen his own position and to keep his hot-headed subjects in a state of tranquillity; and at least he preserved the balance of power in Italy until his death. His enthusiasm for scholarship had been awakened by the men who were his masters in early youth—by Agiropoulos, Landino, and Ficino. All the wise of Italy were his friends—Politian, Pico della Mirandola, Pulci, Alberti, and young Michelangelo—and with them he held high discourse in the Platonic Academy which Gemisthus Plethon founded for Cosimo, or rode on hunting expeditions such as he describes in La Caccia col Falcone or wandered in the cool gardens of the Rucellai, enjoying that delightful existence of scholarly friendship and emulation in a perfect environment for which the modern student who perspires in a hotel on the Lung' Arno or nurses a headache amid the vapours of the British Museum must sigh in vain.

Lorenzo and Politian were not only enthusiastic Platonists; they wrote a large amount of poetry in Italian, imitating Petrarch, yet bringing a distinctly new note to their country's literature. When he was only eighteen years old, Lorenzo had compiled a Codex of the old Italian poetry for his friend Frederick of Aragon, and in his Comento to his own poetry he gives his reasons for writing love sonnets and urges the claims of the Italian language as a vehicle of expression. His admiration for Petrarch did not prevent him from realizing the charm and freshness in the songs of the countryside; his canzoni a ballo have all the gaiety of the popular poetry; even his 15