_Dum_ ver tristis hyems, autumnum proferet æstas, _Dum_que fluet spirans refluetque reciproca Tethys, _Dum_ mixta alternas capient elementa figuras, _Semper_ erit magni decus immortale Maronis, _Semper_ inexhaustis ibunt hæc flumina venis, _Semper_ ab his docti ducentur fontibus haustus, _Semper_ odoratos fundent hæc gramina flores. —_Manto_, 335-337, 342-348, p. 303, _ed. cit. inf._ ----- But Politian would have been faithful neither to those individual qualities which have been noted in him, nor to that sworn service of Greek which was the chivalry of the true Humanist, if he had thought of depreciating Homer. [Sidenote: _The_ Ambra _and_ Rusticus.] The “Ambra,” a poem longer than the “Manto,” and not much less enthusiastic, is mainly devoted to a fanciful description of the youth of the poet, and a verse-summary of the poems. Indeed the peroration (till it is turned into a panegyric of Ambra, a favourite villa of Lorenzo) is a brilliant, forcible, and _true_ indication of the enormous debt of all ancient literature, science, and in fact life, to Homer, of the universality of his influence, and of the consensus of testimony in his favour. The “Rusticus” is rather an independent description and panegyric of country life, as a preface to the reading of Virgil, Hesiod, and other bucolic and georgic writers, than a criticism or comparison of them. [Sidenote: _The_ Nutricia.] But the “Nutricia” is again ours in the fullest sense. Its avowed argument is _De poetica et poetis_, and, in handling this vast and congenial theme, Politian gives the fullest possible scope at once to his genius, to his learning, and to that intense love for literature without which learning is but as the Carlylian “marine-stores.” In nearly eight hundred exultant hexameters,[29] the vigour and fulness of which enable them to carry off without difficulty the frippery of their occasional trappings, he traces the origin of poetry, the transition from mere stupid wonder and the miseries of barbarism to sacred and profane verse, the elaboration of its laws in Judea by David and Solomon, in Greece by Orpheus, the succession of the Greek and Latin poets in the various forms (it is noteworthy that Politian is not at all copious on the drama) through the exploits of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio to the patronage of poetry by Lorenzo himself. ----- Footnote 29: If anybody charges me with plagiarism from Mr Symonds’ “leaping,” I had rather plead guilty than quibble. The metaphor is too obviously the right and only one, for the peculiar motion of Politian’s verse, to any one who has an ear. I keep, however, the order of the edition I use (that of Signor Isidoro del Lugo, Florence, 1867), not the perhaps more logical one of _Nutricia—Rusticus—Manto—Ambra_, which Mr Symonds followed and which is that of Pope, _op. cit. inf._ -----