It rarely happens that Augustus is also Virgil; enough if he is also Mæcenas. LORENZO DE’ MEDICI (1448-92) united all these characters. A prince by position if not by descent, he was not only a patron of literature, but a highly intelligent and discriminating patron; nor only a favourer, but himself the producer of some of the best literature of his day. In character, in circumstances, in the bent of his policy and the general result of his activity, he might not unfairly be termed a miniature Augustus; like him he confiscated the liberties of his country as the sole alternative to anarchy, and repaid her by prosperity and peace. All the great qualities of Augustus were his, and few of the defects which history chiefly censures in his prototype. Both were stronger in the self-regarding than in the self-forgetting virtues, but Lorenzo once rose to heroism. History records no action of Augustus comparable to Lorenzo’s placing himself 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.