The Florentine, becoming warm and finding himself supported, said to them: "Gentlemen, nothing is more easy than to do violence to nature; nothing more difficult than to imitate her. I know something of those whom we in Italy call _improvisatori_; and I could speak in this oriental style for eight hours together without the least effort, for it requires none to be bombastic in negligent verse, overloaded with epithets almost continually repeated, to heap combat upon combat, and to describe chimeras." "What!" said the professor, "_you_ make an epic poem _impromptu_!" "Not a rational epic poem in correct verse, like Virgil," replied the Italian, "but a poem in which I would abandon myself to the current of my ideas, and not take the trouble to arrange them." "I defy you to do it," said the Scotchman and the Oxford graduate at once. "Well," returned the Florentine, "give me a subject." Lord Chesterfield gave him as a subject the Black Prince, the conqueror of Poictiers, granting peace after the victory. The Italian collected himself and thus began: "Muse of Albion, genius that presidest over heroes, come sing with me--not the idle rage of men implacable alike to friends and foes--not the deeds of heroes whom the gods have favored in turn, without any reason for so favoring them--not the siege of a town which is not taken--not the extravagant exploits of the fabulous Fingal, but the real victories of a hero modest as brave, who led kings captive and respected his vanquished enemies. "George, the Mars of England, had descended from on high on that immortal charger before which the proudest coursers of Limousin flee as the bleating sheep and the tender lambs crowd into the fold at the sight of a terrible wolf issuing from the forest with fiery eyes, with hair erect and foaming mouth, threatening the flock and the shepherd with the fury of his murderous jaws. "Martin, the famed protector of them who dwell in fruitful Touraine, Genevieve, the mild divinity of them who drink the waters of the Seine and the Marne, Denis, who bore his head under his arm in the sight of man and of immortals, trembled as they saw George proudly traversing the vast fields of air. On his head was a golden helmet, glittering with diamonds that once paved the squares of the heavenly Jerusalem, when it appeared to mortals during forty diurnal revolutions of the great luminary and his inconstant sister, who with her mild radiance enlightens the darkness of night.