“Lorenzo,” writes John Addington Symonds, “was a man of marvellous variety and range of mental power. He possessed one of those rare natures, fitted to comprehend all knowledge and to sympathise with the most diverse forms of life. While he never for one moment relaxed his grasp on politics, among philosophers he passed for a sage; among men of letters for an original and graceful poet; among scholars for a Grecian, sensitive to every nicety of Attic idiom; among artists for an amateur gifted with refined discernment and consummate taste. Pleasure-seekers knew in him the libertine, who jousted with the boldest, danced and masqueraded with the merriest, sought adventures in the streets at night, and joined the people in their May-day games and Carnival festivities. The pious extolled him as an author of devotional lauds and mystery plays, a profound theologian, a critic of sermons. He was no less famous for his jokes and repartees than for his pithy apothegms and maxims; as good a judge of cattle as of statues; as much at home in the bosom of his family as in the riot of an orgy; as ready to discourse on Plato as to plan a campaign or to plot the death of a dangerous citizen.”[24] “What other men call study and hard toil, for thee shall be pastime;” sings Poliziano, “wearied with deeds of state, to this thou hast recourse, and dost address the vigour of thy well-worn powers to song; blest in thy mental gifts, blest to be able thus to play so many parts, to vary thus the great cares of thy all-embracing mind, and weave so many divers duties into one.”[25] Angelo Poliziano, “honour and glory of Montepulciano” as Pulci calls him, who thus sounds the praises of Lorenzo, was born in 1454. His name, famous in Italian literature, is a latinised version of his birthplace, Montepulciano. As a boy of ten he entered the University of Florence, and studied under Landino, Argyropoulos, Andronicus Kallistos and Ficino. At thirteen he published Latin letters, at seventeen Greek poems, and edited Catullus when he was eighteen. Lorenzo de’ Medici received the young student into his own household, and made him tutor to his children. Ugly and misshapen, he squinted and had an enormous nose, but his voice was wonderfully sweet and melodious, and his eloquence great. Men of learning visited Florence on purpose to see him, and he complains (in a letter to Hieronymus Donatus, May 1480), “does a man want a motto for a ring, an inscription for his bedroom or a device for his plate, or even for his pots and pans, he runs like all the world to Poliziano.” Another famous frequenter of Careggi, Pico della Mirandola, is thus described by Poliziano:—