It was fortunate for the Italian language that the young Lorenzo fell under the influence of Leon Battista Alberti, who asserted that “though the ancient tongue has undisputed authority because so many learned men have employed it, the like honour will certainly be paid to our language to-day if men of culture take the pains to purify and polish it.” The revival of classical learning had almost arrested the study of Italian. In spite of the example of Dante and Boccaccio, Latin was the patrician and literary language, and even when men of letters used the vulgar tongue they interlarded it with Latin. Poliziano’s letters are a case in point. The example of Lorenzo altered all this. In his letter to Federigo of Naples (p. 88) he passes extraordinarily acute criticism on the old Italian poets, and in his Commentary, which takes up ninety-three double pages in the Aldine edition of his poems, he predicts a glorious future to the language used by Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. “Men and practice,” he says, “have rather been wanting to the language than the language to the men.” Muratori, treating of the poetry of the fifteenth century, gives the palm to Lorenzo, and Carducci declares him to be little if at all inferior to Poliziano and Pulci. Incessantly occupied in preserving the balance of power in Italy, yet in his short life of forty-two years he wrote an amount of poetry, and good poetry, which would do credit to a man whose whole life is dedicated to literature. Treated as an equal by popes and princes--the King of France doffed his cap to his ambassadors and called him “my beloved cousin”--he was at home with the artisan and the peasant, whose tastes he to a certain degree shared, and whose characters he so perfectly understood and describes. In _La Nencia da Barberino_, that gayest of gay poems overflowing with _la joie de vivre_, often imitated but never surpassed, Vallera, the shy love-sick peasant, sings the praises of his Nencia, who, with her pretty ways and soft words, her eyes as black as coal, and her fair curly hair, would bear away the palm among a thousand city maidens. Such a dancer too. She bounds like a young goat, whirls like the wheel of a mill and then curtsies, no Florentine lady can do it better. He offers to buy her a paper cornet full of rouge or powder, or pins, or a necklace of those little red buttons [coral] when he goes to Florence, for he would draw the marrow from his bones to give her pleasure. Could he put his heart into her hands it would cry “_Nencia, Nencia bella_,” if she cut it with a knife. But Nencia flirts with other swains, his sighs are full of tears, he waits for her to come with her sheep when he drives his heifers to pasture, and the cruel girl turns back.[153]