The three idyls which we possess of Lorenzo de’ Medici are so many witnesses to the many-sidedness of his genius. The first, ‘Corinto’ (the name of the shepherd who sings his love), resembles the eclogues of the ancients, which were soon to become the models of so many writers, and especially of Sannazaro. Following the precedent of Boccaccio, it is in terza rima, a metre better suited to a series of narratives and descriptions than to a subject in which the lyrical element preponderates. ‘Nencia da Barberino’ is pure nature—in some parts severe nature, with a rich vein of quaint humour and a charming local colour. It is an idyl in eight-lined stanzas, redolent of Tuscan soil, describing the Tuscan people, their manners and modes of speech, with a succession of apostrophes, eulogies, and comparisons, including some that are strange enough. Such are the so-called _rispetti_,—those songs of the people, especially country people, which sometimes in their fantastic flights soar up to the sun and stars, and sometimes borrow their similes from the humblest things. Lorenzo has, in fact, here put together a whole poem of _rispetti_, in which the serious and the comic alternate, and through the mouth of a lover has applied to one rustic beauty what would have sufficed for a whole bevy of maidens. These _rispetti_ are evidently learned from the people, who to this day produce thousands of these half-lyric, half-epigrammatic songs, particularly in the hill-country of Pistoja, for, as an old proverb says, ‘the mountaineers have thick shoes and fine brains.’[4] They are to be heard also in other parts of the Florentine and Sienese dominions, as far as the Maremma, from whence they extend into the Roman Campagna. Some of the rustic verses are peculiar to the poet, who exercises himself freely in a style that permits great variety, and who rivals the people among whom he mingles in fantastic flights and quaint similes, producing a somewhat motley but richly coloured and life-like picture. Luigi Pulci has furnished a companion piece to ‘Nencia.’ Poliziano, without confining himself to a special subject, has also tried his hand at these little songs, which seem to flow spontaneously from Tuscan pens, and form a branch of literature highly important in its relation to the character of the people.