have already seen. His brother’s business misfortunes brought him into great difficulties. ‘Never yet have I made a plan,’ he wrote to Lorenzo after Luca’s failure, ‘that Fate did not destroy in an hour what I had taken a year to build up. I must have come into the world like hares and other poor animals, doomed to be the prey of the huntsman. It is my fate to love thee, and to be very little in thy company.’ That the Medicean bank helped him out, but that the loans were very unimportant and notorious besides, we learn from a petition dated from his estate at Mugello, May 14, 1479, to the effect that Lorenzo would grant him a longer delay for the repayment of a hundred gold florins. He was evidently included in the measures which were rendered necessary by the bad state of the Medicean finances at that time. Pulci, who among others was very intimate with the Sanseverini, seems to have been employed by Lorenzo especially at Naples, Bologna, and Milan, both before and after this period. The last of the poet’s letters known to us, written from Verona, August 28, 1484, shows him to us in the suite of Roberto da Sanseverino and his son Fracasso, who were on their way to Venice. He died in Padua shortly after, but nothing is known about his death.[27] Luigi Pulci was about seventeen years older than his princely friend Lorenzo de’ Medici, while the man who entered into the closest and most productive intellectual relations with Lorenzo was a few years his junior. In 1464 a boy of ten came to Florence to seek maintenance and instruction in the house of some not very wealthy relatives. He had been rendered fatherless by one of those tragedies which bring to light and stigmatise the wild passions and party hatred that in the Tuscan communes of the fifteenth century mocked at justice, and which, though so fearful in punishment, was so powerless for the protection of the citizens. Benedetto Ambrogini of Montepulciano, a jurist of a not undistinguished family, who had held civil and judicial offices at home and abroad, had in the previous year applied to Piero de’ Medici[28] for protection against the bloodthirsty enmity of fellow-citizens and neighbours, to which he soon after fell a victim, leaving unprovided a widow with five children, of whom the above-named boy was the eldest.[29] Angelo, who took from his birthplace the name of Poliziano, early became acquainted with the serious side of life; for although as a child he showed brilliant talents and made rapid progress, he was in danger of being compelled to seek a living as assistant in a shop, and of renouncing the studies to which he was ardently devoted. At fifteen he expressed this tormenting dread in a Latin poem addressed to the young but celebrated philologer, Bartolommeo Fonte, who at that time assisted him with guidance and encouragement.[30] In the year 1469-70 he studied at the Florentine university, and at seventeen he wrote Greek epigrams. He had the