prowess and of unquestionable barbarity. In like manner, when his son Leo was raised to the cardinalate, he disapproved of the eulogium which Poliziano addressed to the Pope. When Poliziano described the most important and dramatic event of his patron’s life, the conspiracy of the Pazzi, it was in prose. The man who had received the young poet into his house and enabled him to give all his time to study was doubtless also the cause of his sending a specimen of his work to Cardinal Ammanati, who kept up such intimate relations with the Medici. Poliziano’s address to this Prince of the Church[33] was modest. He wrote that he was doing like the eagle, which carries its young as soon as they are out of the shell into the light of the rising sun, that their eyes may become accustomed to its splendour. The cardinal, in whom survived the humanistic tradition of the days of Pius II., returns him phrase for phrase without offending against truth. The verses were wonderfully harmonious for so young a writer; the enterprise was useful as an introduction to great things. But if Homer could be asked whether he wished to be turned into Latin, he feared that the old poet, feeling the impossibility of a perfect rendering, would prefer to remain a citizen of Kolophon rather than become a Florentine, and would consider the pallium a more suitable vesture than the toga. In 1473, our poet had addressed some verses full of sonorous but very ordinary flattery to the spendthrift Cardinal of San Sisto, Pietro Riario, on the occasion of his appointment to the archbishopric of Florence. Instead of the expected present, he was put off with fine speeches, and, after the fashion of poor poets, complained bitterly.[34] About this time, also, he was rewarded with nothing but words by another cardinal, a very different man from Riario. He must have said to himself that the days of Nicholas V. were over, although Sixtus IV. hardly yielded to him in his zeal for collecting books. He never seems to have become acquainted with the Pope, and the disagreement which gradually arose between the latter and Poliziano’s protector deprived him of all opportunity of doing so. Four books of the translation of Homer are in existence;[35] whether the work proceeded further is uncertain. It was twice interrupted, and the second interruption decided its fate. Poliziano may, in the progress of his studies, have come round to the views of the Cardinal of Pavia, and have doubted whether a Latinity which strove after the elegance of the Augustan age was suited to the old Greek epic.