He burned his Latin poems, which he had collected in five books and given to Poliziano for correction. The latter had altered a few things, as he said, after the example of him who found fault with the sandals of the goddess of beauty because he could find none with herself; and because a few verses seemed to him to be only of the rank of a knight, while the rest were patrician and senatorial. Poliziano lamented his friend’s resolve in a letter accompanied by a Greek epigram. He could not remember, he said, ever to have read anything more charming, elegant and polished. ‘Ye silly gods of love,’ thus ends the epigram, ‘why did ye fly to Pico, who is the leader of the Muses?’ Poliziano approved of his friend’s poetical attempts, and admired his commentary on Benivieni’s _canzone_ on Platonic love, which the school of Florentine literature reckons among its most important works, more than his deeper studies, when in the rustic solitude of Querceto he wrote an extensive treatise against astrology, destined to form part of a great polemical work on sects hostile to Christianity.[84] Poliziano thought it was lost time: ‘Pico, what hast thou to do with this? Thou’rt wasting thy powers: Truly thy style is too good for this generation of jugglers.’ Savonarola, on the contrary, who was a friend of the author in his later years, and read the unfinished work, expressed mingled pleasure and regret over it; pleasure in the stand made by the work against widespread errors, regret at the premature death of the gifted author. We must not judge Pico della Mirandola by what he has left behind. He paid a heavier tribute to the weaknesses of the time than many others who were not equal to him in intellectual capacity. His whole personality must be considered; it is a typical one. This scion of a princely house, who quitted the world at two-and-thirty, who had measured the heights and depths of the learning of his time, who, with all his abstruse scholarship, preserved a simplicity and amiability of character that drew all hearts to him, is by far the most brilliant figure in that brilliant circle. After four centuries Pico della Mirandola remains the highest representative of early maturity of intellect. But he is something more; in conjunction with the man whose friendship was so warmly expressed, he did more than any other to give a value and importance to a period which, with all its defects, was beneficent and noble.