servility of Florence, the corruption of a godless Church. Michael Angelo, seated between Ficino and Poliziano, with the voices of the prophets vibrating in his memory, and with the music of Plato sounding in his ears, rests chin on hand and elbow upon knee, like his own Jeremiah, lost in contemplation, whereof the after-fruit shall be the Sistine Chapel and the Medicean tombs. Then, when the strain of thought, 'unsphering Plato from his skies,' begins to weary, Pulci breaks the silence with a brand-new canto of Morgante, or a singing boy is bidden to tune his mandoline to Messer Angelo's last-made _ballata_. There is no difficulty in explaining Plato's power upon the thinkers of the fifteenth century. Among philosophers Plato shines like a morning star--[Greek: outh' hesperos oute eôos ontô thaumastos]--an auroral luminary, charming and compelling the attention of the world when man is on the verge of new discoveries. That he should have enslaved the finest intellects at a time when the sense of beauty was so keenly stimulated, and when the stirrings of fresh life were so intense, is nothing more than natural. To philosophise and humanise the religious sentiments that had become the property of monks and pardon-mongers; to establish a concordat between the Paganism that entranced the world, and the Catholic faith whereof the world was not yet weary; to satisfy the new-born sense of a divine and hitherto unapprehended mystery in heaven and earth; to dignify with a semblance of truth the dreams of magic and astrology that passed for science--all this the men of the Renaissance passionately craved. Who could render better help than Plato and the Neoplatonists, whose charm of style and high-flown mysticism suited the ambitious immaturity of undeveloped thought? For the interpretation of Platonic doctrine a hierophant was needed. Marsilio Ficino had been set apart from earliest youth for this purpose--selected in the wisdom of Cosimo de' Medici, prepared by special processes of study, and consecrated to the service of the one philosopher.[312] [Footnote 312: Marsilio Ficino, the son of Cosimo's physician, was born at Figline in 1433.]