Though the name of Cristoforo Landino is now best known in connection with his Dantesque studies, one of his Latin works, the 'Camaldolese Discussions,'[320] will always retain peculiar interest for the student of Florentine humanism. This treatise is composed in imitation of the Ciceronian rather than the Platonic dialogues; the 'Tusculans' may be said to have furnished Landino with his model. He begins by telling how he left his villa in the Casentino, accompanied by his brother, to pay a visit to the hill-set sanctuary of S. Romualdo.[321] There he met with Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, attended by noble youths of Florence--Piero and Donato Acciaiuoli, Alamanno Rinuccini, Marco Parenti, and Antonio Canigiani--all of whom had quitted Florence to enjoy the rest of summer coolness among the firs and chestnuts of the Apennines. The party thus formed was completed by the arrival of Leo Battista Alberti and Marsilio Ficino. The conversation maintained from day to day by these close friends and ardent scholars forms the substance of the dialogue. Seated on the turf beside a fountain, near the spot where Romualdo was bidden in his trance to exchange the black robes of the Benedictine Order for the snow-white livery of angels, they not unnaturally began to compare the active life that they had left at Florence with the contemplative life of philosophers and saints. Alberti led the conversation by a panegyric of the [Greek: bios theôrêtikos], maintaining the Platonic thesis with a wealth of illustration and a charm of eloquence peculiar to himself. Lorenzo took up the argument in favour of the [Greek: bios praktikos]. If Alberti proved that solitude and meditation are the nurses of great spirits, that man by communing with nature enters into full possession of his mental kingdom, Lorenzo pointed out that this completion of self-culture only finds its use and value in the commerce of the world. The philosopher must descend from his altitude and mix with men, in order to exercise the faculties matured by contemplation. Thus far the artist and the statesman are supposed to hold debate on Goethe's celebrated distich-- Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt. [Footnote 320: _Disputationum Camaldulensium_ lib. iv., dedicated to Frederick of Urbino.] [Footnote 321: The legend of the foundation of this Order is well known through Sacchi's picture in the Vatican.]