[Footnote 325: Julius Cæsar Scaliger wrote thus about them in the _Hypercriticus_:--'Græcis vero, quæ puerum se conscripsisse dicit, ætatem minus prudenter apposuit suam; tam enim bona sunt ut ne virum quidem Latina æque bene scripsisse putem.'] [Footnote 326: _Quinque Illustrium Poetarum Carmina_, pp. 299, 301. These epigrams, as well as two on pp. 303, 307, are significant in their illustration of the poet's morality. Giovio's account of Poliziano's death was certainly accepted by contemporaries:--'_Ferunt eum ingenui adolescentis insano amore percitum facile in letalem morbum incidisse._' The whole _Elogium_, however, is a covert libel, like many of Giovio's sketches.] What has been said about his verse, applies with no less force to his prose composition. Poliziano wrote Latin, as though it were a living language, not culling phrases from Cicero or reproducing the periods of Livy, but trusting to his instinct and his ear, with the facility of conscious power. The humanism of the first and second periods attained to the freedom of fine art in Poliziano. Through him, as through a lens, the rays of previous culture were transmitted in a column of pure light. He realised what the Italians had been striving after--the new birth of antiquity in a living man of the modern world. By way of modifying this high panegyric, it may be conceded that Poliziano had the defects of his qualities. Using Latin with the freedom of a master, he was not careful to purge his style of obsolete words and far-fetched phrases, or to maintain the diction of one period in each composition. His fluency betrayed him into verbiage, and his descriptions are often more diffuse than vigorous. Nor will he bear comparison with some more modern scholars on the point of accuracy. The merit, however, remains to him of having been the most copious and least slavish interpreter of the ancient to the modern world. His very imperfections, when judged by the standard of Bembo, place him above the purists, inasmuch as he possessed the power and courage to express himself in his own idiom, instead of treading cautiously in none but Ciceronian or Virgilian footprints.