Many, too, of the narrative poems in hexameters are merely exercises, or adaptations of histories in prose, which latter the reader will prefer, where he can find them. At last, everything--every quarrel and every ceremony--came to be put into verse, and this even by the German humanists of the Reformation.[613] And yet it would be unfair to attribute this to mere want of occupation, or to an excessive facility in stringing verses together. In Italy, at all events, it was rather due to an abundant sense of style, as is further proved by the mass of contemporary reports, histories, and even pamphlets, in the ‘terza rima.’ Just as Niccolò da Uzzano published his scheme for a new constitution, Macchiavelli his view of the history of his own time, a third, the life of Savonarola, and a fourth, the siege of Piombino by Alfonso the Great,[614] in this difficult metre, in order to produce a stronger effect, so did many others feel the need of hexameters, in order to win their special public. What was then tolerated and demanded, in this shape, is best shown by the didactic poetry of the time. Its popularity in the fifteenth century is something astounding. The most distinguished humanists were ready to celebrate in Latin hexameters the most commonplace, ridiculous, or disgusting themes, such as the making of gold, the game of chess, the management of silkworms, astrology, and venereal diseases (_morbus gallicus_), to say nothing of many long Italian poems of the same kind. Nowadays this class of poems is condemned unread, and how far, as a matter of fact, they are really worth the reading, we are unable to say.[615] One thing is certain, that epochs far above our own in the sense of beauty--the Renaissance and the Greco-Roman world--could not dispense with this form of poetry. It may be urged in reply, that it is not the lack of a sense of beauty, but the greater seriousness and the altered method of scientific treatment which renders the poetical form inappropriate, on which point it is unnecessary to enter. One of these didactic works has of late years been occasionally republished[616]--the ‘Zodiac of Life,’ by Marcellus Palingenius (Pier Angello Manzolli), a secret adherent of Protestantism at Ferrara, written about 1528. With the loftiest speculations on God, virtue, and immortality, the writer connects the discussion of many questions of practical life, and is, on this account, an authority of some weight in the history of morals. On the whole, however, his work must be considered as lying outside the boundaries of the Renaissance, as is further indicated by the fact that, in harmony with the serious didactic purpose of the poem, allegory tends to supplant mythology. But it was in lyric, and more particularly in elegiac poetry, that the poet-scholar came nearest to antiquity; and next to this, in epigram.