Poliziano is at once the truest classical scholar, and, with the possible exception of Boiardo (who belongs to Ferrara, and does not come within the scope of the present volume), the greatest Italian poet of the fifteenth century. He is, indeed, the last and most perfect fruit of Florentine Humanism. His father, Benedetto Ambrogini, had been murdered in Montepulciano by the faction hostile to the Medici; and the boy Angelo, coming to Florence, and studying under Ficino and his colleagues, was received into Lorenzo's household as tutor to the younger Piero. His lectures at the Studio attracted students from all Europe, and his labours in the field of textual criticism won a fame that has lasted to the present day. In Italian he wrote the _Orfeo_ in two days for performance at Mantua, when he was eighteen, a lyrical tragedy which stamps him as the father of Italian dramatic opera; the scene of the descent of Orpheus into Hades contains lyrical passages of great melodiousness. Shortly before the Pazzi conspiracy, he composed his famous _Stanze_ in celebration of a tournament given by Giuliano dei Medici, and in honour of the _bella Simonetta_. There is absolutely no "fundamental brain work" about these exquisitely finished stanzas; but they are full of dainty mythological pictures quite in the Botticellian style, overladen, perhaps, with adulation of the reigning house and its _ben nato Lauro_. In his lyrics he gave artistic form to the _rispetti_ and _strambotti_ of the people, and wrote exceedingly musical _ballate_, or _canzoni a ballo_, which are the best of their kind in the whole range of Italian poetry. There is, however, little genuine passion in his love poems for his lady, Madonna Ippolita Leoncina of Prato; though in all that he wrote there is, as Villari puts it, "a fineness of taste that was almost Greek." Lorenzo dei Medici stands second to his friend as a poet; but he is a good second. His early affection for the fair Lucrezia Donati, with its inevitable sonnets and a commentary somewhat in the manner of Dante's _Vita Nuova_, is more fanciful than earnest, although Poliziano assures us of "La lunga fedeltà del franco Lauro." But Lorenzo's intense love of external nature, his power of close observation and graphic description, are more clearly shown in such poems as the _Caccia col Falcone_ and the _Ambra_, written among the woods and hills in the country round his new villa of Poggio a Caiano. Elsewhere he gives free scope to the animal side of his sensual nature, and in his famous _Canti carnascialeschi_, songs to be sung at carnival and in masquerades, he at times revelled in pruriency, less for its own sake than for the deliberate corruption of the Florentines. And, for a time, their music drowned the impassioned voice of Savonarola, whose stern cry of warning and exhortation to repentance had for the nonce passed unheeded.