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Updated: June 27, 2025
Politian wrote poems in Italian as well as Latin, from which we may infer that in Lorenzo's circle it was possible to give a realistic picture of the passionate life of the lower classes. His gipsy's love- song is one of the earliest products of that wholly modern tendency to put oneself with poetic consciousness into the position of another class.
Whether the Christian owners of that house did or did not know who we were, I am not certain. At any rate, through them we were introduced at night into the palace of Politian, the Melchite Patriarch of Alexandria. He was a stern-faced, black-bearded man of honest heart but narrow views, of whom the Bishop Barnabas had often spoken to me as his closest friend.
"Love God," Pico writes to Angelo Politian, "we rather may, than either know Him, or by speech utter Him. And yet had men liefer by knowledge never find that which they seek, than by love possess that thing, which also without love were in vain found."
Warren, a Birmingham bookseller of good repute, whom he helped by his knowledge of literature. While in Birmingham he did a translation of a Jesuit book about Abyssinia, for which Warren paid him five guineas. In 1734 he returned to Lichfield, tried without success to obtain subscribers for an edition of the poems of Politian, and offered to write in the Gentleman's Magazine.
I gave them, first, the opening speech of the Orfeo of Politian, where the sad shepherd accounts his plight, his pursuit of the nymph Euridice, her abhorrence of him, and the like. All eyes were fixed upon me; I saw those of La Panormita glisten. The smooth-flowing verses moved her. They were silent when I had done, which a little disconcerted me; but presently the dwarf snapped out, "More."
But just as the existence of these helps tempted many to undertake a task to which they had no vocation, so were the really capable men stimulated to a more faultless excellence, till at length the letters of Politian, and at the beginning of the sixteenth century those of Pietro Bembo, appeared, and took their place as unrivalled masterpieces, not only of Latin style in general, but also of the more special art of letter-writing.
The next was Politian, equally renowned for hard scholarship and for the sweetness and charm of his voluminous poems. The third was the Greek refugee, Theodore of Gaza, so warmly praised by Erasmus for his versatile talent; no man, it was said, was so skilled in the double task of turning Greek books into Latin, and rendering Latin into Greek.
Thus flourished poetry in the Tuscan quattrocento; for Politian was but little more poet than Lorenzo, while he was no less dextrous as a rhymer and fashioner of conceits. Not serious, but piacevole, with an elegantia quaedam prope divinum; therefore molto utile. Pen-work in fact, and kin to needlework.
In the seventeenth century Politian would be a "contagious Papist," using his charm to convert men to Romanism, and Selling would be a "true son of the Church of England," railing at Politian for his "debauch'd and Popish principles." The Renaissance had set men travelling to Italy as to the flower of the world. They had scarcely started before the Reformation called it a place of abomination.
Though the two cut-throats behaved with the outward courtesy of gentlemen, there was something terrifying in their looks which it would have been hard to define, and the highly refined Venetian noble, who admired the elegant works of Politian and composed scores of polished inanities, shuddered from time to time as he glanced at Gambardella's sinewy brown hand or Trombin's strong pink fingers and thought of the stains that must often have been on both.
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