charm. His friend Poliziano entered with the zest of a poet and a
pleasure-seeker into these diversions. He helped Lorenzo to revive the
Tuscan Mayday games, and wrote exquisite lyrics to be sung by girls in
summer evenings on the public squares. This giant of learning, who
filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with Students of all nations, and
whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history
of scholarship, was by nature a versifier, and a versifier of the
people. He found nothing' easier than to throw aside his professor's
mantle and to improvise _ballate_ for women to chant as they danced
their rounds upon the Piazza di S. Trinità. The frontispiece to an old
edition of such lyrics represents Lorenzo surrounded with masquers in
quaint dresses, leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo.
Another woodcut shows an angle of the Casa Medici in Via Larga, girls
dancing the _carola_ upon the street below, one with a wreath and
thyrsus kneeling, another presenting the Magnificent with a book of
loveditties. The burden of all this poetry was: "Gather ye roses while
ye may, cast prudence to the winds, obey your instincts." There is
little doubt that Michelangelo took part in these pastimes; for we
know that he was devoted to poetry, not always of the gravest kind. An
anecdote related by Cellini may here be introduced, since it
illustrates the Florentine customs I have been describing. "Luigi
Pulci was a young man who possessed extraordinary gifts for poetry,
together with sound Latin scholarship. He wrote well, was graceful in
manners, and of surpassing personal beauty. While he was yet a lad and
living in Florence, it was the habit of folk in certain places of the
city to meet together during the nights of summer on the open streets,
and he, ranking among the best of the improvisatori, sang there. His
recitations were so admirable that the divine Michelangelo, that
prince of sculptors and of painters, went, wherever he heard that he
would be, with the greatest eagerness and delight to listen to him.