adventures, of
enchantments and love-makings; but they wanted also to laugh; and,
sceptical, practical, democratic, the artizans and shopkeepers of
Florence--to whom, paying, as they did, expensive mercenaries who stole
poultry and never got wounded on any account, all chivalry or real
military honour was the veriest nursery rubbish--such people as crowded
round the _cantastoria_ of _mercato vecchio_, must indeed have found
much to amuse them in these tales of so different an age.

And into such crowds there penetrated to listen and watch (even as the
Magnificent Lorenzo had elbowed among the carnival ragamuffins of
Florence, and had slid in among the holiday-making peasants of Poggio a
Caiano) a learned man, a poet, an intimate of the Medicis, of Politian,
Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola, Messer Luigi Pulci, the same who had
written the semi-allegorical, semi-realistic poem about Lorenzo dei
Medici's gala tournament. There was a taste in the house of the Medici,
together with those for platonic philosophy, classical erudition,
religious hymns, and Hebrew kabbala, for a certain kind of realism, for
the language and mode of thinking of the lower classes, as a reaction
from Petrarchesque conventionality. As the Magnificent Lorenzo had had
the fancy to string together in more artistic shape the quaint and
graceful love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, of
the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci appears to have been
smitten with the notion of trying his hand at a chivalric poem like
those to which he and his friends had listened among the butchers and
pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market, and giving
an impression, in its ideas and language, of the people to whom such
strains were sung. But Luigi Pulci was vastly less gifted as a poet than
Lorenzo dei Medici; Florentine prentices are less aesthetically pleasing
than Tuscan peasants, and the "Morgante Maggiore" is a piece of work of
a sort utterly inferior to the "Nencia da Barberino." Still the
"Morgante Maggiore" remains, and will remain, as a very remarkable
production of grotesque art. Just as Lorenzo dei Medici was certainly
not without a deliberate purpose of selecting the quaintness and
gracefulness of peasant life; even so, and perhaps more, Luigi Pulci
must have had a deliberate intention of producing a ludicrous effect; in
both cases the deliberate attempt is very little perceptible, in the
"Nencia da Barberino" f