o d'Anguillari; accordingly, in the end,
the whole burden of the struggle fell on Florence. The Magnifico's
position gradually became precarious, inasmuch as many persons declared
the war to be in reality a personal quarrel between Pope Sixtus and
the Medici. Complaints began to be heard that the public treasury was
exhausted and the commerce of the city ruined, while the citizens were
burdened with oppressive taxes. Lorenzo had the mortification of being
told that sufficient blood had been shed, and that it would be expedient
for him rather to devise some means of effecting a peace than of making
further preparations for the war.

In these circumstances, and confronted by one of the most dangerous
crises of his whole life, Lorenzo rose to the occasion and effected a
solution of the difficulty by daring to perform what was undoubtedly one
of the bravest acts ever achieved by a diplomatist. By some statesmen
it might be condemned as foolhardy, by others as quixotic. Its very
foolhardiness and quixotry fascinated the man it was intended to
influence, the blood-thirsty, cruel, and pitiless Ferrante of Naples, who
was restrained from crime by the fear neither of God nor man, and who
had actually slain the condottiere Piccinino when he visited him under a
safe-conduct from the monarch's best ally. But the Renaissance annals are
filled with the records of men and women whose natures are marvellous
studies of contrasted and contradictory traits. Such was the Neapolitan
tyrant. While a monster in much, he had his vulnerable points. He was
ambitious to pose as a friend of the "New Learning," and he knew that
Lorenzo was not only the most munificent patron, but also one of the most
illustrious exponents, of the Renaissance principles.

Although his enemy, Ferrante received Lorenzo with every demonstration of
respect and satisfaction. He lost sight of the hostile diplomatist in
the great humanist. Two Neapolitan galleys were sent to conduct him
to Naples, and he was welcomed on landing with much pomp. Never did
Lorenzo's supreme diplomatic genius, never did his versatile powers as a
statesman, as a scholar, as a patron of letters, and as a brilliant man
of the world, blaze forth in more splendid effulgence than during his
three-months' stay in Naples. Though opposed by all the papal authority
and resources; though Sixtus by turns threatened, cajoled, entreated,
promised, in order to prevent Lorenzo having any success, the successo