and the children are singing a new song, surely the Trionfo of Lorenzo,
it is the first time, perhaps, that we hear it--

Quant' e' bella giovinezza.

Ah, if they had but known how tragically that day would close.

As Cosimo lay dying at Careggi, often closing his eyes, "to use them to
it," as he told his wife, who wondered why he lay thus without sleeping,
it was perhaps some vision of that conflict which he saw and would fain
have dismissed from his mind, already divided a little in its
allegiance--who knows--between the love of Plato and the love of Jesus.
Piero, his son, gouty and altogether without energy, was content to
confirm his political position and to overwhelm the Pitti conspiracy. It
is only with the advent of Lorenzo and Giuliano, the first but
twenty-one when Piero died, that the spirit of the Renaissance, free for
the first time, seems to dance through every byway of the city, and,
confronted at last by the fanatic hatred of Savonarola, to laugh in his
face and to flee away through Italy into the world.

Born in 1448, Lorenzo always believed that he owed almost everything
that was valuable in his life to his mother Lucrezia, of the noble
Florentine house of Tornabuoni, which had abandoned its nobility in
order to qualify for public office. A poetess herself, and the patron of
poets, she remained the best counsellor her son ever had. In his early
youth she had watched over his religious education, and in his
grandfather's house he had met not only statesmen and bankers, but
artists and men of letters. His first tutor had been Gentile Becchi of
Urbino, afterwards Bishop of Arezzo; from him he learned Latin, but
Argyropolus and Ficino and Landino taught him Greek, and read Plato and
Aristotle with him. Nor was this all, for we read of his eagerness for
every sort of exercise. He could play calcio and pallone, and his own
poems witness his love of hunting and of country life, and he ran a
horse often enough in the palii of Siena. He was more than common tall,
with broad shoulders, and very active. In colour dark, though he was not
handsome, his face had a sort of dignity that compelled respect, but he
was shortsighted too, and his nose was rather broad and flat. If he
lacked the comeliness of outward form, he loved all beauteous things,
and was in many ways the most extraordinary man of his age; his verse,
for instance, has just that touch of genius which seems to be wanting in
the work of contempo