ldren, and a whole host of poor
relatives, whom the wise father (as Pandolfini teaches) employs rather
than strangers for his clerks and overseers--if this town house was the
pride of the Italian burgess; the villa, with its farms and orchards,
was the real joy, the holiday paradise of the over-worked man. To read
in the cool house, with cicala's buzz and fountain plash all round, the
Greek and Latin authors; to discuss them with learned men; to watch the
games of the youths and the children, this was the reward for years of
labour and intelligence; but sweeter than all this (how we feel it in
Agnolo Pandolfini's speeches!) were those occupations which the city
could not give: the buying and selling of plants, grain, and kine, the
meddling with new grafted trees, the mending of spaliers, the
straightening of fences, the going round (with the self-importance and
impatience of a cockney) to see what flowers had opened, what fruit had
ripened over-night; to walk through the oliveyards, among the vines; to
pry into stable, pig-stye, and roosting-place, taking up handfuls of
drying grain, breaking twigs of olives, to see how things were doing;
and to have long conversations with the peasants, shrewd enough to
affect earnest attention when the master was pleased to vent his
town-acquired knowledge of agriculture and gardening. Sweet also,
doubtless, for younger folk, or such perhaps as were fonder of teaching
new lute tunes to the girls than of examining into cabbages, and who
read Dante and Boccaccio more frequently than Cicero or Sallust; though
sweet perhaps only as a vague concomitant of their lazy pleasures, to
listen to those songs of the peasantry rising from the fields below,
while lying perhaps on one's back in the shaded grass, watching the
pigeons whirring about the belvedere tower. Vaguely pleasant this also,
doubtless; but for a long while only vaguely. For, during more than two
centuries, the burgesses of Italy were held enthralled by the Courtly
poets of other countries; listening to, and reading, at first, only
Provencals and Sicilians, or Italians, like Sordello, pretending to be
of Provence or Sicily; and even later, enduring in their own poets,
their own Guittones, Cavalcantis, Cinos, Guinicellis, nay even in Dante
and Petrarch's lyrics, only the repetition (however vivified by genius)
of the old common-places of Courtly love, and artificial spring, of the
poetry of feudal nations. But the time came when not