mic, Virgilian, Horatian, or Petrarchesque
aestheticism of his contemporaries; he is essentially a realist, and all
the effects, which he produces, all the beauty, charm, or beastliness of
his work, corresponds to beauty, charm, or beastliness in the reality of
things. If Lorenzo writes at one moment carnival songs of ribald
dirtiness, at the next hymns full of holy solemnity; it is, I think,
merely because this versatile artist takes pleasure in trying whether
his face may not be painted into grinning drunkenness, and then
elongated and whitened into ascetic gentleness. Instead of seeking, like
most of his contemporaries, to be Greek, Roman, or mediaeval by turns, he
preferred trying on all the various tricks of thought and feeling which
he remarked among his unlettered townsfolk. His realism naturally drew
him towards the classes where realism can deal with the real; and not
the affected, the self-conscious, the deliberately attempted. Hence
those wonderful little poems, the carnival songs of the gold-thread
spinners, of the pastry-cooks, of the shoemakers, which give us so
completely, so gracefully, the whole appearance, work, manner, gesture
of the people; give them to us with ease and rapidity so perfect, that
we scarcely know how they are given; that we almost forget verses and
song, and actually see the pulling, twisting, and cutting of the
gold-threads; that we see and hear the shoemaker's hands smoothing down
the leather of the shoe in his hand, to convince his customers of its
pliability; that we see and smell the dear little pale yellow pasties
nestling in the neat white baskets, after having stood by and watched
the dough being kneaded, chopped, and floured over, the iron plates
heated in the oven, the soft, half-baked paste twisted and bent; nay, we
feel almost as if we had eaten of them, those excellent things which
seem such big mouthfuls but are squeezed and crunched at one go like
nothing at all. Hence, I mean from this love of watching effects and
reproducing them, originated also the masterpiece of Lorenzo dei Medici,
the "Nencia da Barberino."

This poem, of some fifty octaves, is the result of those Tuscan peasant
songs, of which I have told you the curious Courtly descent, at last
having struck the fancy of a real poet. It is, what Lorenzo's
masterpiece necessarily must be, in the highest degree a modern
performance; as modern as a picture by Bastien Lepage; as an opera,
founded upon local music, b