e routine of teaching until he had
completed his work. During the next decade he became the "professor," and
discharged the duties with a genius and an adaptability to circumstances
that won for him the admiration and love of all his students.

This decade was also remarkable for the commencement of the devotion to
the cultivation of literary style, a pursuit yet to reach its culmination
in Poliziano in Florence and in Bembo and Sadoleto in Rome. Originality
gradually gave place to conventionality, until men actually came to
prefer the absurdities of Ciceronianism, and a cold, colorless adherence
to hard-and-fast rules of composition, to a work throbbing with the
pulsation of virile life. Humanism was beginning to take flight from
Italy, to find a home and a welcome beyond the Alps.

The final decade of Lorenzo's life constituted the midsummer bloom of
the Tuscan renaissance, the meridian of the intellectual and artistic
supremacy of Florence. In Lorenzo it found its fullest expression. He was
typical of its spiritual as well as of its moral meaning; typical, too,
of that mental unrest which sought escape from the pressing problems of
an enigmatic present by reverting to the study of a classic past whose
ethical, social, and political difficulties were rarely of a complex
character, but concerned themselves principally with what may be termed
the elementary verities of man's relations to the Deity and to his
fellows.

Lorenzo's amazing versatility has been pronounced a fault by some who
believed they detected in him the potential capacity of rivalling
Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on their own ground, had he only
conserved his energies. This is a foolish supposition. Lorenzo's
many-sidedness was but the reflection in himself, as the most accurate
mirror of the time, of all that wondrous susceptibility to beauty, that
eager craving after the realization of the [greek: to kalon] ("the Good")
so characteristic of the best Hellenic genius, whether we study it in the
dramas of Sophocles or the _Republic_ of Plato or in the statesmanship of
Pericles. If Lorenzo had resembled his grandfather and concentrated his
energies upon finance and politics, there might have been a line of
reigning Medicean princes in Florence half a century earlier than
actually was the case, but Europe would have been distinctly the loser
by the absence of the greatest personal force making for culture which
characterized the Renaissance.

This last