ourse of hostilities
undoubtedly promoted the increase of mutual interest in each other's
intellectual development, the fact that the Magnifico had to disburse
enormous sums for the prosecution of the campaigns necessarily limited
his ability to extend the same princely patronage to the cause of
learning. But with the conclusion of peace he resumed the original scale
of his benefactions, and the last four years of his life were, perhaps,
the most fruitful of all in sterling good achieved in the fostering of
the Renaissance.

He encouraged the printers to double their output; he munificently
assisted such undertakings as the first edition of Homer, edited by the
famous scholars Demetrius Chalcondyles and Demetrius Cretensis, as well
as other editions of the classics prepared by Poliziano, Marullus, and
others. In the final estimate of his influence upon his age we hope to
show that his aim was as pure as the prosecution of its realization was
determined. He encouraged foreigners to come to Florence to study
Greek, and, when their funds failed them, in many cases he generously
entertained them at his own expense. Grocyn and Linacre, as well as
Reuchlin, testify to the wise generosity of the great Magnifico, and all
three declare that to him, more than to any other man, the Renaissance
owed not only its development, but even the character it assumed in Italy
in the second last decade of the fifteenth century.

The end came when he was literally in his prime. Only forty-two years of
age, he might reasonably have looked forward to many years of active work
and the enjoyment of his honors! But Lorenzo, although not a vicious, was
a pleasure-loving man, and he had drained the cup of enjoyment to the
very lees. His constitution was undermined by worry and late vigils, by
the very intensity of interest wherewith he had devoted himself to the
pleasures of the moment. Accordingly, late in 1491 he began to feel the
gout, from which he had suffered for some years, becoming so troublesome
that he was unable for the duties devolving on him. He had lost his
wife, Clarice Orsini, in July, 1487, at a time when he was absent at the
sulphur baths of Filetta, striving to obtain relief from pain; therefore
his last years were lonely indeed.

Life had lost its relish to the dying Magnifico. The only thing over
which he showed a flash of the old interest was in March, 1492, when his
son Giovanni (afterward Leo X), on being made a cardinal by