style. The sonnets
of both are remarkable for what in the critical jargon of to-day
might be termed realism. Cecco is even savage and brutal. He
anticipates Villon from afar, and is happily described by Mr.
Rossetti as the prodigal, or 'scamp' of the Dantesque circle. The
case is different with Folgore. There is no poet who breathes a
fresher air of gentleness. He writes in images, dealing but little
with ideas. Every line presents a picture, and each picture has the
charm of a miniature fancifully drawn and brightly coloured on a
missal-margin. Cecco and Folgore alike have abandoned the mediaeval
mysticism which sounds unreal on almost all Italian lips but
Dante's. True Italians, they are content to live for life's sake,
and to take the world as it presents itself to natural senses. But
Cecco is perverse and impious. His love has nothing delicate; his
hatred is a morbid passion. At his worst or best (for his best
writing is his worst feeling) we find him all but rabid. If
Caligula, for instance, had written poetry, he might have piqued
himself upon the following sonnet; only we must do Cecco the justice
of remembering that his rage is more than half ironical and
humorous:--

An I were fire, I would burn up the world;
An I were wind, with tempest I'd it break;
An I were sea, I'd drown it in a lake;
An I were God, to hell I'd have it hurled;
An I were Pope, I'd see disaster whirled
O'er Christendom, deep joy thereof to take;
An I were Emperor, I'd quickly make
All heads of all folk from their necks be twirled;
An I were death, I'd to my father go;
An I were life, forthwith from him I'd fly;
And with my mother I'd deal even so;
An I were Cecco, as I am but I,
Young girls and pretty for myself I'd hold,
But let my neighbours take the plain and old.

Of all this there is no trace in Folgore. The worst a moralist could
say of him is that he sought out for himself a life of pure
enjoyment. The famous Sonnets on the Months give particular
directions for pastime in a round of pleasure suited to each season.
The Sonnets on the Days are conceived in a like hedonistic spirit.
But these series are specially addressed to members of the Glad
Brigades and Spending Companies, which were common in the great
mercantile cities of mediaeval Italy. Their tone is doubtless due to
the occasion of their composition, as compliments to Messer Nicholo
di Nisi and Messer G