busy himself at once to make a fair copy before speeding the
verses to another. So their fame spread, and so the copies multiplied,
till there was never a musical youth in Florence that did not know the
better part of them by heart; and still, for all this publicity, there
was no man could say who wrote the rhymes, nor who was the lady they
honored. I think and believe, indeed, there were many in Florence who
would gladly have declared themselves the author, but dared not for fear
of detection, and who contented themselves by slight hints and
suggestions and innuendoes, which earned them, for a time, a brief
measure of interest, soon to be dissipated by the manifest certainty of
their incapacity.

And the first of all these sonnets was that which is now as familiar as
honey on the lips of every lover of suave songs--I mean that sonnet
which begins with the words:

"To every prisoned soul and gentle heart--"

To this sonnet it pleased many of our poets of the city to write their
replies, though they knew not then to whom they were replying, and
Messer Guido Cavalcanti wrote his famous sonnet, the one that begins:

"Unto my thinking thou beheldst all worth--"

Now I, being fired by the same spirit of rhyming that was abroad, but
being of a different temper from the most of my fellows, took it upon me
to pretend a resentment of all this beautiful talk of Love and My Lady.
So I wrote a sonnet, and here it is, urging the advantages of a
plurality in love-affairs:

"Give me a jolly girl, or two, or three--
The more the merrier for my weathercock whim;
And one shall be like Juno, large of limb
And large of heart; and Venus one shall be,
Golden, with eyes like the capricious sea;
And my third sweetheart, Dian, shall be slim
With a boy's slimness, flanks and bosom trim,
The green, sharp apple of the ancient tree.
With such a trinity to please each mood
I should not find a summer day too long,
With blood of purple grapes to fire my blood,
And for my soul some thicket-haunting song
Of Pan and naughty nymphs, and all the throng
Of light o' loves and wantons since the Flood."

I showed this sonnet to Messer Guido, who laughed a little, and said
that I might be the laureate of the tavern and the brothel, but that
this new and nameless singer was a man of another metal, whom I could
never understand. Whereat I laughed, too; but being none the le