iversary of Plato's death, it had looked down from
under laurel leaves on a picked company of scholars and philosophers,
who met to eat and drink with moderation, and to discuss and admire,
perhaps with less moderation, the doctrines of the great master:--on
Pico della Mirandola, once a Quixotic young genius with long curls,
astonished at his own powers and astonishing Rome with heterodox theses;
afterwards a more humble student with a consuming passion for inward
perfection, having come to find the universe more astonishing than his
own cleverness:--on innocent, laborious Marsilio Ficino, picked out
young to be reared as a Platonic philosopher, and fed on Platonism in
all its stages till his mind was perhaps a little pulpy from that too
exclusive diet:--on Angelo Poliziano, chief literary genius of that age,
a born poet, and a scholar without dulness, whose phrases had blood in
them and are alive still:--or, further back, on Leon Battista Alberti, a
reverend senior when those three were young, and of a much grander type
than they, a robust, universal mind, at once practical and theoretic,
artist, man of science, inventor, poet:--and on many more valiant
workers whose names are not registered where every day we turn the leaf
to read them, but whose labours make a part, though an unrecognised
part, of our inheritance, like the ploughing and sowing of past
generations.

Bernardo Rucellai was a man to hold a distinguished place in that
Academy even before he became its host and patron. He was still in the
prime of life, not more than four and forty, with a somewhat haughty,
cautiously dignified presence; conscious of an amazingly pure Latinity,
but, says Erasmus, not to be caught speaking Latin--no word of Latin to
be sheared off him by the sharpest of Teutons. He welcomed Tito with
more marked favour than usual and gave him a place between Lorenzo
Tornabuoni and Giannozzo Pucci, both of them accomplished young members
of the Medicean party.

Of course the talk was the lightest in the world while the brass bowl
filled with scented water was passing round, that the company might wash
their hands, and rings flashed on white fingers under the wax-lights,
and there was the pleasant fragrance of fresh white damask newly come
from France. The tone of remark was a very common one in those times.
Some one asked what Dante's pattern old Florentine would think if the
life could come into him again under his leathern belt and bon