boschetto, Che qualche fantasia ha per la mente; Vorr a fantasticar
forse un sonetto.'"

"And where's Luigi Pulci? I saw _him_." "Oh, in the wood there. Gone,
depend upon it, To vent some fancy in his brain--some whim, That will
not let him rest till it's a sonnet."

In a letter written to Lorenzo, when the future statesman, then in his
seventeenth year, was making himself personally acquainted with the
courts of Italy, Pulci speaks of himself as struggling hard to keep down
the poetic propensity in his friend's absence. "If you were with me," he
says, "I should produce heaps of sonnets as big as the clubs they make
of the cherry-blossoms for May-day. I am always muttering some verse or
other betwixt my teeth; but I say to myself, 'My Lorenzo is not here--he
who is my only hope and refuge;' and so I suppress it." Such is the
first, and of a like nature are the latest accounts we possess of the
sequestered though companionable poet. He preferred one congenial
listener who understood him, to twenty critics that were puzzled with
the vivacity of his impulses. Most of the learned men patronised by
Lorenzo probably quarrelled with him on account of it, plaguing him in
somewhat the same spirit, though in more friendly guise, as the Della
Cruscans and others afterwards plagued Tasso; so he banters them in
turn, and takes refuge from their critical rules and common-places in
the larger indulgence of his friend Politian and the laughing wisdom of
Lorenzo.

"So che andar diritto mi bisogna, Ch' io non ci mescolassi una bugia,
Che questa non e storia da menzogna; Che come in esco un passo de la
via,

Chi gracchia, chi riprende, e chi rampogna: Ognun poi mi riesce la
pazzia;

Tanto ch' eletto ho solitaria vita, Che la turba di questi e infinita.

La mia Accademia un tempo, o mia Ginnasia, E stata volentier ne' miei
boschetti; E puossi ben veder l' Affrica e l' Asia: Vengon le Ninfe con
lor canestretti, E portanmi o narciso o colocasia; E cosi fuggo mille
urban dispetti: Si ch' io non torno a' vostri Areopaghi, Gente pur
sempre di mal dicer vaghi.

I know I ought to make no dereliction From the straight path to this
side or to that; I know the story I relate's no fiction, And that
the moment that I quit some flat, Folks are all puff, and blame, and
contradiction, And swear I never know what I'd be at; In short, such
crowds, I find, can mend one's poem, I live retired, on purpose not to
know 'em.

Yes, gentlemen, my only