ery, its quaint conceits,
its unexpected combinations and subtle moralising, it is an element in
the local colour of a great age. It illustrates also the faith of that
age in all oracles, its desire to hear all voices, its generous belief
that nothing which had ever interested the human mind could wholly lose
its vitality. It is the counterpart, though certainly the feebler
counterpart, of that practical truce and reconciliation of the gods of
Greece with the Christian religion, which is seen in the art of the
time; and it is for his share in this work, and because his own story is
a sort of analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this
purpose in his writings, that something of a general interest still
belongs to the name of Pico della Mirandola, whose life, written by his
nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in it, to be
translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More, that great
lover of Italian culture, among whose works this life of Pico, Earl
of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls him, may still be
read, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was the very
day--some day probably in the year 1482--on which Ficino had finished
his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the work to which he had
been dedicated from childhood by Cosmo de' Medici, in furtherance of his
desire to resuscitate the knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens.
Florence indeed, as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity
for the mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and more
practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua, and other
cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they knew perhaps very
little about him, had had the name of the great idealist often on their
lips. To increase this knowledge, Cosmo had founded the Platonic
academy, with periodical discussions at the villa of Careggi. The fall
of Constantinople in 1453, and the council in 1438 for the
reconciliation of the Greek and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence
many a needy Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of
the mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the
scholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced into his
study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of Plato, as
other men burned lamps before their favourite saints, a young man fresh
from a journey,