To Lorenzo it owed this celebrity.  At an early date he perceived that the new art would be of little value if there were not careful press readers.  He was therefore among the first to induce scholars of distinction to engage in this task.  For example, he enlisted the aid of Cristoforo Landino, who in his Disputationes Camaldunenses had really inaugurated the science of textual criticism by urging that a careful comparison of the various codices should constitute the preliminary step in any reproduction of the classics.  Landino’s work on Vergil and Horace merits the warmest praise.  Lorenzo also impressed Poliziano into the work, whose labors in marking the various readings, in adding scholia and “notes” illustrative of the text of Catullus, Propertius, Ovid, etc., were of the utmost value.  To Lorenzo and to his younger brother Giuliano, another great humanist, Giorgio Merula of Milan, dedicated his Plautus, published in Venice in 1472, showing at how early an age the Magnifico had taken his place among the recognized patrons of the Italian Renaissance.

We ought not, moreover, to omit mention of another achievement of Lorenzo, though performed in a sphere of effort lying outside of the strict limits of our Renaissance survey.  Seeing it was the “Revival of Letters,” however, which induced the revival of the cultivation of the vernacular Italian literature, surely it is not out of place to refer to it here.  Early in life Lorenzo became imbued with the conviction that his native tongue was unsurpassed as a medium for “the expression of noble thoughts in noble numbers.”  Not only did he encourage others to study Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, but by following out his own precepts he became one of the great Italian poets.  His Selve d’Amore, his Corinto, his Ambra, his La Nencia da Barberino, his Laude, his Sonetti, his Cansoni, etc., are all poems that live in the Italian literature of to-day.  Not as a man ashamed of the vernacular, and forced to use it because he can command no better, does Lorenzo write.  “He is sure of the justice of his cause, and determined by precept and example and by the prestige of his princely rank to bring the literature he loves into repute again.”

But of these poems we cannot here take further note.  By the scholars of the Renaissance such work was looked askance at.  If they did produce any of these “trifles,” as they were called, they almost blushed to own them, and were ashamed to communicate them to each other.  That he dared to be natural says much for Lorenzo, and it was largely due to his encouragement that Cristoforo Landino undertook his great work on “Dante,” to which we owe so much to-day.