This decade was also remarkable for the commencement of the devotion to the cultivation of literary style, a pursuit yet to reach its culmination in Poliziano in Florence and in Bembo and Sadoleto in Rome.  Originality gradually gave place to conventionality, until men actually came to prefer the absurdities of Ciceronianism, and a cold, colorless adherence to hard-and-fast rules of composition, to a work throbbing with the pulsation of virile life.  Humanism was beginning to take flight from Italy, to find a home and a welcome beyond the Alps.

The final decade of Lorenzo’s life constituted the midsummer bloom of the Tuscan renaissance, the meridian of the intellectual and artistic supremacy of Florence.  In Lorenzo it found its fullest expression.  He was typical of its spiritual as well as of its moral meaning; typical, too, of that mental unrest which sought escape from the pressing problems of an enigmatic present by reverting to the study of a classic past whose ethical, social, and political difficulties were rarely of a complex character, but concerned themselves principally with what may be termed the elementary verities of man’s relations to the Deity and to his fellows.

Lorenzo’s amazing versatility has been pronounced a fault by some who believed they detected in him the potential capacity of rivalling Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto on their own ground, had he only conserved his energies.  This is a foolish supposition.  Lorenzo’s many-sidedness was but the reflection in himself, as the most accurate mirror of the time, of all that wondrous susceptibility to beauty, that eager craving after the realization of the [greek:  to kalon] ("the Good”) so characteristic of the best Hellenic genius, whether we study it in the dramas of Sophocles or the Republic of Plato or in the statesmanship of Pericles.  If Lorenzo had resembled his grandfather and concentrated his energies upon finance and politics, there might have been a line of reigning Medicean princes in Florence half a century earlier than actually was the case, but Europe would have been distinctly the loser by the absence of the greatest personal force making for culture which characterized the Renaissance.

This last decade of Lorenzo’s life—­from his thirty-first to his forty-second year—­was memorable in many respects.  In the year 1481 he was again exposed to the danger of assassination.  Battista Frescobaldi and two assistants in the Church of the Carmeli, and again on Ascension Day, made an attempt to stab him, but were frustrated by the vigilance of Lorenzo’s friends.  There is no doubt that this second attempt was also instigated by Girolamo Riario, the nephew of Sixtus IV.  Thereafter Lorenzo never moved out without a strong bodyguard of friends and adherents—­a precaution rendered necessary by the repeated plots that were being hatched against him by his enemies.