Pulci appears to have been slender in person, with small eyes and a ruddy face.  I gather this from the caricature of him in the poetical paper-war carried on between him and his friend Matteo Franco, a Florentine canon, which is understood to have been all in good humour—­sport to amuse their friends—­a perilous speculation.  Besides his share in these verses, he is supposed to have had a hand in his brother’s romance, and was certainly the author of some devout poems, and of a burlesque panegyric on a country damsel, La Beca, in emulation of the charming poem La Nencia, the first of its kind, written by that extraordinary person, his illustrious friend Lorenzo, who, in the midst of his cares and glories as the balancer of the power of Italy, was one of the liveliest of the native wits, and wrote songs for the people to dance to in Carnival time.

The intercourse between Lorenzo and Pulci was of the most familiar kind.  Pulci was sixteen years older, but of a nature which makes no such differences felt between associates.  He had known Lorenzo from the latter’s youth, probably from his birth—­is spoken of in a tone of domestic intimacy by his wife—­and is enumerated by him among his companions in a very special and characteristic manner in his poem on Hawking (La Caccia col Falcone), when, calling his fellow-sportsmen about him, and missing Luigi, one of them says that he has strolled into a neighbouring wood, to put something which has struck his fancy into a sonnet: 

“‘Luigi Pulci ov’ e, che non si sente?’ ‘Egli se n’ ando dianzi in quel 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.