“Barons! your castles in safety place,
      Your cities and villages, too,
    Before ye haste to the battle-scene: 
      And Papiol! quickly go,
    And tell the lord of ‘Yes and No’
    That peace already too long hath been!"[4]

[Footnote 4:  I cannot forbear taking a bit of margin to print the closing stanzas of the original, which carry the clash of sabres in their very sound.

    “Ie us dic que tan no m’ a sabor
      Manjars ni beure ni dormir
    Cum a quant aug cridar:  A lor! 
      D’ambas las partz; et aug agnir
        Cavals voitz per l’ombratge,
    Et aug cridar:  Aidatz!  Aidatz! 
    E vei cazer per los fossatz
        Paucs e grans per l’erbatge,
    E vei los mortz que pels costatz
    An los tronsons outre passatz.

      “Baros, metetz et gatge
      Castels e vilas e ciutatz,
      Enans q’ usquecs no us guerreiatz.

      “Papiol, d’agradatge
      Ad Oc e No t’ en vai viatz,
      Dic li que trop estan en patz.”

It would seem that the men of that time, like men of most times, bore a considerable contempt for people who said “Yes” one day, and “No” the next.]

I am on my way to Italy, (it may as well be confessed,) where I had fully intended to open my rainy day’s work; but Turner has kept me, and then Auvergne, and then the brisk battle-song of a Troubadour.

When I was upon the Cajano farm of Lorenzo the Magnificent, during my last “spell of wet,” it was uncourteous not to refer to the pleasant commemorative poem of “Ambra,” which Lorenzo himself wrote, and which, whatever may be said against the conception and conduct of it, shows in its opening stanzas that the great Medici was as appreciative of rural images—­fir-boughs with loaded snows, thick cypresses in which late birds lurked, sharp-leaved junipers, and sturdy pines fighting the wind—­as ever he had been of antique jewels, or of the rhythm of such as Politiano.  And if I have spoken slightingly of this latter poet, it was only in contrast with Virgil, and in view of his strained Latinity.  When he is himself, and wraps his fancies only in his own sparkling Tuscan, we forget his classic frigidities, and his quarrels with Madonna Clarice, and are willing to confess that no pen of his time was dipped with such a relishing gusto into the colors of the hyacinths and trembling pansies, and into all the blandishments of a gushing and wanton spring.[5]

[Footnote 5:  See Wm. Parr Greswell’s Memoirs of Politiano, with translations.]