men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed: the public,” he is paraphrasing a passage in the “Symposium.”
Friendship, indeed; could have desired no better warrant for its permanence or its ardours than the Platonic theory, or creed,as we might better call it, that the true world was the world of ideas, and that these ideas took visible form and became incarnate in man, and it is only when we realise the influence of neo-Platonism on the Renaissance that we can understand the true meaning of the amatory phrases and words with which friends were wont, at this time, to address each other. There was a kind of mystic transference of the expressions of the physical sphere to.a sphere that was spiritual, that was removed from gross bodily appetite, and in which the soul was Lord. Love had, indeed, entered the olive garden of the new Academe, but he wore the same flame-coloured raiment, and had the same words of passion on his lips.
Michael Angelo, the “haughtiest spirit in Italy” as he has been called, addresses the young Tommaso Cavalieri in such fervent and passionate terms that
