1494, and a still youthful fire breathes in his impetuous hexameters. When he was lecturing at Florence, he sometimes began by reciting a Latin poem of his own, as an introduction to the classical author. Some of these poems, in hexameter verse, remain. One of them rapidly surveys the history of poetry from Homer to Boccaccio; another is a prelude to the "Iliad" and "Odyssey"; a third, to the bucolic poets, especially Hesiod and Virgil. In these, as in much other Latin verse of the Renaissance, despite some blemishes which modern scholarship would have avoided, one can see how thoroughly the writer was imbued with the style and diction of his models. A fine ear is a frequent Italian gift, and some of these Renaissance versifiers have been singularly successful in catching the rhythms of the best Latin poets, especially those of Virgil and of Ovid.
Verse and rhetoric were, indeed, modes of self-expression irresistibly attractive to men whose ambition was fired by the example of their Italian ancestors, and who felt that motive so characteristic of the Renaissance,—the passionate desire of the individual to make his own powers stand out, clear-cut and brilliant, before the world,—the longing for fame in his life-time, and for the praise of posterity. Italy had no political unity, no common aims in respect to national life. Humanism proposed what to many men, and coteries, and cities took, in a way, the place of that,—the dream that the glories of ancient Rome and Italy were being renewed in
