In 1360 a certain Paganino Bonafede composed a poem called "Il Tesoro de' Rustici"; but I believe it was never published; and Tiraboschi calls it "_poco felice_." If we could only bar publicity to all the _poco felice_ verses!
In the middle of the fifteenth century the Florentine Poggio says some good things in a rural way; and still later, that whimsical, disagreeable Politiano, who was a pet cub of Lorenzo de' Medici, published his "Rusticus." Roscoe says, with his usual strained hyperbole, that it is inferior in kind only to the Georgics. The fact is, it compares with the Georgics as the vilest of the Medici compare with the grandest of the Cæsars.
The young Michele Verini, of the same period, has given, in one of his few remaining letters, an eloquent description of the Cajano farm of Lorenzo de' Medici. It lay between Florence and Pistoia. The river Ombrone skirted its fields. It was so successfully irrigated, that three crops of grain grew in a year. Its barns had stone floors, walls with moat, and towers like a castle. The cows he kept there (for ewes were now superseded) were equal to the supply of the entire city of Florence. Hogs were fed upon the whey; and peacocks and pheasant innumerable roamed through the woods.
Politiano also touches upon the same theme; but the prose of young Verini is better, because more explicit, than the verse of Politiano.
While I write, wandering in fancy to that fair plain where Florence sits a queen, with her girdle of shining rivers, and her garland of olive-bearing hills,----the snow is passing. The spires have staggered plainly and stiffly into sight. Again I can count them, one by one. I have brought as many authors to the front as there are spires staring at me from the snow.
Let me marshal them once more:--Verini, the young Florentine; Politiano,[24] who cannot live in peace with the wife of his patron; Poggio, the Tuscan; Crescenzi, the magistrate and farmer joined; the half-score of dead men who lie between the covers of the "Geoponica"; the martyr Boëthius, who, under the consolations of a serene, perhaps Christian philosophy, cannot forget the charm of the fields; Palladius, who is more full than original; Pliny the Consul, and the friend of Tacitus; Horace, whose very laugh is brimming with the buxom cheer of the country; and last,--Virgil.