[619] The invocation of a patron saint is an essentially pagan undertaking, as has been noticed at p. 57. On a more serious occasion, comp. Sannazaro’s Elegy: ‘In festo die divi Nazarii martyris.’ Sann. Elegiae, 1535, fol. 166 sqq.
Si satis ventos tolerasse et imbres
Ac minas fatorum hominumque fraudes
Da Pater tecto salientem avito
Cernere fumum!
[621] Andr. Naugerii, Orationes duae carminaque aliquot, Venet. 1530, 4^o. The few ‘Carmina’ are to be found partly or wholly in the Deliciae. On N. and his death, see Pier. Val. De inf. lit. ed. Menken, 326 sqq.
[622] Compare Petrarch’s greeting to Italy, written more than a century earlier (1353) in Petr. Carmina Minora, ed. Rossetti, ii. pp. 266 sqq.
[623] To form a notion of what Leo X. could swallow, see the prayer of Guido Postumo Silvestri to Christ, the Virgin, and all the Saints, that they would long spare this ‘numen’ to earth, since heaven had enough of such already. Printed in Roscoe, Leone X. ed. Bossi, v. 337.
[624] Molza’s Poesie volgari e Latine, ed. by Pierantonio Serassi, Bergamo 1747.
[625] Boccaccio, Vita di Dante, p. 36.
[626] Sannazaro ridicules a man who importuned him with such forgeries: ‘Sint vetera haec aliis, mî nova semper erunt.’ (Ad Rufum, Opera, 1535, fol. 41 a.)
[627] ‘De mirabili urbe Venetiis’ (Opera, fol. 38 b):