[105] In the Deliciæ Poet. Italorum (1608), ii. pp. 455 sqq.: ad Alfonsum ducem Calabriæ. (Yet I do not believe that the above remark fairly applies to this poem, which clearly expresses the joys which Alfonso has with Drusula, and describes the sensations of the happy lover, who in his transports thinks that the gods themselves must envy him.—L.G.).
[106] Mentioned as early as 1367, in the Polistore, in Murat. xxiv. col. 848, in reference to Niccolò the Elder, who makes twelve persons knights in honour of the twelve Apostles.
[107] Burigozzo, in the Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 432.
[108] Discorsi, i. 17, on Milan after the death of Filippo Visconti.
[109] De Incert. et Vanitate Scientiar. cap. 55.
[110] Prato, Archiv. Stor. iii. p. 241.
[111] De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, l. ii. cap. 15.
[112] Discorsi, iii. 6; comp. Storie Fiorent. l. viii. The description of conspiracies has been a favourite theme of Italian writers from a very remote period. Luitprand (of Cremona, Mon. Germ., ss. iii. 264-363) gives us a few, which are more circumstantial than those of any other contemporary writer of the tenth century; in the eleventh the deliverance of Messina from the Saracens, accomplished by calling in Norman Roger (Baluz. Miscell. i. p. 184), gives occasion to a characteristic narrative of this kind (1060); we need hardly speak of the dramatic colouring given to the stories of the Sicilian Vespers (1282). The same tendency is well known in the Greek writers.
[113] Corio, fol. 333. For what follows, ibid. fol. 305, 422 sqq. 440.
[114] So in the quotations from Gallus, in Sismondi, xi. 93. For the whole subject see Reumont, Lorenzo dei Medici, pp. 387-97, especially 396.