[485] Trattato circa il Reggimento e Governo della Città di Firenze (Florence, 1847), ii. 2.
[486] Tutti i Trionfi, Carri, etc., Firenze, 1559. See the edition dated Cosmopoli, 1750.
[487] In this place should be noticed a sinister Carnival Song, by an unknown author, which belongs, I think, to the period of Savonarola's democracy. It is called Trionfo del Vaglio, or "Triumph of the Sieve" (Cant. Carn. p. 33):
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To the Sieve, to the Sieve, to the Sieve, Ho, all ye folk, descend! With groans your bosoms rend! And find in this our Sieve Wrath, anguish, travail, doom for all who live! To winnow, sift and purge, full well we know, And grind your souls like corn: Ye who our puissance scorn, Come ye to trial, ho! For we will prove and show How fares the man who enters in our Sieve. Send us no groats nor scrannel seed nor rye, But good fat ears of grain, Which shall endure our strain, And be of sturdy stuff. Torment full stern and rough Abides for him who resteth in our Sieve. Who comes into this Sieve, who issues thence, Hath tears and sighs, and mourns: But the Sieve ever turns, And gathers vehemence. Ye who feel sin's offence, Shun ye the rage, the peril of our Sieve. A thousand times the day, our Sieve is crowned; A thousand times 'tis drained: Let the Sieve once be strained, And, grain by grain, around Ye shall behold the ground Covered with folk, cast from the boltering Sieve. Ye who are not well-grained and strong to bear, Abide ye not this fate! Penitence comes too late! Seek ye some milder doom! Nay, better were the tomb Than to endure the torment of our Sieve! |
[488] Life of Piero di Cosimo.
[489] Life of Pontormo.
[490] Revival of Learning, pp. 345-357, 452-465.
[491] Carducci, Preface to his edition of Le Stanze, L'Orfeo e Le Rime di Messer Angelo Ambrogini Poliziano (Firenze, 1863), p. xxiii.
[492] This poem must have been written between 1476, the date of Simonetta's death, and 1478, the date of Giuliano's murder, when Poliziano was about twenty-four. Chronology prevents us from regarding it as the work of a boy of fourteen, as Roscoe thought, or of sixteen, as Hallam concluded.
[493] His Latin elegies on Simonetta and on Albiera degli Albizzi, and those Greek epigrams which Scaliger preferred to the Latin verses of his maturity, had been already written.