He quotes Columella's rule for twenty-four loads (carrette) of manure to hill-lands per acre, and eighteen to level land; and adds,—"Our people put the double of this,"—"I nostri mettano più chel doppio."
But the book of our friend Crescenzi is interesting, not so much for its maxims of agronomic wisdom as for its association with one of the most eventful periods o£ Italian history. The new language of the Peninsula[23] was just now crystallizing into shape, and was presently to receive the stamp of currency from the hands of Dante and Boccaccio. A thriving commerce through the ports of Venice and Amalfi demanded all the products of the hill-sides. Milan, then having a population of two hundred thousand, had turned a great river into the fields,—which to this day irrigates thousands of acres of rice-lands. Wheat was grown in profusion, at that time, on fields which are now desolated by the malaria, or by indolence. In the days of Crescenzi, gunpowder was burned for the first time in battle; and for the first time crops of grain were paid for in bills of exchange. All the Peninsula was vibrating with the throbs of a new and more splendid life. The art that had cropped out of the fashionable schools of Byzantium was fast putting them in eclipse; and before Crescenzi died, if he loved art on canvas as he loved art in gardens, he must have heard admiringly of Cimabue, and Giotto, and Orcagna.
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 The cows he kept there (for ewes were now superseded) were equal to the supply of the entire city of Florence.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.