Poliziano's principal works are the stanzas called La Giostra, written upon Giuliano de' Medici's victory in a tourna ment; the Orfeo, a lyrical drama performed at Mantua with musical accompaniment ; and a collection of fugitive pieces, reproducing various forms of Tuscan popular poetry. La Giostra had no plan, and remained imperfect ; but it demonstrated the capacities of the octave stanza for rich, harmonious and sonorous metrical effect. The Orfeo is a slight piece of work, thrown off at a heat, yet abounding in unpremeditated lyrical beauties, and containing in itself the germ both of the pastoral play and of the opera. The Tuscan songs are distinguished by a "roseate fluency," an exquisite charm of half romantic, half humorous abandonment to fancy, which mark them out as improvisations of genius. It may be added that in all these departments of Italian composition Poliziano showed how the taste and learning of a classical scholar could be engrafted on the stock of the vernacular, and how the highest perfection of artistic form might be attained in Italian without a sacrifice of native spontaneity and natural flow of language.
Beyond the sphere of pure scholarship and pure literature Poliziano did not venture. He was present, indeed, at the attack made by the Pazzi conspirators on the persons of Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici, and wrote an interesting account of its partial success. He also contributed a curious document on the
death of Lorenzo de' Medici. Otherwise, his uneventful life was passed as a house-friend of the Medici, as the idol of the learned world, and as a simple man of letters to whom (with truly Tuscan devotion to the Saturnian country) rural pleasures were always acceptable. He was never married; and his morals incurred suspicion, to which his own Greek verses lend a plausible colouring. He died, half broken-hearted by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de' Medici, on Sept. 24, For the life and works of Politian, see F. 0. Mencken (Leipzig, 1736), a vast repertory of accumulated erudition; Jac. Mahly, Angelus Politianus (Leipzig, 1864) ; Carducci's ed. of the Italian poems (Florence, Barbera, 1863) ; Del Lungo's ed. of the Italian prose works and Latin and Greek poems (Florence, Barbera, 1867) ; the Opera omnia (Basle, 1554) ; Greswell, Life of Politian (1805) ; Roscoe, Lorenzo de' Medici (loth ed., 1851) ; J. Addington Symonds, Renais sance in Italy (1875-86), and translations from Poliziano's poems in Symonds's Sketches and Studies in Italy (1879). (J. A. S.; X.)