of Jesus that we find in that tiny dark chapel, or the journey of man, awake now on the first morning of spring in quest of beauty?  Over the grass scattered with flowers, that gay company passes at dawn by little white towns and grey towers, through woods where for a moment is heard the song of some marvellous bird, past running streams, between hedges of pomegranates and clusters of roses; and by the wayside rise the stone-pine and the cypress, while over all is the far blue sky, full of the sun, full of the wind, which is so soft that not a leaf has trembled in the woods, nor the waters stirred in a single ripple.  Truly they are come to Tuscany where Beauty is, and are far from Bethlehem, where Love lies sleeping.  There on a mule, a black slave beside his stirrup, rides Cosimo Pater Patriae, and beside him comes Piero his son, attended too, and before them on a white horse stepping proudly, with jewels in his cap, rides the golden-haired Lorenzo, the youngest of the three kings, already magnificent, the darling of this world of hills and streams, which one day he will sing better than anyone of his time.  Not thus came the Magi of the East across the deserts to stony Judaea, and though the Emperor of the East be of them, and the Patriarch of Constantinople another, we know it is to the knowledge of Plato they would lead us, and not to the Sedes Sapientiae.  And so it is before an empty shrine that those clouds of angels sing; Madonna has fled away, and the children are singing a new song, surely the Trionfo of Lorenzo, it is the first time, perhaps, that we hear it—­

    Quant’ e’ bella giovinezza.

Ah, if they had but known how tragically that day would close.

As Cosimo lay dying at Careggi, often closing his eyes, “to use them to it,” as he told his wife, who wondered why he lay thus without sleeping, it was perhaps some vision of that conflict which he saw and would fain have dismissed from his mind, already divided a little in its allegiance—­who knows—­between the love of Plato and the love of Jesus.  Piero, his son, gouty and altogether without energy, was content to confirm his political position and to overwhelm the Pitti conspiracy.  It is only with the advent of Lorenzo and Giuliano, the first but twenty-one when Piero died, that the spirit of the Renaissance, free for the first time, seems to dance through every byway of the city, and, confronted at last by the fanatic hatred of Savonarola, to laugh in his face and to flee away through Italy into the world.

Born in 1448, Lorenzo always believed that he owed almost everything that was valuable in his life to his mother Lucrezia, of the noble Florentine house of Tornabuoni, which had abandoned its nobility in order to qualify for public office.  A poetess herself, and the patron of poets, she remained the best counsellor her son ever had.  In his early youth she had watched over his religious education, and in his grandfather’s house he had met not