force of his example and influence against the
encroachments of fanatic precisians. He had too
much learning, too strong a faculty for design, too
great variety and liveliness of elocution, to be ignored
by any scholar. He could not be dismissed as a
barbarian; and he was too ingenuous, too fond of the
Tuscan earth, the Tuscan air, to admit the sterile
blight of the false classicism. In his own way and
degree he did what Catullus and Lucretius, Virgil
and Ovid, had done before him--by taking all he
could get from the universal sources of learning,
while he kept his loyalty to the native genius of
Italy. Thus he appears at the beginning of the
Renaissance well protected against some of its most
insidious vanities,--just as the great Latin poets were
saved by the same Italian genius from the dangers of
a too absolute subservience to Greece.

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