Note 514 — Chapter VII

See Lettere di Luigi Pulci a Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Lucca, Giusti, 1868. Sonetti di Matteo Franco e Luigi Pulci, 1759. The sonnets are indescribably scurrilous, charged with Florentine slang, and loaded with the filthiest abuse. The point of humor is that Franco and Pulci undertook (it is said, for fun) to heap scandals on each other's heads, ransacking the language of the people for its vilest terms of invective. If they began in joke, they ended in earnest; and Lorenzo de' Medici, who had a taste for buffoonery, enjoyed the scuffle of his Court-fools. It was a combat of humanists transferred from the arena of the schools to the market-place, where two men of parts degraded themselves by assuming the character of coal-heavers.