Twelve Books of Letters and Lectures

...it is not my intention to enumerate each one. But to your merits toward me has been added an elegant letter from our learned friend Manuel, sweeter than that Hymettian honey (from where, of course, he gathered it) and than any nectar. We have clearly turned him into a Glaucus, exchanging bronze for gold [i.e., bronze things for golden ones]. For who is unaware how those Atticisms, native to the Greeks [i.e., most Attic to the native Greeks], degenerate on this side of the sea? Yet we fear his critical marks the less for this very reason: that we were born in Latium. Just as when we write Latin incorrectly, we defend ourselves by the fact that we are thought to be "Hellenizing"; and like bats, while we are clearly neither mice nor birds, we nonetheless attempt to prove ourselves to both. Farewell.

ANGELO POLIZIANO

to his dear Giovanni Pico della Mirandola,

sends many greetings.

I hear that you have burned the love verses you wrote some time ago, perhaps fearing that they might harm either your reputation now or the morals of others. For I do not think it was because they turned out poorly, as Plato is said to have done with his own. For as much as I recall, nothing was more polished, sweet, or ornate than they. Since you used to call them your "Loves," it recently pleased me to sport with these Greek verses, as if upon those very "Loves" burned by you:

Often struck by the arrows and burned by Pico’s Cupids,
He could endure no more, and took away all their weapons:
Bows