346 P O L - - P O L de Medici s demand for a resuscitation of the vulgar literature. Lorenzo led the way himself, and Poliziano was more a follower in his path than an initiator. Yet what Poliziauo produced, impelled by a courtly wish to satisfy his patron s whim, proves his own immeasurable superiority as an artist. His principal Italian works are the stanzas called La Giostra, written upon Giuliano de Medici s victory in a tournament ; 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 capaci ties 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 composi tion 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. It is difficult to combine in one view the several aspects presented to us by this many-sided man of literary genius. At a period when humanism took the lead in forming Italian character and giving tone to European culture, he climbed with facility to the height of achievement in all the branches of scholarship which were then most seriously prized in varied knowledge of ancient authors, in critical capacity, in rhetorical and poetical exuberance. This was enough at that epoch to direct the attention of all the learned men of Europe on Poliziano. At the same time, almost against his own inclination, certainly with very little enthusiasm on his part, he lent himself so success fully to Lorenzo de Medici s scheme for resuscitating the decayed literature of Tuscany that his slightest Italian effusions exercised a potent influence on the immediate future. He appears before us as the dictator of Italian culture in a double capacity as the man who most per fectly expressed the Italian conception of humanism, and brought erudition into accord with the pursuit of noble and harmonious form, and also as the man whose verna cular compositions were more significant than any others of the great revolution in favour of Italian poetry which culminated in Ariosto. Beyond the sphere of pure scholar ship 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 to the students of Florentine history. But he was not, like many other humanists of his age, concerned in public affairs of state or diplomacy, and he held no office except that of professor at Florence. His private life was also uneventful. He passed it as a house-friend and dependant of the Medici, as the idol of the learned world, and as a simple man of letters for 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 certain amount of plausible colouring. In character Poliziano was decidedly inferior to the intellectual and literary eminence which he dis played. He died half broken-hearted by the loss of his friend and patron Lorenzo de Medici, in 1494, at the age of forty, just before the wave of foreign invasion which was gathering in France swept over Italy. For the life and works of Folitian, consult F. 0. Mencken (Leipsic, 1736), a vast repertory of accumulated erudition ; Jac. Mahly, Angelas Politianus (Leipsic, 1864); Carducci s edition of the Italian poems (Florence, Barbera, 1863); Del Lungo s edition of the Italian prose works and Latin and Greek poems (Florence, Barbera, 1867); the OpcraOmnia (Basel, 1554); Greswell s English Life of Politian ; Roscoe s Lorenzo de Medici ; Von Keumont s Life | of Lorenzo de Medici ; Symonds s Renaissance in Italy, and transla- I tions from Poliziano s Italian poems in his Sketches and Studies in
- Italy, which include the Orfeo. (J. A. S.)
POLITICAL ECONOMY THE present condition of the study of political economy seems to prescribe, as most suitable for these pages, a treatment of the subject different from that adopted in relation to other departments of knowledge. There pre vails wide-spread dissatisfaction with the existing state of economic science, and much difference of opinion both as to its method and as to its doctrines. There is, in fact, reason to believe that it has now entered on a transition stage, and is destined ere long to undergo a considerable transformation. Hence it has appeared to be unseasonable, and therefore inexpedient, to attempt in this place a new dogmatic treatise on political economy. What is known as the " orthodox " or " classical " system, though in our time very generally called in question, is to be found set out in numerous text-books accessible to every one. Again, some of the most important special branches of economics are so fully explained and discussed in other parts of the present work (see BANKING, EXCHANGE, FINANCE, MONEY, &c.) as to dispense with any further treatment of them here. It has been thought that the mode of handling the subject most appropriate to the circumstances of the case, and likely to be most profitable, would be that of tracing historically from a general point of view the course of speculation regarding economic phenomena, and contemplating the suc cessive forms of opinion concerning them as products of the periods at which they were respectively evolved. Such a study is in harmony with the best intellectual tendencies of our age, which is, more than anything else, characterized by the universal supremacy of the historical spirit. To such a degree has this spirit permeated all our modes of thinking that with respect to every branch of knowledge, no less than with respect to every institution and every form of human activity, we almost instinctively ask, not merely what is its existing condition, but what were its earliest discoverable germs, and what has been the course of its development 1 The assertion of J. B. Say that the history of political economy is of little value, being for the most part a record of absurd and justly exploded opinions, belongs to a system of ideas already obsolete, and requires at the present time no formal refuta tion. It deserves notice only as reminding us that we must discriminate between history and antiquarianism : what from the first had no significance it is mere pedantry to study now. We need concern ourselves only with those modes of thinking which have prevailed largely and seriously influenced practice in the past, or in which we can discover the roots of the present and the future. When we thus place ourselves at the point of view of history, it becomes unnecessary to discuss the definition of political economy, or to enlarge on its method, at the out set. It will suffice to conceive it as the theory of social
wealth, or to accept provisionally Say s definition which