for his share in this work, and because his own story is a sort of
analogue or visible equivalent to the expression of this purpose in
his writings, that something of a general interest still belongs to
the name of Pico della Mirandola, [36] whose life, written by his
nephew Francis, seemed worthy, for some touch of sweetness in
it, to be translated out of the original Latin by Sir Thomas More,
that great lover of Italian culture, among whose works the life of
Pico, Earl of Mirandola, and a great lord of Italy, as he calls
him, may still be read, in its quaint, antiquated English.

Marsilio Ficino has told us how Pico came to Florence. It was
the very day--some day probably in the year 1482--on which
Ficino had finished his famous translation of Plato into Latin, the
work to which he had been dedicated from childhood by Cosmo
de' Medici, in furtherance of his desire to resuscitate the
knowledge of Plato among his fellow-citizens. Florence indeed,
as M. Renan has pointed out, had always had an affinity for the
mystic and dreamy philosophy of Plato, while the colder and
more practical philosophy of Aristotle had flourished in Padua,
and other cities of the north; and the Florentines, though they
knew perhaps very little about him, had had the name of the
great idealist often on their lips. To increase this knowledge,
Cosmo had founded the Platonic academy, with periodical
discussions at the Villa Careggi. The fall of Constantinople in
1453, and the council in 1438 for the reconciliation of the Greek
and Latin Churches, had brought to Florence many a needy
Greek scholar. And now the work was completed, the door of the
mystical temple lay open to all who could construe Latin, and the
[37] scholar rested from his labour; when there was introduced
into his study, where a lamp burned continually before the bust of