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foreign loans, saved themselves from bankruptcy by bankrupting their city. There was no fiction or poetry about that! Cosimo de' Medici spent much time and money inculcating the philosophy of Plato; but he never forgot his collections-except in case of some poor devil of a poet or philosopher whose debt he chose to forget. In the matter of interest, this house, like the railroads a few decades ago, was wont to charge what the traffic would stand.

Boccaccio, Petrarch, Ariosto and other Italian poets and romancers, alternately burned incense at the Medician shrine and satirically smiled at the undue satisfaction with which their homage was received.

Lorenzo de' Medici, late in the fifteenth century, evolved a Florentine plan which as a centralizer went one better than the well advertised and thus far successful "Des Moines plan" of city government! He established a council in which absolute power was concentrated. It was composed of seventy citizens appointed for life, and all completely under his influence, so that from that time forth a banker, in the role of benevolent despot, held undisputed sway in Florence.

The banker-poet of the fifteenth century, Lorenzo de' Medici, was wont to make elaborate ex

cuses for his love of books and for his adventures in literature. Writing to Ficino, he says:

"When my mind is disturbed with the tumults of public business, and my ears are stunned with the clamours of turbulent citizens, how would it be possible for me to support such contention unless I found a relaxation in science?"

Pico of Mirandula was lost in wonder that, even when Lorenzo was deeply engaged in affairs of the republic, "his conversation and his thoughts should be turned to subjects of literature, as if he were perfect master of his time."

Speaking of his indulgence in amatory verse, Lorenzo makes this apology:

"Persecuted as I have been from my youth, some indulgence may perhaps be allowed me for having sought consolation in these pursuits."

The banker-historian, Roscoe, in his life of Lorenzo de' Medici, says that Lorenzo's poems are "distinguished by a vigour of imagination, an accuracy of judgment, and an elegance of style, which afforded the first great example of improvement, and entitle him, almost exclusively, to the honourable appellation of the restorer of Italian literature."

Without multiplying quotations, let his "Clamourous Cranes," a fifteenth century suggestion of Bryant's masterpiece, "To a Water

fowl," suffice to illustrate the bold flights of Lorenzo's imagination:

Marking the tracts of air, the clamourous cranes
Wheel their due flight, in varied lines descried;
And each with outstretched neck his rank maintains,
In marshall'd order through th' ethereal void.

Lorenzo's sonnets, chiefly amatory, are written in a style and with a refinement of finish which ranks their author almost with Petrarch, and along with Mrs. Browning and Rossetti. These first lines to one of his sonnets convey an impression of the careful elaboration of his amatory

verse:

Ah, pearly drops, that, pouring from those eyes,
Spoke the dissolving cloud of soft desire!

Muratori, in his treatise on the poetry of Italy, speaking of Lorenzo's sonnets, says: "It is gold from the mine, mixed indeed with ruder materials, yet it is always gold."

Passing over several centuries, and from Italy to England, I am halted by a work entitled "Discourse of Trade," by Sir Josiah Child, published late in the seventeenth century, in which is coined the opprobrious word, "bankering," as follows:

"This gaining scarcity of money proceeds from the trade of bankering, which obstructs circula

tion, advances usury, and renders it so easy that most men, as soon as they can make up a sum of from £50 to £100, send it in to the goldsmith, which doth and will occasion, while it lasts, that fatal pressing necessity for money visible throughout the whole Kingdom, both to prince and people."

The conservative quality of early eighteenth century London bankers, who had descended from the goldsmiths of an earlier time, is shown in Gay's letter to Snow in 1720, referring probably to the collapse of the South Sea bubble. The impecunious poet and dramatist wrote

When credit sank and commerce gasping lay,
Thou stood'st, nor sent one Bill unpaid away.

The banker of the old school, the successor to the Lombards, as described in Lawson's "History of Banking,"* is in sharp contrast with the banker of to-day. "He was a man of serious manners, plain apparel, the steadiest conduct, and a rigid observer of formalities. As you looked in his face, you could read in intelligible characters that the ruling maxim of life, the one to which he turned all his thoughts, and by which he shaped all his actions, was 'that he who would be trusted

* Bankers Magazine, April, 1852.

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