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Growing up, Lorenzo was surrounded by administrators, bankers, and courtiers, but also by great poets such as Luigi Pulci and Agnolo Poliziano.

Many of the most powerful families were heretics or open defenders of heresy—the Baroni, Pulci, Cipriani, Cavalcanti, Saraceni, and Malpresa.

I trust, however, it has been made sufficiently clear that Don Juan is something quite different from the mere mock-heroic—from Pulci, for instance, "sire of the half-serious rhyme," whom Byron professed to imitate.

It is not, for example, possible to think of finding in Pulci such a couplet as this: But almost sanctify the sweet excess By the immortal wish and power to bless.

After noticing the rise of Italian literature in the fourteenth century, it's subsequent degradation, it's revival in the fifteenth, and the rude attempts at restoring it, by Burchiello, Matteo Franco, and the three Pulci, that honour is conferred on Lorenzo: he is shown to have first, among his contemporaries, discriminated the true object, and expressed the real characteristics of poetry, in description, poetic comparison, and personification of material objects, of passions and affections; to have treated with success the prosopopœia.