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The Life of Lorenzo De Medici, Called the Magnificent
The Life of Lorenzo De Medici Called the Magnificent Author:Thomas Roscoe, William Roscoe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR. Few men who have risen to eminence have been less indebted to extrinsic circumstances, or adventitious aids of any kind, than the author... more » of Lorenzo de' Medici and Leo X. He was surrounded, on the contrary, by everything unfavourable to the development of high moral and intellectual culture ; and whatever he accomplished was solely due to the force of his own genius and talents, and to his untiring energy of character. He boasted neither friend nor patron to open or to smooth his ascent of the arduous path, which a lofty sense of duty and indignant feeling against all oppression, rather than any low ambition, had marked out for him. Apart from mere infant instruction, his education was his own work ; he formed his own tastes, habits, and pursuits, and, in the foundation of his character and future reputation, he became his own Mentor. Nature had done much for him, but he did more for himself. He never abused her gifts; he employed them with a gratitude, a devotion, an unwearied strength and labour, and dispensed their fruits with lavish hand, in a love of mankind which ceased only with his being on earth. The lives of public men—which may now truly be said to be public property, and read by a whole people beyond the old pale of factions and of parties—ought invariably to be written with a view to that people's moral and social improvement. It is for this object that the writer wishes in the outset to convey to them his impressions,—his still lively recollection of the qualities of a man who rose from among themselves ; who thought, who wrote, who toiled for them; who never ceased his labours in their great cause ; who first advocated the slave's freedom in the mart of slavery itself, in the very face of slave-owners; and in public assemblies, and in the ...« less