He helped Lorenzo to revive the Tuscan Mayday games, and wrote exquisite lyrics to be sung by girls in summer evenings on the public squares.

This giant of learning, who filled the lecture-rooms of Florence with Students of all nations, and whose critical and rhetorical labours marked an epoch in the history of scholarship, was by nature a versifier, and a versifier of the people.

He found nothing' easier than to throw aside his professor's mantle and to improvise _ballate_ for women to chant as they danced their rounds upon the Piazza di S.Trinita.The frontispiece to an old edition of such lyrics represents Lorenzo surrounded with masquers in quaint dresses, leading the revel beneath the walls of the Palazzo.
Another woodcut shows an angle of the Casa Medici in Via Larga, girls dancing the _carola_ upon the street below, one with a wreath and thyrsus kneeling, another presenting the Magnificent with a book of loveditties.

The burden of all this poetry was: "Gather ye roses while ye may, cast prudence to the winds, obey your instincts." There is little doubt that Michelangelo took part in these pastimes; for we know that he was devoted to poetry, not always of the gravest kind.

An anecdote related by Cellini may here be introduced, since it illustrates the Florentine customs I have been describing.