And in the 'Convito'
he disconnects 'nobile' and 'nobilita' from every condition of birth,
and identifies the idea with the capacity for moral and intellectual
eminence, laying a special stress on high culture by calling 'nobilita'
the sister of 'filosofia.'
And as time went on, the greater the influence of humanism on the
Italian mind, the firmer and more widespread became the conviction that
birth decides nothing as to the goodness or badness of a man. In the
fifteenth century this was the prevailing opinion. Poggio, in his
dialogue 'On nobility,' agrees with his interlocutors-- Niccolo
Niccoli, and Lorenzo Medici, brother of the great Cosimo-- that there
is no other nobility than that of personal merit. The keenest shafts of
his ridicule are directed against much of what vulgar prejudice thinks
indispensable to an aristocratic life. 'A man is !111 the farther
removed from true nobility, the longer his forefathers have plied the
trade of brigands. The taste for hawking and hunting saviours no more
of nobility than the nests and lairs of the hunted creatures of
spikenard. The cultivation of the soil, as practiced by the ancients,
would be much nobler than this senseless wandering through the hills
and woods, by which men make themselves like to the brutes than to the
reasonable creatures. It may serve well enough as a recreation, but not
as the business of a lifetime.
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