The element of satire in these ditties of the people leads me to speak of one very prominent poet of the fifteenth century--Domenico di Giovanni, called Il Burchiello, the rhyming barber.[312] He was born probably in 1403 at Florence, where his father, who was a Pisan, had acquired the rights of citizenship and followed the trade of a barber. Their shop was situated in Calimala, and formed a meeting-place for the wits, who carried Burchiello's verses over the town. The boy seems to have studied at Pisa, and acquired some slight knowledge of medicine.[313] At the age of four-and-twenty we find him married, with three children and no property.[314] Soon after this date, he separated from his wife; or else she left him on account of his irregular and dissolute habits. Peering through the obscurity of his somewhat sordid history, we see him getting into trouble with the Inquisition on account of profane speech, and then espousing the cause of the Albizzi against the Medicean faction. On the return of Cosimo de' Medici in 1434, Burchiello was obliged to leave Florence. He settled at Siena, and opened a shop in the Corso di Camollia, hoping to attract the Florentines whose business brought them to that quarter. Here he nearly ruined his health by debauchery, and narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of a certain Ser Rosello.[315] Leaving Siena about 1440, Burchiello spent the last years of his life in wandering through the cities of Italy. We hear of him at Venice entertained by one of the Alberti family, then at Naples, finally in Rome, where he died in 1448, poisoned probably by Robert, a bastard of Pandolfo Sigismondo Malatesta, at the instigation of his ancient enemy, Cosimo de' Medici.[316] Such long arms and such retentive memory had the merchant despot.
Burchiello's sonnets were collected some thirty years after his death and published simultaneously at various places.[317] They owed their popularity partly to their political subject-matter, but more to their strange humor. A foreigner can scarcely understand their language, far less appreciate their fun; for not only are they composed in Florentine slang of the fifteenth century, but this slang itself consists of detached phrases and burlesque allusions, chipped as it were from current speech, broken into splinters, and then wrought into a grotesque mosaic. That Burchiello had the merit of originality, and that he caught the very note of plebeian utterance, is manifest from the numerous editions and imitations of his sonnets.[318] His Muse was a _volgivaga Venus_ bred among the taverns and low haunts of vulgar company, whose biting wit introduced her to the society of the learned. Yet her utterances, at this distance of time, are so obscure and their point has been so blunted that to profess an admiration for Burchiello savors of literary affectation.[319] He was a poet of the transition; and the burlesque style which he made popular was destined to be superseded by the more refined and subtle Bernesque manner. Il Lasca, writing in the sixteenth century, expressed himself strongly against those who still ventured to compare Burchiello with the author of _Le Pesche_. "Let no one talk to me of Burchiello; to rank him with Berni is no better than to couple the fiend Charon with the Angel Gabriel."[320]