"Facetiæ," may be taken as a specimen of the free, unbridled talk which circulated among the Pope's scribes. He took the clerical habit without vow or ordination, reserving himself for future preferment, if it should come in a desirable shape, and being thus unable to marry, lived for a long time in concubinage with a woman by whom he had a number of children. At length, when he was fifty-five years old, he contracted marriage with a Florentine lady of eighteen, and had by her a legitimate family. An era in his life, as well as in the history of humanism, was his residence at Constance during the Council. At the suggestion of Niccolò Niccoli, as it would seem, he made use of some of his leisure time in searching for manuscripts. A visit to St. Gallen in company with two friends, was most abundantly rewarded, as we shall see hereafter, and his discoveries, more than anything else, revived and increased the zeal for the literary remains of the ancients, which Petrarch had awakened, and aroused the emulation of the Italian magnates to get possession of the new treasures, as well as to institute new searches for them. At Constance, also, he was a witness of the trial and death of Jerome of Prague, which he describes in a letter to Leonardo Bruni in such terms, that his correspondent warns him against showing so much affection for the cause of a heretic, and advises him to write upon such subjects in a more guarded manner. Here, too, he devoted some of his leisure hours to the study of Hebrew, but never went beyond the merest elements of the language. After the deposition of John XXIII., having failed of gaining favor with Martin V., -the Pope appointed by the Council-Poggio spent some time in England, where the Bishop of Winchester, Cardinal Beaufort, who had been at Constance and may have seen him there, made him offers of a benefice in the Church, which he declined. From his exile in the far off, barbarous land of

*

*It concludes thus:-" Neither did Mutius suffer his hand to be burned as patiently as Jerome endured the burning of his whole body; nor did Socrates drink the hemlock as cheerfully as Jerome submitted to the fire." His mind runs naturally to heathens as the standard of comparison. The letter is appealed to by Neander in the last volume of his history, and a translation of the whole of it is given by Shepherd.

England, he returned again to Italy, to his literary friends, and his employment in the Roman Court. Here he held his office until 1452, or possibly longer, frequently making visits to Florence, and residing there with the Curia, during the exile of Eugenius from his capital. He was, for a short time, Chancellor of Florence, after the death of Marsuppini, in 1453, but some unpopularity on his part, or complaints on the part of citizens, induced him to resign the office, and he spent the closing years of his long life in affluence, in a villa of his near the city, engaged in the composition of his Latin History of Florence. Besides this work, his Facetic and his Letters, which are more prized than those of any other humanist, he wrote several translations from the Greek, a number of eulogies on funeral occasions, with an equal number of invectives and of highly esteemed moral essays.

Poggio was an "open and large man, without knowing how to feign or dissemble," says the old bookseller, from whom we have already quoted. We may go farther, and say that he had not only a free-speaking, but a most bitter tongue; that he was at variance with many of his literary contemporaries, although always maintaining friendship with Niccolò Niccoli and the Florentine set; that he detested the monks, and by the keenness of his wit and his biting satire, probably did more to undermine the Church which supported him, than any man of his age, or of the succeeding age, until Erasmus.

Two Florentines, of a very different temper and spirit from Poggio, deserve some mention, before we proceed to say a few words on the humanists whose lot in life placed them wholly, or in part, outside of this favored circle.

Gianozzo Manetti, born in 1396, of a noble Florentine family, and destined by his father to a merchant's life, grew weary of his business, and at the age of twenty-five began the study of Latin, to which he applied himself with such devotion as to allow only five hours to sleep. In time the knowledge of Greek and of Hebrew was acquired, and to perfect himself

"Egli era in questo tempo molto ricco," says Vespasian, "per essere stato lungo tempo in corte di Roma."

in these tongues "he took two Greeks and a Hebrew into his house, bargaining with them that they should always talk with him in their native languages," in which way he rendered both tongues so familiar, that he used them in conversation just as if they were his vernacular. As his reputation grew, he was selected to explain the ethics of Aristotle, in the public school or university of Florence, in which exercise he had many scholars, who afterwards became celebrated for their learning."* Perhaps no man of the age was a more universal scholar than he. Skilled in logic and ethics, acquainted with theology, a proficient in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, not without knowledge of the Rabbinical writings, and able to dispute with Jews on their own ground-to all this he united the most estimable and devout character, the greatest truthfulness, respect for religion and faith in the divine government. He was entrusted by the Republic with the most important public stations. On various occasions the head of the University, and in the city government, he also was sent on important public embassies to the Popes, to Naples, and other Italian powers, and was more than once selected by other towns to be their Captain. Of his Hebrew studies a remarkable fruit was his translation of the Psalter, with the Greek of the Seventy, and Jerome's Latin version, in separate columns by its side, to which was prefixed a defense of his version in five books. This seems to have utterly perished. He also translated the New Testament, together with several of the works of Aristotle. Among his other works we name a number of orations on funeral or other occasions, lives of illustrious persons, as of Socrates, Seneca, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pope Nicholas V.-whom he survived more than four years, since he died in 1459-and a work in ten books against the Hebrews, which is still extant, in manuscript, in the Laurentian Library, and finally an autobiography. His library was a large one for the time, embracing, like his mind, various departments of learning and science. He had a design to open a public library in the Convent of Santo Spirito, where he had

*Tiraboschi, vi. 1158, ed. 2, of 1824.

received his first initiation into the sciences, but death prevented the execution of the plan.*

With all his worth and learning Manetti had no great influence on the progress of letters, and was soon forgotten. One cause of this may have been that he did not concentrate but divided his studies, and another, suggested by Voigt, that the graces were wanting in him :-" one whose Latin style was so monotonous, and wearisome by reason of its unrivaled prolixity, whose clumsy panegyrics heaped up one superlative upon another, such a one, according to the prevailing taste of the times, would gain little credit by the most open show of knowledge."

The other remaining Florentine of whom we propose to speak is Ambrogio Traversari, who was born in 1386, near Forli, in the Romagna, and at the age of fourteen entered the Camaldulensian monastery degli Angioli, at Florence. If he was, as is generally said, a scholar of Chrysoloras, he must have given himself almost immediately to the study of Greek, in which he became a great proficient and gave instructions to some of the forty brethren in the convent, as well as to Manetti, whom we have just spoken of. In 1431, Ambrogio, who now was widely known as a scholar, and esteemed for his worth of character, was made by Eugenius IV. General of the order of Camalduli, and was active in carrying out the reforms which the Pope had instituted. Sent by Eugenius, in 1435, to the Council of Basel, he there advocated the Pope's side against the prevalent views of the assembled fathers with zeal and dexterity. From Basel he visited the court of the Emperor Sigismund, on a commission from the same Pope, who sent him again to Venice to meet the Emperor and the patriarch of the Greeks, and to escort them to Ferrara. At Ferrara and at Florence, where the council was continued, he played a leading

*For Manetti's life we have two early authorities, that of Vespasian, who says more about him than about any one else, except Frederic, Duke of Urbino, and that of Naldo Naldi, in Muratori's Scriptores Rer. Ital. xx., 527.

According to Tiraboschi, vi. 1182. ed. 2, a Greek, Demetrius Scarani by name, became a monk in the convent in 1417, and aided Ambrose to acquire the Greek language.

part in the debates with the Greeks and the attempts to bring about a union of the churches, in which his uncommon knowledge of Greek was a great help to the Roman cause. He died soon afterwards, in October, 1439. His works were translations from Greek fathers, and an itinerary, or hodœporicon, containing his day-book of journeys undertaken in the reforms of his order after he became its general, which, with twenty books of letters, has been printed; and he also, at the request of Niccoli and Cosimo de' Medici, began, but never finished, a translation of Diogenes Laertius.

Traversari is an instance of a strict monk, uniting to a rigorous observance of the rules of his order a great curiosity in regard to heathen literature, which led him into daily association with men of other morals and lives. One of the best parts of Prof. Voigt's work is that in which he notices this inconsistency as a sign of the conflicting influences of the times, painting it, however, in too glaring colors. We translate one or two passages :—

"He who knew Traversari only as a public character might take him for a hard, intriguing, vain-glorious, hypocritical monk. We are not surprised that he was not much loved, that he was involved, especially, in bitter strife with brethren of his order, and every where was the author of variance and hatred rather than of reconciliation. But he was quite another person in his Florentine home and among the literati; here he showed his accessible and amiable side. In the convent degli Angioli came together the Medicen brothers, (Cosimo and Lorenzo), the sprightly, acute Niccoli, the cold, saturnine Marsuppini and others, for almost daily confidential intercourse. At Cosimo's table one might see the little general of the Camaldulensian order, with his cheerful countenance and great liveliness, entertaining the company. Men like Marsuppini, the classical heathen, like Bruni and Poggio, the frivolous jesters, stood in no danger of a moral lecture from him. With Niccoli, he lived in the friendship, almost, of one student with another. Fondness for books and literary tastes bound them to one another. To Niccoli he sent his reports and all the discoveries he made through Italy when he examined the convents, and still more, the conventual libraries. On the other hand, if Niccoli was abroad with his Benvenuta [who was at once his housekeeper and mistress], he entrusted to the care of the general of monks the most precious thing that he left behind, the keys to his iron book-chests—a good part of the books, moreover, Traversari had always by him in his cell-the antiquarian treasures of his house and his clothing, which the Camaldulensian, at the request of his pedantically neat friend, ordered one of the brethren of the convent to beat and brush. We see, from their correspondence, with what surprising patience Traversari endured the petty humors and weaknesses of Niccoli, what attention and