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Yet it was precisely in such places that Bracciolini and his companions looked for the books that they wanted; what is still stranger, they always found in such queer places the exact books they were in search of. It was so, for example, when they recovered the books in the monastery of St.
I. If there be one man more than another who might easily fall into the error of supposing that an ancient Roman could take in the most capricious and arbitrary way any name he pleased, Flavius, or Julius, or Pius, it would be a man like Bracciolini, who, as Secretary of the Popes for forty years, was in the habit of seeing every now and then, and that, too, at very brief intervals, a Cardinal, on being raised to the dignity of the Papacy, take any name from whim or fancy, and, sometimes a very queer name, too, as a Cossa taking the name of John, or a Colonna the name of Martin.
These I shall now endeavour to point out were the handiwork of Bracciolini, to whose wondrous power of assimilating his literary abilities to those of another I must pay this just tribute; that in those six books of the Annals he mastered the simplicity, though he came far short of the elegance of Tacitus.
Evidently the needy, ignorant, stupid monk of Hirschfeldt was not over busy in the Abbey of Fulda transcribing the forgery of Bracciolini and incorporating it with the works of Tacitus in closely copied Lombard characters of great antiquity.
The narrative of Bracciolini, light and airy, yet withal touching and graphic, has a wonderful effect in the "Chronicon Tarvisinum": it's not unlike sunlight breaking in and brightly shining between banks of fog.
On the deposition of Gregory XII. for that Pope's duplicity and share in the intrigues and dissensions which disgraced the Pontifical palace for three years, Bracciolini seems to have retired from Rome, and to have remained a resident in Florence during the greater part of the ten months' reign of the mild, pious and philosophical Alexander V., the only able and virtuous divine, who sat in those dark times on St.
XV. About the Caspian Sea. XVI. Accounted for. XVII. A passage clearly written by Bracciolini. It is now, however, time to pass on to other matters more interesting and important, and, it may be, more convincing.
But Bracciolini puts before us nothing like this; only incongruous, unimaginable and un-Romanlike personages, people who gibber at us, as idiots in their asylums, as that unfortunate simpleton, the Emperor Claudius; murderous criminals who glower and scowl upon us, as those two monsters of iniquity, Tiberius and Nero; pimps and parasites beyond number, who so plague us with their perpetual presence, that the revolted soul at length wonders how so many such beings can be acting together, and be so degenerate, when Nature might have designed most, if not all, of them, for greater and more salutary purposes.
I. The poetic diction of Tacitus, and its fabrication in the Annals. II. Florid passages in the Annals. III. Metrical composition of Bracciolini. VI. The language of other Roman writers, Livy, Quintus Curtius and Sallust. VII. The phrase "non modo ... sed", and other anomalous expressions, not Tacitus's. VIII. Words not used by Tacitus, distinctus and codicillus.
Bracciolini is one of these writers; his contradictions, too, are most remarkable: they are to be found just as well in his acknowledged productions as in both parts of the Annals. Many instances might be given; the following may suffice: What then is the characteristic of Tiberius? Forgetfulness or remembrance in his hatreds?
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