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But anyone conversant with the writings and temper of Bracciolini will know well that such passages, instead of being in any way distasteful, would be altogether agreeable.
If Bracciolini could get so much for an incomplete copy of Livy's History, what might he not hope to get for a complete one? Imagination wanders into the realms of fairy. The genius of Livy, and also of Sallust, was more in accord with his own than the staid majestic coldness and the solemn curt sententiousness of Tacitus.
Behold Bracciolini once more in the palace of the Pontiffs of Rome; and now acting, in the capacity of Secretary, or, more properly, writer of the Apostolic Letters, to a Pope who was a poisoner. John XXIII. was even worse than that: he was a most atrocious violator of laws, human and divine; and some crimes he committed were so heinous that it would be indecent to place them before the public.
Freinshemius followed him, and some of the subsequent editors, among them Ernesti, who observes he could see no reason why the images of the Livii should have been omitted at the funeral of Drusus; nor anybody else, except for the very strong and simple reason that the author of the Annals, being Bracciolini, was not acquainted with the fact, which must have been familiar to Tacitus, that the Livii, and not the Julii, were the great ancestors of Drusus.
There are, in fact, a number of words, and also phrases, used by Bracciolini that are no where to be found in any of the works of Tacitus. To illustrate this, we will confine ourselves to two examples only of each, and to the first part of the Annals and the History of Florence.
This is not to be met with in the writings of any of the old Romans; it would seem, then, that the Annals was, as is alleged, a spurious composition of the fifteenth century, and that the same hand wrote both parts. "Extitere" is a word never used by Tacitus; or, more properly, he so avoids it that he uses it but once. Bracciolini, on the contrary, is very much given to the use of it.
"P" will not permit of being used in Latin at the end of words; but we find Bracciolini thus playing with it in the very first of his letters: "projicit eam personam sibi acceptiorem, cum illam multi petant porrectis manibus, atque ipse," &c. I. The literary merit and avaricious humour of Bracciolini. II. He is aided in his scheme by a monk of the Abbey of Fulda.
Nicholas V, who founded the Vatican Library in 1453, Cosmo de' Medici, who began the Medicean collection a little earlier, and Poggio Bracciolini, who ransacked all the cities and convents of Europe for manuscripts, together with the teachers of Greek, who in the first half of the fifteenth century escaped from Constantinople with precious freights of classic literature, are the heroes of this second period.
II. The different mode of writing of both. III. Their different manners of digressing. V. The spirit of the Renaissance shown in both parts of the Annals. VI. That both parts proceeded from the same hand shown in the writer pretending to know the feelings of the characters in the narrative. VII. The contradictions in the two parts of the Annals and in the works of Bracciolini.
Demetrios, having gleaned this knowledge in a pothouse, purchased a stout file, a scarlet cap and a lute. Ambrogio Bracciolini, head-gaoler at the fortress so the gossips told Demetrios had been a jongleur in youth, and minstrels were always welcome guests at San' Alessandro. The gaoler was a very fat man with icy little eyes.
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