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De Pact. Conj. Certain it is that the circumstances of Bracciolini were so much improved after his forgery of the Annals that from that time he had the opportunity of indulging a cherished idea of his earlier manhood devoting himself to literary undertakings.
But in 1422 no professor was wanted in that country, because it had no university: Hungary then was, and remained a wilderness of unlettered barbarism for nearly half a century after, it not being until 1465, half a dozen years from the death of Bracciolini, that Matthias Corvinus established in Buda the first Hungarian University, filling it with valuable works which he got copied from rare manuscripts in the principal cities of Italy, especially Rome and Florence, and inviting to it men as learned as Bracciolini, not only from Italy, but also France and Germany.
His two years' residence here filled him with a marked admiration of London as well as with the most confused ideas of the antiquity and greatness of its commerce; and though comments have already been made on his description of it as eminently absurd, the passage is too curious not to be examined again; the more so as it has misled good historians of London, who believing that the account actually proceeded from Tacitus, have taken it to be incontrovertibly true, whereas it is only true, if it be applied, as it is applicable only to the advanced state of society and the large commercial town of which Bracciolini was the eye witness towards the close of the reign of Henry V., and the commencement of that of his infant son and successor.
IX. It will be here seen that the only thing mentioned as breaking out more suddenly and being more dreadful in its devastation than an earthquake is the "plague": "quo IMPROVISIOR GRAVIORque PESTIS fuit." Bracciolini spoke from personal observation.
I. We have, then, seen, how, from the inception to the commencement of the forgery; how, from its first suggestion to Bracciolini by Lamberteschi and its approval by Niccoli in February, 1422, down to the finishing of the transcription by the monk of the Abbey of Fulda in February, 1429, and its delivery into the hands of Bracciolini in probably the month following, seven years elapsed.
II. When in the course of the autumn before last an announcement was made of this work in some of the public journals, the compliment was paid to me in one of the most enlightened of them, the Daily News, by a brilliant and learned writer, who was a perfect master of his subject, questioning whether it could be possible that Bracciolini had forged the Annals, on account of his mode of composition being so thoroughly different from that of Tacitus.
VI. As this is the language of Cicero, and not Tacitus, so we find in other places in both parts of the Annals Bracciolini using the language of other leading Roman writers, in preference to that of the historian whom he was feigning himself to be. The following few instances will suffice: Tacitus makes the adjective agree with the substantive: Livy does not.
It was, certainly, well known to such an accomplished "grammaticus" as Bracciolini; and for the very simple reason that he adheres to it on all other occasions.
His studies drew him to the revival of classic learning which was becoming a passion across the Alps. One wandering scholar from Forli, who took the pompous name of Titus Livius and who wrote at his request the biography of Henry the Fifth, Humphrey made his court poet and orator. The Duke probably aided Poggio Bracciolini in his search for classical manuscripts when he visited England in 1420.
This being admitted, it seems quite consistent that Bracciolini should speak of Augustus Caesar, before he was Emperor, as "Octavianus." Julius Caesar, Act IV. sc. 1.
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