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When he returned to Paris, he found occupation at once; and, as his Scots biographers love to record, "three of the most learned men in the world taught humanity in the same college," viz. Turnebus, Muretus, and Buchanan. Then followed a strange episode in his life.
For, by affecting a certain liberty in censuring morals, he avoided all offence, under the cloak of simplicity." Of him and his compeers, Turnebus, and Muretus, and their friend Andrea Govea, Ronsard, the French court poet, said that they had nothing of the pedagogue about them but the gown and cap.
As the learned philosophers FRACASTORIUS and SCALIGER have highly prized them: so have the eloquent orators, PONTANUS and MURETUS very gloriously estimated them. As GEORGIUS BUCHANANUS' JEPTHAE, amongst all modern tragedies, is able to abide the touch of ARISTOTLE's precepts and EURIPIDES's examples: so is Bishop WATSON's ABSALOM.
He heard the applause of the Romish party ring through Europe he heard the commendation of Philip of Spain he knew that the most eloquent orator of the Church, Muretus, had congratulated the pope upon this signal victory of the truth.
We can thus clearly perceive, why it was when a forgery was to be undertaken, it was of an ancient classic, and the selection made was a continuance to the History of Tacitus: we, also, know how natural it was when Bracciolini found, after deliberation and a trial, that there was little or no sympathy between him and Tacitus, and, certainly, no identity of genius, that he should strive his utmost to cast off such a heavy burden and endeavour to carry a lighter load by fabricating a continuation of Livy; but no guinea is required to be spent for a visit to the seance of a medium, to call up the spirit of Cosmo de' Medici by the rapping of a table: in the first place, the spirit would be sure not to come, however hard the table might be rapped, from fear of being addressed in Latin or Italian, as spirits are always sulky when they speak languages that are unknown to the medium: in the second place, after what we hear from Vossius and Muretus about the historical studies of the enlightened Princely Florentine, we want no ghost of his to come from the grave, and tell us that he would not have taken one entire book of Livy for one little page of Tacitus.
Interim gravis utrobique et disertus. De Historicis Latinis. Lib. Facius. De Viris Illustribus, p. 57. Flor. Here we see the cause of the error committed by Vossius, Muretus, and a number of historians; not only this phrase of Fazio's, but the manner in which contemporary Florentines thought of and demeaned themselves towards Cosmo de' Medici.
Muretus remarks that the stories of Seneca's memory seemed to him almost incredible, until he witnessed a still more marvelous occurrence. The sum of his statement is that at Padua there dwelt a young Corsican, a brilliant and distinguished student of civil law. Having heard of his marvelous faculty of memory a company of gentlemen requested from him an exhibition of his power.
His broad, bald, red face, ending in an auburn spade-shaped beard, wore the air of content. Around him were old books that had belonged to famous students of old Scaliger, Meursius, Muretus and before him lay the proof-sheets of his long-deferred work, a new critical edition of "Demetrius of Scepsis."
All the rest show an oblivion or indifference most unlike the genial communicativeness of Cicero, Horace, and Ovid. His father was one Suetonius Lenis, a military tribune and wearer of the angusticlave. Muretus, however, desirous to give him a more illustrious origin, declares that his father was the Suetonius Paulinus mentioned by Tacitus.
By Mark Pattison, late Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. London, 1885. Critics have spoken of his learning, but the description is only relatively accurate. Of him, in this respect, we may say, what he said of Erasmus. 'Erasmus, though justly styled by Muretus, eruditus sane vir ac multæ lectionis, was not a learned man in the special sense of the word not an érudit. He was the man of letters.
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