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Repeatedly in letters to his friend Niccoli, during two years and more of anxiety and discontent passed by him from 1420 to 1422 in the Palace of the Prince Prelate, Bracciolini complained bitterly of the magnificent promises not being fulfilled that the Cardinal had held forth to him on condition of his accompanying him to England.
Numbered among them were some who had great fame for transcribing; learned men, who knew Latin almost, if not quite, as well as they knew their mother-tongue, Cosimo of Cremona, Leonardo Giustiniani of Venice, Guarino of Verona, Biondo Flavio, Gasparino Barzizza, Sarzana, Niccoli, Vitturi, Lazarino Resta, Faccino Ventraria, and some others; in fact, a host; for nearly all the literary men, in consideration of the enormous sums they obtained for copies of the ancient classics carefully and correctly written, devoted themselves to the occupation of transcription, as, in these times, men of the highest attainments in letters, some, too, of the greatest, even European, celebrity, give their services, for the handsome remunerations they receive, to the newspaper and periodical press.
Peter's throne. IV. For losing that one glimpse of light in public life, Bracciolini was more than compensated by a beam of beneficent Fortune in his private career, which threw such lustre on his path, that it rescued him from what must have been his inevitable fate, morbid cynicism: it was one of the happiest incidents that ever occurred to him: he formed the acquaintance of a man, seventeen years his senior who, in the lapse of a very short time, became to him a father and adviser, to whom present or absent he imparted every one of his schemes, thoughts, cares, sayings and doings; who was the unfailing allayer of his anxieties, alleviator of his sorrows, and most constant support of all his undertakings, Niccolo Niccoli, of whom I must take notice, as he was one of the most active stimulators of the forgery of the Annals.
With the lucrative contingencies attached to his forgery, such as disposing of copies from the original, a privilege which he, doubtless, obtained from his friend Cosmo de' Medici, and for which he must have frequently got large sums of money, he may have gratified the inclination he expressed six years before to his friend, Niccoli, of spending 400 gold sequins a year; "non sum pecuniosus ... erat animus expendere usque ad CCCC. aureos, non quod tot habeam."
To this Niccoli retorts that Aristotle gives this not as his own conviction, but as the popular impression; in his Ethics, where he speaks as he thinks, he calls him noble who strives after that which is truly good. Together with these discussions, we find a sketch of the conditions of the nobles in various parts of Italy.
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.
A still greater, nay, "the greatest reason for his desire of returning to Greek literature," he gives in a letter to Niccoli dated London, the 17th of July, 1420, that, in "skimming over Aristotle during the spring of that year, not for the purpose of studying him then, but reading and seeing what there was in each of his works," he had found that sort of "perusal not wholly unprofitable, as he had learnt something every day, superficial though it might be, from understanding Aristotle in his own language, when he found him in the words of translators either incomprehensible or nonsensical."
Niccolo Niccoli by common consent was the great Mæcenas of his age; his passion for books was boundless, and he had gathered the best collection that had been seen in Italy for many generations.
III. As Bracciolini gave his assent to the fabrication of additional books to the History of Tacitus, his friends Niccoli and Lamberteschi as well as himself were of opinion that his presence was required in Italy, in order that the three should take counsel together, and, discussing the matter in concert, deliberate fully what was best to be done: "nam maturius deliberare poterimus, quid sit agendum," he says in a letter addressed to Niccoli from London on the 5th of March, 1422; and as he left England for Italy in the summer, and did not begin his forgery till the autumn of the next year, he spent the interval of some eighteen, nineteen or twenty months in continually holding cabinet councils with his two friends, and secretly devising with them on what plan he could best execute the addition to the History of Tacitus; no doubt, he thought they had so cleverly arranged matters in providing against all mishaps that he never would be found out.
These words occur in a letter that bears date Rome, the 25th of September, 1427; and whatever interpretation the reader may feel disposed to put upon them, he must admit, after considering all that has been said, that they seem to confirm wonderfully the truth of our theory, pointing, as they unquestionably do, to some mysterious and deep secret about Tacitus that existed only between Niccoli and Bracciolini; and what could that secret be?
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