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Poor good Kaiser: they say he was a humane stately gentleman, stately though shortish; fond of pardoning criminals where he could; very polite to Muratori and the Antiquaries, even to English Rymer, in opening his Archives to them, and made roads in the Dalmatian Hill-Country, which remain to this day. I do not wonder he grew more and more saturnine, and addicted to solid taciturn field-sports.
There could be no question of juggling; Muratori was an honourable old Garibaldist who had been wounded in his youth, and now went about on crutches, but, since we have never heard of its being made practical use of, it would seem that there was nothing in it. I did not care to look up all the Italians to whom I had introductions from Villari. But I tried my luck with a few of them.
Muratori, Chron. di Bologna, xviii. 254. The stipends paid to teachers of jurisprudence were much more liberal than those paid to humanists. In the Diary of Sanudo it is recorded that a jurist professor at Padua received a thousand ducats per annum. Lauro Quirino, a professor of rhetoric, meantime received only forty ducats, and Laurentius Valla at Pavia received fifty sequins.
Wonder is expressed that with such limitless wealth at its command, an "Enrichment Committee" should have brought in so poverty-stricken a Report. Have we not Muratori and Mabillon? it is asked: Daniel and Assemani, Renaudot and Goar? Are there not Missals Roman, Ambrosian, and Mozarabic? Breviaries Anglican, Gallican, and Quignonian?
The able writer has noticed that the very mutilated and incorrect manner in which Muratori has printed all that he has given of Sanuto, and especially Le Vite de' Dogi, of which the original copy still remains inedited in the Estensian Library at Modena.
But, from a comparison of Signor Tamburini's work with the portions of the original preserved by Muratori, we have satisfied ourselves that his honesty is on a level with his capacity as a translator, and what his capacity is we propose to enable our readers to judge for themselves.
He took a pen and noted the name down, and said, "But Tassoni has criticised Petrarch very ingeniously." "Yes, but he has dishonoured taste and literature, like Muratori." "Here he is. You must allow that his learning is immense." "Est ubi peccat." Voltaire opened a door, and I saw a hundred great files full of papers. "That's my correspondence," said he.
It is scarcely worth while to refer to the supposed evidence of the "Canon of Muratori," since the date of this fragment is utterly unknown. In the year 1740 Muratori published this document in a collection of Italian antiquities, stating that he had found it in the Ambrosian library at Milan, and that he believed that the MS. from which he took it had been in existence about 1000 years.
I have spent hours walking up and down this book-lined room, wondering whether the universe or I were mad. Sometimes I laughed, for the thing is sheerly ridiculous. Sometimes I cursed at the impertinence of the thing in happening at all. Once I stumbled over a volume of Muratori lying on the floor, and I kicked it across the room. Then I took it up, and wept over the loosened binding.
Bracciolini might have said the same of himself. There is no getting at any insight as to his nature from the biographies of him; they are all such faint and imperfect sketches: we learn nothing of him from that curiosity of literature, L'Enfant's astonishing performance, "Poggiana" in which the pages and the blunders contend for supremacy in number, and the blunders get it, nor from that bald, cold business, entitled "Vita Poggii," which Recanati, flinging aside brilliancy and clinging fast to fidelity in facts and plainness of speech, prefixed to his edition of Bracciolini's "Historia Florentina," published at Venice in 1715, and which Muratori, sixteen years after, reprinted at Milan along with the said "History of Florence, in the 20th volume of his "Rerum Italicarum Scriptores;" nor from the Rev.
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