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These relics were greedily sought for by the potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched his library with some such treasures. But he obtained a nobler prize nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, the authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho.
The early study of Plato and Plotinus, with the commentaries and the THEOLOGIA PLATONICA of the illustrious Florentine; of Proclus, and Gemistius Pletho; and at a later period of the De Immenso et Innumerabili and the "De la causa, principio et uno," of the philosopher of Nola, who could boast of a Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville among his patrons, and whom the idolaters of Rome burnt as an atheist in the year 1600; had all contributed to prepare my mind for the reception and welcoming of the Cogito quia Sum, et Sum quia Cogito; a philosophy of seeming hardihood, but certainly the most ancient, and therefore presumptively the most natural.
When Gemisthus Pletho came to Florence, Cosimo made one of his audience, and was so moved by his eloquence that he determined to establish a Greek academy in the city on the first opportunity. He was the dear friend of Marsilio Ficino, and he founded the Libraries of S. Marco and of the Badia at Fiesole.
"Doubtless you know her monographs in the series of 'Mediaeval Byways'? He is working at Gemistus Pletho.
In this passion for reliques two different sentiments seem to have been combined the merely superstitious belief in the efficacy of charms, which caused the Venetians to guard the body of S. Mark so jealously, and the Neapolitans to watch the liqifaction of the blood of S. Januarius with a frenzy of excitement and that nobler respect for the persons of the mighty dead which induced Sigismondo Malatesta to transport the body of Gemistus Pletho to Rimini, and which rendered the supposed coffin of Aristotle at Palermo an object of admiration to Mussulman and Christian alike.
Take, then, the case of Savonarola. The Florentines received him gladly enough and heard him with honest admiration, even enthusiasm. Still, there is reason to believe they took him, in the main, spectacularly, as they also took that portentous old monomaniac Gemisthos Pletho who made religions as we might make pills.
The Platonic Academy, whose most celebrated member, Marsilius Ficinus, translated Plato and the Neoplatonists into Latin, was founded in 1440 on the suggestion of Georgius Gemistus Pletho under the patronage of Cosimo dei Medici.
Landor wrote his "Imaginary Conversations" when eighty-five, and Somerville his "Molecular Science" at eighty-eight; Isaac Walton was active with his pen at ninety; Hahnemann married at eighty and was working at ninety-one. J. B. Bailey has published a biography of "Modern Methusalehs," which includes histories of the lives of Cornaro, Titian, Pletho, Herschell, Montefiore, Routh, and others.
The fourteenth century, ere its close, saw the birth of Poggio, Valla, and the elder Guarino; and early in the fifteenth Florence under Cosmo de Medici was a nest of Platonists. These, headed by Gemistus Pletho, a born Greek, began about A.D. 1440 to write down Aristotle. For few minds are big enough to be just to great A without being unjust to capital B.
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