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The only pity is that Poggio's work was not fuller and was not illustrated with sketches. Far more was left in his time than was found by Raphael eighty years later.
In Poggio's walks through Rome the study of the remains themselves is for the first time more intimately combined with that of the ancient authors and inscriptions the latter he sought out from among all the vegetation in which they were imbedded the writer's imagination is severely restrained, and the memories of Christian Rome carefully excluded.
All that we have of the histories of Livy come to us through Poggio's industry as a manuscript-hunter; this same worthy found and brought away from different monasteries a perfect copy of Quintilian, a Cicero's oration for Caecina, a complete Tertullian, a Petronius Arbiter, and fifteen or twenty other classics almost as valuable as those I have named.
These are they alone who have distinguished Florence by the histories that they have written. The pride of the citizen and a just sense of the value of history, together with sound remarks upon Venice and Milan, mingle curiously in this passage with the pedantry of a fifteenth-century scholar. Poggio's Historia Populi Florentini is given in the XXth volume of Muratori's collection.
I spent a few days at Oxford copying out a seventeenth century translation of Poggio's Liber Facetiarum or the Hypneroto-machia of Poliphili for a publisher; I forget which, for I copied both; and returned very pale to my troubled family. I had lived upon bread and tea because I thought that if antiquity found locust and wild honey nutritive, my soul was strong enough to need no better.
It was Poggio's son, Jacopo, who took part in the Pazzi Conspiracy, of which we are about to read, and was very properly hanged for it. Hawkwood was an Essex man, the son of a tanner at Hinckford, and was born there early in the fourteenth century.
From German monasteries, Poggio's friend, Nicolas of Treves, brought away twelve comedies of Plautus and a fragment of Aulus Gellius. Dear as their pagan books were to the monkish collectors, it was upon their Bibles, their psalters, and their other religious books that these mediaeval bibliomaniacs expended their choicest art and their most loving care. St.
But George of Trebisond was vilified after Poggio's fashion, and called 'brute' and 'heretic, and 'more Turkish than the filthiest Turk, with a hailstorm of still harder epithets.
The original form of the incident is found in the Hitopadesa, where three sharpers persuade a Bráhman that the goat he is carrying for a sacrifice is a dog. This story of the Florentine noodle or rather Poggio's version may have been suggested by a tale in the Gesta Romanorum, in which the emperor's physician is made to believe that he had leprosy.
Yet he was certainly a very accurate scholar; and he showed a proper manly spirit when he boxed Poggio's ears in the Theatre of Pompey for reminding him of the cleverness expected from 'a starving Greek. His life, one is glad to think, had a very peaceful end.
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