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But against that robbery Bardo de' Bardi shall struggle though blind and forsaken, he shall struggle. I too have a right to be remembered as great a right as Pontanus or Merula, whose names will be foremost on the lips of posterity, because they sought patronage and found it; because they had tongues that could flatter, and blood that was used to be nourished from the client's basket.
A certain latinisator, dwelling near the hospital, said since, producing the authority of one Taponnus, I lie, it was one Pontanus the secular poet, who wished those bells had been made of feathers, and the clapper of a foxtail, to the end they might have begot a chronicle in the bowels of his brain, when he was about the composing of his carminiformal lines.
The epic poet should diligently strive to attain the second and third, and may learn how to do it from the masters of rhetoric. Thus a poet should seek in an epic the same qualities which an orator is supposed by classical rhetorics to strive for in the statement of facts of his speech. Furthermore, says Pontanus, one can write very good poetry by paraphrasing orations in verse.
He himself made up his estimate from current gossip or from the satires of Pontanus and Sannazzaro two poets who lived in Naples and not in Rome. Their epigrams merely show that they were inspired by a deep-seated hatred of Alexander and Cæsar, who had wrought the overthrow of the Aragonese dynasty, and further with what crimes men were ready to credit evil-doers.
When Charles VIII. of France invaded Naples, Pontanus was deputed to address the French conqueror.
Passion gave to the son of Croesus the voice which nature had denied him. And Antiochus fell into a fever, inflamed with the beauty of Stratonice, too deeply imprinted in his soul. Pliny pretends to have seen Lucius Cossitius, who from a woman was turned into a man upon her very wedding-day. Pontanus and others report the like metamorphosis to have happened in these latter days in Italy.
We have only a few letters written by her during her residence in Rome, and there is not a single poem dedicated to her or which mentions her; therefore it is due to the malicious epigrams of Sannazzaro and Pontanus that she has been branded as the most depraved of courtesans.
At Naples he saw the collection of the works of Pontanus, presented to the Dominicans by his daughter Eugenia; at Bologna he found a long roll of the Pentateuch, 'written by Esdras'; and at Ferrara he described the tomb of Coelius, who was buried among his books, at his own desire, like a miser in the midst of his riches.
Errors, and accidents, and delays are what we have to contend with. Did not Pontanus err two hundred times, before he could obtain even the matter on which to found his experiments? The great Flamel, too, did he not labour four-and-twenty years, before he ascertained the first agent? What difficulties and hardships did not Cartilaceus encounter, at the very threshold of his discoveries?
The following to name only the most important charged her explicitly or by implication with incest: the poets Sannazzaro and Pontanus, and the historians and statesmen Matarazzo, Marcus Attilius Alexis, Petrus Martyr, Priuli, Macchiavelli, and Guicciardini, and their opinions have been constantly reiterated down to the present time.
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