CHAPTER VI.
ITALY—THE RENAISSANCE.
The study of the classics had languished for a time after the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio. It revived again upon the coming of Chrysoloras, who is said to have lighted in Italy 'a new and perpetual flame.' Poggio Bracciolini was one of his first pupils; and he became so distinguished in literature that the earlier part of the fifteenth century is known as the age of Poggio. Leonardo Aretino describes the enthusiasm with which the Italians made acquaintance with the ancient learning. 'I gave myself up to Chrysoloras,' he writes, 'and my passion for knowledge was so strong that the daily tasks became the material of my nightly dreams.' He told Cosmo de' Médici, when translating Plato's Dialogues, that they alone seemed to be infused with real life, while all other books passed by like fleeting and shadowy things.
We are chiefly concerned with Poggio as the discoverer of long-lost treasures. He saved Quintilian and many other classics from complete extinction. 'Some of them,' said his friend Barbaro, 'were already dead to the world, and some after a long exile you have restored to their rights as citizens.' As a famous stock of pears had been named after an Appius or Claudius, so it was said that these new fruits of literature ought certainly to be named after Poggio.
The sole remaining copy of an ancient work upon aqueducts was discovered by him in the old library at Monte Cassino, which had survived the assaults of Lombards and Saracens, but in that later age seemed likely to perish by neglect. We have the record of an earlier visit by Boccaccio, in which the carelessness of its guardians was revealed. The visitor, we are told, asked very deferentially if he might see the library. 'It is open, and you can go up,' said a monk, pointing to the ladder that led to an open loft. The traveller describes the filthy and doorless chamber, the grass growing on the window-sills, and the books and benches white with dust. He took down book after book, and they all seemed to be ancient and valuable; but from some of them whole sheets had been taken out, and in others the margins of the vellum had been cut off. All in tears at this miserable sight, Boccaccio went down the ladder, and asked a monk in the cloister how those precious volumes had come to such a pass; and the monk told him that the brothers who wanted a few pence would take out a quire of leaves to make a little psalter for sale, and used to cut off the margins to make 'briefs,' which they sold to the women.
Poggio himself has described his discovery at the Abbey of St. Gall. 'By good fortune,' he says, 'we were at Constance without anything to do, and it occurred to us to go to the monastery about twenty miles off to see the place where the Quintilian was shut up.' The Abbey had been founded by the Irish missionaries who destroyed the idols of Suabia, when according to the ancient legend the mountain-demon vainly called on the spirit of the lake to join in resisting the foe. Its library had been celebrated in the ninth century, when the Hungarian terror fell upon Europe, and the barbarian armies in one and the same day 'laid in ashes the monastery of St. Gall and the city of Bremen on the shores of the Northern ocean'; but the books had been fortunately removed to the Abbey of Reichenau on an island in the Rhine. 'We went to the place,' said Poggio, 'to amuse ourselves and to look at the books. Among them we found the Quintilian safe and sound, but all coated with dust. The books were by no means housed as they deserved, but were all in a dark and noisome place at the foot of a tower, into which one would not cast a criminal condemned to death.' He describes the finding of several other rare mss., and says: 'I have copied them all out in great haste, and have sent them to Florence.'
In 1418 he visited England in the train of Cardinal Beaufort. He said that he was unable to procure any transcripts, though he visited some of the principal libraries, and must have seen that the collection at the Grey Friars at least was 'well stocked with books.' He was more successful on the Continent, where he brought the History of Ammianus out of a German prison into the free air of the republic of letters. He gave the original to Cardinal Colonna, and wrote to Aretino about transcripts: 'Niccolo has copied it on paper for Cosmo de' Médici: you must write to Carlo Aretino for another copy, or he might lend you the original, because if the scribe should be an ignoramus you might get a fable instead of a history.'
Among the pupils of Chrysoloras, Guarini of Verona was esteemed the keenest philologist, and John Aurispa as having the most extended knowledge of the classics. Aurispa, says Hallam, came rather late from Sicily, but his labours were not less profitable than those of his predecessors; in the year 1423 he brought back from Greece considerably more than two hundred mss. of authors hardly known in Italy; and the list includes books of Plato, of Pindar, and of Strabo, of which all knowledge had been lost in the West. Aurispa lectured for many years at Bologna and Florence, and ended his days at the literary Court of Ferrara. Philelpho was one of the most famous of the scholars who returned 'laden with manuscripts' from Greece. To recover a lost poem or oration was to go far on the road to fortune, and a very moderate acquaintance with the text was expected from the hero of the fortunate adventure. When he lectured on his new discoveries at Florence, where he had established himself in spite of the Médici, Philelpho according to his own account was treated with such deference on all sides that he was overwhelmed with bashfulness; 'All the citizens are turning towards me, and all the ladies and the nobles exalt my name to the skies.' He was the bitter enemy of Poggio, and of all who supported the reigning family of Florence. Poggio had the art of making enemies, though he was a courtier by profession and had been secretary to eight Popes. He raged against Philelpho in a flood of scurrilous pamphlets; Valla, the great Latin scholar, was violently attacked for a mere word of criticism, and Niccolo Perotti, the grammarian, paid severely for supporting his friend. Poggio was always in extremes. His eulogies in praise of Lorenzo de' Médici, and Niccolo Niccoli of Florence are perfect in grace and dignity; his invectives were as scurrilous as anything recorded in the annals of literature.