[753] See above, p. 225.
[754] On Comines, see above, p. 96, note 1. While Comines, as is there indicated, partly owes his power of objective criticism to intercourse with Italians, the German humanists and statesmen, notwithstanding the prolonged residence of some of them in Italy, and their diligent and often most successful study of the classical world, acquired little or nothing of the gift of biographical representation or of the analysis of character. The travels, biographies, and historical sketches of the German humanists in the fifteenth, and often in the early part of the sixteenth centuries, are mostly either dry catalogues or empty, rhetorical declamations.
[755] See above, p. 96.
[756] Here and there we find exceptions. Letters of Hutten, containing autobiographical notices, bits of the chronicle of Barth. Sastrow, and the Sabbata of Joh. Kessler, introduce us to the inward conflicts of the writers, mostly, however, bearing the specifically religious character of the Reformation.
[757] Among northern autobiographies we might, perhaps, select for comparison that of Agrippa d’Aubigné (though belonging to a later period) as a living and speaking picture of human individuality.
[758] Written in his old age, about 1576. On Cardano as an investigator and discoverer, see Libri, Hist. des Sciences Mathém. iii. p. 167 sqq.
[759] E.g. the execution of his eldest son, who had taken vengeance for his wife’s infidelity by poisoning her (cap. 27, 50).
[760] Discorsi della Vita Sobria, consisting of the ‘trattato,’ of a ‘compendio,’ of an ‘esortazione,’ and of a ‘lettera’ to Daniel Barbaro. The book has been often reprinted.
[761] Was this the villa of Codevico mentioned above, p. 321?
[762] In some cases very early; in the Lombard cities as early as the twelfth century. Comp. Landulfus senior, Ricobaldus, and (in Murat. x.) the remarkable anonymous work, De laudibus Papiae, of the fourteenth century. Also (in Murat. i.) Liber de Situ urbis Mediol. Some notices on Italian local history in O. Lorenzo, Deutschland’s Geschichtsquellen im Mittelalter seit dem 13ten Jahr. Berlin, 1877; but the author expressly refrains from an original treatment of the subject.