END OF BOOK THE FIRST.
BOOK THE SECOND.
BRACCIOLINI.
Si per se virtus sine fortuna ponderanda sit, dubito an hunc
primum omnium ponam.
CORNELIUS NEPOS. Thrasybulus.
CHAPTER I.
BRACCIOLINI IN ROME.
I. His genius and the greatness of his age.—II. His qualifications. —III. His early career.—IV. The character of Niccolo Niccoli, who abetted him in the forgery.—V. Bracciolini's descriptive writing of the Burning of Jerome of Prague compared with the descriptive writing of the Sham Sea Fight in the Twelfth Book of the Annals.
Though I have dwelt on the harshness of style and manner, and the occasional inaccuracies in grammar and language of the author of the Annals, it must not be supposed that I fail to appreciate his merit. In some of the qualities that denote a great writer he is superior to Tacitus; nor can anyone, not reading him in his original form, conceive an adequate notion of how his powers culminate into true genius,—what a master he is of eloquence, and how happy in expressing his very beautiful sentiments, which, sometimes having the nature of a proverb or an epigram, please by the placing of a word. His general ideas are scarcely retained in a translation: such a reproduction deprives them of the train of images and impressions which cluster round them in his language of poetry and suggestion, giving them spirit and interest, and imparting to them strength and ornament:—As winter is thrown over a landscape by the hand of nature, so coldness is thrown over his page by the hand of a translator: the student who can familiarize himself with his thoughts as expressed in the tongue in which he wrote, and reads a translation, is in the position of a man who can walk in summer along the bank of a majestic river flowing beautifully calm and stately by meadows pranked with flowers and woods waving in varied hues of green, yet prefers visiting the scene in winter when life and freshness are fled, the river being frozen, the flowers and greenness gone from the fields, and the leaves fallen from the trees.
The question arises,—Who was this wonderful man? If unknown, can he not be discovered?
John Leycester Adolphus, famous for his History of George the Third, discovered the author of the Waverley Novels in Sir Walter Scott, when the Wizard of the North was styled "The Great Unknown," by pointing out coincidences in the pieces and poems, known to be the productions of Scott, in such matters as the correct morals, the refined manners, the Scotch words and idioms, the descriptive power, the picturesque and dramatic fancy, the neat, colloquial turns in dialogue, the quaint similes, the sprinkle of metaphors, the love of dogs, the eloquent touches with regard to the pure and tender relations of father and daughter; and clinched the investigation by showing the freedom and correctness in the use of law-terms and phrases, which indicated clearly that the author was a lawyer. It being easy when a way has been shown to follow in the track, I turned to the period in question, which, I knew, must be the first half of the fifteenth century, to look for a writer, whose qualities, literary and moral,—or rather immoral,—could win for him the triumphal car of being the Author of the Annals—if triumph can, in any way, be associated with such ingloriousness as forgery,—and, after a little looking about, I found him in one whose compositions display, not to a remote, but in a close degree the energy, the animation, the feeling, the genius, the true taste, the deep meaning, and glimpses, ever and anon, of that signal power, which, rising into truly awful magnificence, of looking deeply into the darkest recesses of the human heart, runs through the Annals like the shining waters of a river in whose rich sands roll grains of gold.