centuries' a language that would unlock for him the treasures of Homer, Plato and Demosthenes, and of all the poets, philosophers and orators, of whom he had heard such wonders'. Bruni learnt Greek for two years under Chrysoloras, and his memorable translations from the Greek will be mentioned at a later point. Another notable pupil, Vergerio, left a distinguished position as a teacher at Padua, to learn Greek in Florence. But the first enthusiasm for Greek had begun to abate on the Arno, when Chrysoloras, in obedience to the bidding of the emperor Manuel Palaeologus, left Florence in 1400 for Milan, where he was invited in 1402 to teach Greek at Pavia. It was there that he commenced a literal rendering of Plato's Republic, afterwards revised by his favourite pupil Uberto Decembrio, who transmitted to his scholarly son, Pier Candido, a reverence for the memory of Chrysoloras. The latter returned for a time to the East, but between 1407 and 1410 he was once more in the West as the envoy of his emperor, the places visited during these years including Venice, Florence, Paris, London, and finally Rome. He was afterwards sent to Constantinople to treat with the patriarch on the union of the Churches. In 1413 he went to Germany with two cardinals to arrange about the Council of Constance, and at Constance he died of a fever in the spring of 1415. He was buried, not in the church of the Dominican monastery, but in a chapel between the north side of the choir and the sacristy. The monastery has been secularised; the finely vaulted church has become the diningroom, and the adjoining chapel the pantry, of the Insel-Hôtel ; but 1 This interval of time (in which several other humanists agree) is deemed too small by Hody (p. 54), and by others. But it closely corresponds to the statement in Martin Crusius, Annales Suevici 274, that Greek was extinguished in Italy in 690 A.D. (exactly 706 years before). Hody, 28-30; cp. Gibbon, vii 122 Bury, and Symonds, ii 110 f. 3 P. 45 f infra. 4 Cod. Laur. Lat. lxxxix 50. See his letter in Traversari, Epp. xxiv 69. He was only a child of three when Chrysoloras reached Pavia. 6 Ep. ad Joannem (Palaeologum II) imperatorem, év † σúykpiois tŷs #aλaiâs καὶ νέας Ρώμης, in Migne, P. G. clvi 34α, μέμνημαι δὲ τῆς ἐν Λονδινίῳ τῆς Βρεταννικῆς... γενομένης αὐτοῖς (St Peter and St Paul) πομπῆς καὶ πανηγύρεως τῶν ἐκεῖ. on the ceiling of the ancient chapel the traveller may still read the simple epitaph composed by Vergerio in memory of his master'. His funeral was attended by his Roman pupil, the poet Cenci, and by Poggio Bracciolini. The catechism of Greek Grammar known as his Erotemata, the earliest modern text-book of the subject, was printed in Florence shortly before 1484 and at Venice in the February of that year, and was afterwards used by Linacre at Oxford and by Erasmus at Cambridge. We also have his letter to Guarino on the meaning of the term Theorica in Demosthenes, and on the edition of the Iliad described by Plutarch as that of the narthex2. But he was unproductive as an author, and needlessly diffuse and redundant as a teacher. In his general character, however, he was a man of a far finer type than either of his precursors, Barlaam and Leontius Pilatus. His pupil Poggio, who, in his relation to others, is only too apt to give proof of an implacable and bitter temper, is eloquent in praise of his master's integrity, generosity and kindness, and of that grave and sober earnestness, which was in itself an incentive to virtue. He had been a bright example to others, a heaven-sent messenger who had aroused an enthusiasm for the study of Greek. His fame was cherished by another celebrated pupil, Guarino, who compared him to a ray of light illuminating the deep darkness of Italy. Forty years after his master's death, he fondly collected all the many tributes to his memory and enshrined them in a volume under the title of Chrysolorina. A Greek MS that once belonged to Chrysoloras is now at Wolfenbüttel', and his own transcript of Demosthenes in the Vatican®. 1 Ante aram situs est D. Emanuel Chrysoloras,...vir doctissimus, prudentissimus, optimus etc. (complete copy in Legrand, 1 xxviii f). An epitaph, which I have seen in the Portinari chapel (1462–6) of the church of S. Eustorgio in Milan, strangely confounds Manuel Chrysoloras, litterarum Graecarum restitutor, with his nephew John, the father-in-law of Philelphus. 2 Rosmini, Vita di Guarino, iii 181, 187-189. Poggio, Epp. i 4, xiii 1. Partly preserved in Harleian MS 2580 (Sabbadini, La Scuola...di Guarino, 16). Cp., in general, Voigt, i 222—2323; ii 1133; also Hody, 12—54; Legrand, Bibliographie Hellénique, 1 xix-xxx; and Klette, Beiträge, i 47 f. Portrait in Paulus Jovius, Elogia (1575) 41, copied in Legrand, 111 59. Gud. 24. Gr. 1368 (De Nolhac, Bibl. de F. Orsini, 145). Conversino Meanwhile, an interest in Latin literature was maintained and developed in Northern Italy by the enthusiastic student of Cicero, Gasparino da Barzizza, to whom we shall soon return', and by two earlier Latin scholars, both of them bearing the identical name of 'John of Ravenna". One of the two was a pupil of Petrarch, a youthful humanist, who has been identified as Giovanni di Conversino da Ravenna (1347Giovanni di c. 1406). He was recommended to Petrarch in 1364, and aided him in editing his 'Familiar Letters'. His beautiful penmanship, his marvellous memory, and his zeal for learning made his master desire to retain him permanently in his service. He left for Pisa (1366) and soon returned. After a while he was eager to go to Constantinople and learn Greek; but Petrarch assured him that Greece was no longer a home of learning, and accordingly he started for 'Calabria', with letters of introduction to persons in Rome and Naples. We afterwards find him teaching in Florence (1368), Belluno and Udine, but the only place in which he settled for long was Padua, where he was a teacher of rhetoric in 1382, and again from 1394 to 1405. Besides serving as Latin secretary to the house of the Carraras, he lectured on the Latin poets, and aroused an interest in the study of Cicero. Among his pupils were the foremost teachers of the next generation, Vittorino da Feltre and Guarino da Verona'. He was formerly confounded with another John of Ravenna', now finally identified as Giovanni Malpaghini (fl. 1397-1417), who was Giovanni a teacher in Florence for many years, counting among his pupils the three future Chancellors, Leonardo Bruni, Carlo Marsuppini and Poggio Bracciolini. Early in the fifteenth century Gasparino of Barzizza, near Malpaghini 1 p. 23 infra. 'They were regarded, even by so eminent an authority as Voigt, as one and the same person. 3 Epp. Sen. xi 9, p. 887, Graeciam...nunc omnis • Voigt, i 212-91, ed. 3, revised by Lehnerdt. Programm of the latter (1893), with Sabbadini in ital. v (1888) 156 f, and Klette's Beiträge, i (1888). Voigt, i 2193 f.. longe inopem disciplinae. See esp. the Königsberg Giornale storico della lett. Gasparino da Barzizza Bergamo (c. 1370-1431) taught for a time in Pavia, Venice, Padua and Ferrara, and in 1418 found his earliest hopes fulfilled by his final settlement in Milan. He expounded the De Oratore, De Senectute, De Officiis, Philippics and Letters of Cicero, the last of these being his favourite study. He collected Ciceronian мss', and gave a strong impulse to the study of Cicero, and especially to the cultivation of a new style of epistolary Latin. Henceforward, Latin letters were neither to be inspired by Seneca and the philosophical works of Cicero, as those of Petrarch, nor were they to be rich in rhetoric, like those of Salutati. They were to aim at a studied carelessness, and to reflect the grace of the best type of conversation. Gasparino's own style was sometimes criticised as marked by elegance and refinement rather than force and vigour. But his style is not uniform. It is marked by three main varieties:-(1) the easy and familiar style of his private correspondence, in which, however, he is far too fond of the mediaeval use of quod; (2) his orations, which include not a few unCiceronian words and phrases, while his eulogy of St Francis combines classical and Christian phraseology without any breach of good taste; and (3) his formal models for epistolary Latin composition,-Epistolae ad exercitationem accommodatae. It is in these last that he attains the highest degree of correctness; it is in these alone that he proves himself 'the true apostle of Ciceronianism'. It is characteristic of the French appreciation of literary and epistolary style that his liber epistolarum was the first book printed in France. 1 Sabbadini, Scoperte, 36. 2 Sabbadini, Ciceronianismo, 13—17. Paris, 1470; copy exhibited in British Museum, King's Library, case vii. His book on Orthography was published about the same time, while his Grammar was printed at Brescia in 1493. Opera, ed. Furietti, Rome, 1723; two of his Latin lectures in K. Müllner's Reden und Briefen, 56 f. Cp. Voigt, i 2203 f, 5063, and facsimile in Chap. xiii infra. |