Tacitus and Bracciolini Part 16

This, it must be admitted, is not in the style of Tacitus; it is, however, exactly in the style of Bracciolini--in proof of which I need only point to the historic details which abound in the Dialogue on the Unhappiness of Princes;--the introduction of the particulars into which he enters when drawing up a comparison for a young friend of Ferrara between Julius Caesar and Scipio Africa.n.u.s, on the question submitted to him, "which was the greater man" (Op. 357 seq.); and when in the Discourse on n.o.bility he refers to the statues that adorned the garden of a villa, he enters into remarks on the pa.s.sion possessed by the ancient Romans of ornamenting their homes with the images of their ancestors (Op.

64-83).

IV. Bodinus, in his "Method to an Easy Knowledge of History,"

first published in 1566, seems to be very much struck at two statements in the Fourth Book of the Annals; in the 33rd chapter the words occur: "we link together cruel orders, continual prosecutions, treacherous alliances, the destruction of the innocent, and trials terminating in similar issues": in the chapter preceding the writer says that he does not narrate "wars, sieges of cities, routings of armies and struggles of politicians and plebeians": Bodinus observes, Tacitus "carefully describes all the wars that occurred in his time; they were conflicts in which he was usually engaged or acted as commander, nor was there after the battle of Actium a single historian who treated so copiously of military and civil affairs":--"Libro quarto profitetur se 'nec bella, nec urbium expugnationes, nec fusos exercitus, nec certamina plebis et optimatium' narrare ... et paulo post: 'nos saeva jussa, continuas accusationes, fallaces amicitias, perniciem innocentium, et easdem exitu causas conjungimus', quanquam omnia bella, quae illis temporibus contigerunt, et quibus fere interfuit aut praefuit, studiose describit: nec post Actiacam victoriam ullus est historicus qui militarem aut forensem rationem copiosius tractavit" (Jo. Bodinus. Methodus ad facilem Historiarum Cognitionem. p. 66. Geneva Ed. 1610).

Can anything be stronger than these simple words of the French Doctor of Civil Law of the sixteenth century towards drawing further the attention of the reader to the truth of the theory maintained in this book? It is not possible that, though Bracciolini thus, as we see, forgot himself for a moment as the imitator of another, Tacitus could have made a slip of this kind.

He is always describing battles; he takes a special delight in doing so; it is a species of description in which he particularly excelled, even as it is a species of description in which Bracciolini just as particularly showed weakness; Tacitus could do nothing better, because, as Bodinus says, he was actually engaged in the battles, or else acted in them as a commander. Nor is it true of his History, as it is of the Annals, that it is one perpetual tissue of prosecutions and trials that end in the conviction of innocent persons, treacherous alliances and tyrannical decrees; nor that it avoids all narration of the contentions between the people and the n.o.bles.

V. We seem to be looking at a picture of the middle ages or the Renaissance and not of the first or second century of the Christian aera, when we read the story of Caius Sila.n.u.s, the Proconsul of Asia, who, accused of malversation and peculation, is first banished to the island of Gyarus, but when the Prince pleads for him, and he is backed by the intercession of a Vestal Virgin of sanct.i.ty,--corresponding to a Christian nun or abbess of exemplary piety,--Sila.n.u.s is removed to the more bearable place of exile, the island of Cythaera (III. 66-9).

Just as we find in the first part of the Annals this picture marking the mediaeval period, we find in the last part a sentiment that strongly denotes the time of the Renaissance, because it is morally wrong: with the greatest coolness Bracciolini states in the eleventh book of the Annals that "employment of stratagem against a deserter and violator of his oath reflects no dishonour on the Roman character": "nec irritae aut degeneres insidiae fuere adversus transfugam et violatorem fidei" (XI. 19): the sentiment would never have proceeded from Tacitus nor any other high-minded Roman of antiquity; but it is strictly in accord with the views and feelings of the Renaissance, or fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century: in reading the best writers of that period we every now and then come across maxims which a strict morality condemns: Machiavelli, who better reflects the spirit of his age and Italy than anybody else, except the author of the Annals, occasionally shocks us by such utterances in his Treatise on Livy, as, "it is permissible to deceive for the good of the State, provided that advantage be gained by it"; it is a proper thing "to violate one's word for the good of one's country"; "cruelty which tends to a beneficial end is not blamable and that which profits is praiseworthy"; or in his work ent.i.tled "The Prince",--"it is quite enough for a Prince to be virtuous in show, and not in fact"; he should "dissemble to reign well," and "the justice of war is in its utility."

VI. Bracciolini, who was inventing history as well as forging a production, did not deem it necessary to be actuated at all times in his representations by the love of truth: in putting forth supposit.i.tious matters as matters of fact, he advanced his own opinions and conjectures as the conjectures and opinions of the persons who figured in his narrative: to give an example: --"Tiberius and Augusta abstained from appearing in public" on the day when the remains of Germanicus were borne to the tomb of Augustus: that may be history; but we are certain that it is not history when we are told what their supposition was about going abroad: "I do not know," says the writer, "whether they supposed that a public expression of sorrow on their part would be derogatory to their imperial dignity, but I rather suspect it was fear that their hypocrisy would be detected when their looks were scrutinised by the eyes of all": "Tiberius atque Augusta publico abstinuere; inferius majestate sua rati, si palam lamentarentur, an ne, omnium oculis vultum eorum scrutantibus, falsi intelligerentur" (Ann. III. 4).

We have another proof here that the whole Annals proceeded from the same hand; this sort of thing goes on as well in the last, as in the first part of that work; in the fourteenth chapter (10), the writer undertakes to describe the state of Nero's punishment after (what may or may not be history) the murder of his mother: we are told, as if Bracciolini possessed the magic of peering into the inmost recesses of the soul, that it was only "at length after Nero had completed the monstrous deed that he became conscious of its enormity": "perfecto demum scelere magnitudo ejus intellecta est". We then follow the Emperor into the privacy of his locked chamber; in the dead of night, we see what he does, when he is hidden from the eyes of all: everybody can pretty well guess (but only guess not positively know) how it fared with him; an evil conscience like a hidden torture wracks the criminal as the vulture fed on the liver of the rock-tied t.i.tan;--the Furies come, causing the guilty to pa.s.s sleepless nights, for the Furies are the Demons sent to torture the impious: accordingly Bracciolini thus continues the description:--"during the remainder of the night, he would at one time remain in silence with his eyes fixed immovably, very often springing up out of terror, and with a distracted soul watch for the dawn of day, as if it were to bring death to him":--"reliquo noctis, modo, per silentium defixus soepius pavore exurgens et mentis inops lucem opperiebatur, tanquam exitium allaturam" (L. c.).

Though we all know that investigations of this kind must necessarily be attended with uncertainty, yet in watching Bracciolini's bold proceedings in unfolding the mazes of the human heart by the pa.s.sions of famous men, we a.s.sent readily to his delineations, because the feelings he represents, if not true, seem to be true on account of their being natural and obvious.

This kind of guesswork, nowhere to be found in the pages of Tacitus, has been considered in these days a great improvement in historical composition,--by none more so than by Lord Macaulay, who made Bracciolini, (supposing him to be Tacitus), the object of his adoration. Modern historians reject what Thucydides, Xenophon, Herodotus, Livy, Sall.u.s.t, Tacitus, and other ancient writers of history, Greek and Roman, did,--ascribing probable words and phrases to eminent persons on grand occasions, as violations of truth and daring a.s.sumptions;--nevertheless, they imitate the practice set by Bracciolini of knowing the motives that influenced ill.u.s.trious characters.

The cause of a memorable matter of fact,--Luther casting off his allegiance to the Pope,--remains hidden in impenetrable mystery: notwithstanding that, Protestant historians as confidently maintain it was the love of truth, as Catholic biographers boldly a.s.sert it was the pa.s.sion of resentment.

We have the same rash conjectures as to James the Second: after he abdicated the throne of England, he lived to the end of his days in quietness and seclusion, never making an attempt to regain the goodwill of his people, nor breathing a wish for a reconciliation: though that monarch kept his feelings to himself, Lord Macaulay in his History of England (IV. 380), with a comprehensiveness of discernment that is amazing, writes thus: "_in his view_," that is, King James's, "there could be between him and his subjects no reciprocity of obligation. Their duty was to risk property, liberty, life, in order to replace him on the throne, and then to bear patiently whatever he chose to inflict upon them. They could no more pretend to merit before him than before G.o.d. When they had done all they were still unprofitable servants. The highest praise due to the Royalist who shed his blood on the field of battle or on the scaffold for hereditary monarchy was simply that he was not a traitor." When such intimate acquaintance is shown with the senti- ments of the fallen king, one wonders who knew better his intentions and inclinations, Lord Macaulay, his historian, or Peters, his father confessor. In writing thus Lord Macaulay merely imitated the example set by Bracciolini, who, on almost every occasion, pretends to know motives, detect inclinations, explore the causes of events as well as look into the soul, reveal the pa.s.sions and determine the judgments of powerful men. It is very pretty, but it is not history; and any one who considers how beyond his power it is to ascertain the principles which regulate his own conduct or the behaviour of those with whom he is in familiar and daily intercourse,--whose peculiar habit, too, he knows well,--must see that the task is not only difficult, but superhuman,--comprised in one plain and simple word --impossible.

VII. A thousand authors may be read, and in vain contradictions looked for in any of them. When, therefore, a writer is found contradicting himself, it is a peculiarity to be noted as uncommonly striking; one contradiction being found, several may be looked for. Bracciolini is one of these writers; his contradictions, too, are most remarkable: they are to be found just as well in his acknowledged productions as in both parts of the Annals. Many instances might be given; the following may suffice:--

In the fourth book of the Annals, Tiberius is represented so full of hatred that a man who had been for a long time in exile does not escape his memory, as occurs with Serenus--"non occultante Tiberio vetus odium adversus exulem Serenum" (IV. 29). In the sixth book, however, Tiberius, though still actuated by hatred, is so forgetful that Rubrius Fabatus remains unharmed through oblivion:--"mansit tamen incolumis oblivione magis quam elementia"

(VI. 14). What then is the characteristic of Tiberius?

Forgetfulness or remembrance in his hatreds?

So in his acknowledged works, Bracciolini speaks in one of his letters, as we have seen, of not having such a very high opinion of the Papacy as the world believed: "Ego minus existimo Pontificatum quam credunt" (Ep. I. 17). But in another of his works, "De Infelicitate Principum," (Op. p. 392), he expresses his belief that "all Princes were in the enjoyment of a large amount of happiness, more particularly the Pope, who was considered the greatest of men, and yet gained his position without any anxiety or any labour, any pains or any peril." "Nam c.u.m omnes principes magna existimem felicitate frui, tum vero maxime Pontifices, c.u.m nulla cura, nullo labore, nulla opera, nullo periculo eum statum adipisc.u.n.tur, qui habetur maximus apud mortales." What are we then to suppose? that Bracciolini had formed a very lofty, or a very indifferent estimate of the Papacy?

In both parts of the Annals, he displays the same spirit of contradiction; first he praises, then condemns the same things; in the last part he defends Popular Revels (XIV. 20) and objects to them immediately afterwards (ibid); so in the first part he lauds luxury in the second book (33) and censures it in the third (53).

We find the same contradiction with respect to Augustus and deification; in the first book of the Annals we are told that if a man has temples reared to him and is worshipped in the likeness of a G.o.d, he commits a grievous wrong, because he deprives divine beings of all their honours: this it is stated was done by Augustus:--"Nihil Deorum honoribus relictum c.u.m se templis et effigie numinum coli vellet" (An. I. 10). After this we should be mightily surprised, did we not know of the humour of the writer with whom we are dealing, to find it a.s.serted in the fourth book, when the people of Lusitania and Boetica (now Portugal, Andalusia and Granada), offer to erect a temple to Tiberius, and he refuses (IV. 37, 38), that that Emperor "showed degeneracy of spirit, because men of the highest virtue have ever sought the greatest honours: thus Hercules and Bacchus were added to the number of the G.o.ds among the Greeks, and Romulus among the Romans: accordingly that Augustus who hoped for deification chose the n.o.bler part, for when we scorn fame we scorn the virtues:--"quidam, ut degeneris animi, interpretabantur: optumos quippe mortalium altissima cupere. Sic Herculem et Liberum apud Graecos; Quirinum apud nos, deum numero, additos. Melius Augustum, qui speraverit ... contemtu famae, contemni virtutes" (IV. 38).

VIII. A few words, in conclusion, may be said about the oldest ma.n.u.script containing the first six, and, consequently, all the books of the Annals. This, which, it has been stated, is the First Florence MS., I take to be the identical one that came out of the Abbey of Corvey through the hands of Arcimboldi, because, like its mendacious brother, the Second Florence, it bears upon it the unmistakable stamp of an impudent forgery. Just as the Second Florence pretends to be of the fourth century, if not earlier, from having the attestation of Sal.u.s.tius the Philosopher, so the First Florence professes to be as old as, at the very least, the twelfth century, from being written in characters, which, Taurellus says (Praef. ad Pand. Floren.), are the same as those in the Florentine MS. of the Pandects of Justinian. Now, the Florentine Pandects, which were found at Amalfi, were plundered from that town and taken to Pisa in 1137 by Lotharius Saxe after his successful war with Pope Innocent II., though the two costly volumes were not first deposited in the Grand Duke's Library at Florence until 1406.

Danesius, Bishop of Lavaur (in Languedoc), also bears testimony to the great antiquity of the First Florence MS. But this was nineteen years after the first publication of all the Annals in Rome, it being in 1534 that Danesius, examining it with other ancient works, p.r.o.nounced upon its very old age.

Ernesti, in his preface to the works of Tacitus, quotes a pa.s.sage from a letter of Graevius to his friend Heinsius where the great h.e.l.lenist is of opinion that the MS. bore the marks of being copied from a supposit.i.tious and half learned original; "exemplar, unde illud fluxit, mendosum et ab semidocto interpolatum"

(Tom. IV. Coll. Burm. p. 496). But suppose that the ma.n.u.script is no copy, but, as I maintain, an original, then the opinion of Graevius becomes extremely valuable in this inquiry, because it actually corroborates what I have said about the ma.n.u.script,--that it was transcribed by an ignorant monk, and that it is an audacious forgery.

We have, then, no evidence whatsoever that can be relied upon of the great antiquity of this ma.n.u.script: on the contrary what we do know about it as a fact is utterly subversive of such an a.s.sumption: this copy in the Mediceo-Laurentian Library in Florence of all the Annals of Tacitus cannot be traced further back than to the possession of a man who flourished in the days of Leo X. and the Emperor Maximilian I.,--Johannes Jocundus of Verona; so that it turns out, on careful investigation that all positive knowledge of this MS. stops at the commencement of the sixteenth century, exactly as all positive knowledge of the other Florentine MS. stops at the commencement of the fifteenth century.

IX. I have now done; and think that I have said quite enough for the spuriousness of the Annals never to be hereafter argued as a moot point, but accepted as an established fact. I need not go into further consideration; because further consideration cannot give more weight to what has been put forward. I, therefore, pause, a.s.sured that with only these few facts and observations placed before him, the reader has come to the same conclusion as myself, that, strange as it may be, yet, nevertheless, there is truth in the theory now started for the first time, I dare say, to the amazement of the reader, as to the amazement of everybody, that Tacitus is, and has been, for century after century, wrongly accredited with the authorship of the Annals. It is to dispel all cavil about this, that I have examined the History and the Annals from every imaginable point of view, so as to enable the reader to see the two works as clearly as they can be seen--not that the reader has seen them as clearly as objects are seen under the open sky by the blaze of the noontide sun; still I hope that he has seen them, as objects in broad day are seen,--where there must he some shadows in corners,--in a room, when all the blinds are drawn up and all the windows are thrown open.

T H E E N D.

[ENDNOTES]

[Endnote 013] Here we find the most learned Father of the Church using "volumen" in an unusual acceptation, not as a whole work, nor a part of a literary composition rolled into a scroll among the ancients, or separately bound among ourselves, but a division of a subject in the same "volume," just as Cornelius Nepos, once, and once only,--in his Life of Atticus (16),--speaks of the sixteen "books" of Letters which Cicero addressed to Atticus: "s.e.xdecim _volumina_ Epistolarum ... ad Attic.u.m missarum"; yet three or four "books" must have formed a "volumen," when we find Ovid, in his "Tristia" (III. 14, 19) speaking of the "five volumes" that contained his Metamorphoses:--

"Sunt quoque mutatae per quinque volumina formae;"

as the Metamorphoses were divided into fifteen books, three then formed a "volumen."--I cannot avoid calling attention to the curiously incorrect phrase, "voluminibus exaravit." An ancient, speaking of the "volumen," or scroll, would have used "scribere,"

--"exarare," possibly, when speaking of the "codicillus," or little wooden table made of wax, which he sent as a note or billet-doux to a friend or sweetheart, the figurative verb being applicable to the stylus "ploughing" letters "out" of the wax. The pa.s.sage, from this blunder alone, seems to be an interpolation, where the forger ridiculously overshoots his mark: he out-Jeromes Jerome; for he makes the saint write bad Latin from a motive that never led St. Jerome astray,--a desire to be poetic. It is strange, too, for the pa.s.sage to have come from the most learned of the Latin fathers with the loose expression, "post Augustum," to denote a history that began with Galba; and when Tacitus, who confined his attention to affairs of state (to the utter disregard of biographical details of the emperors), is spoken of as writing "Vitas Caesarum." However, the man who made the interpolation knew all that he wanted to accomplish, and would have been eminently successful in his crafty and knavish design, had he only known Latin well enough to have made St. Jerome write it as a bishop would have written it in the fourth century.

[Endnote 019] Nevertheless, Tacitus is uncommonly provoking to believers,--in his version, for example, of what is solemnly recorded in the xviith chapter of Exodus and the xxth of Numbers about the Israelites, when, in their wanderings, they murmured for want of water, and the Lord instructed Moses to "take the rod with which he smote" the waters of the Red Sea: the sacred penman proceeds: "And Moses took the rod from before the Lord, as he commanded him: And Moses and Aaron gathered the congregation together before the rock, and he said unto them, 'Hear now, ye rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?' And Moses lifted up his hand, and with his rod he smote the rock twice: and the water came out abundantly, and the congregation drank and their beasts also." (Numbers xx. 9-11). This incident, opposed to the laws of nature, Tacitus shews happened according to the const.i.tuted course of things, and makes the miracle ridiculous by introducing a.s.ses as the princ.i.p.al performers: he has been speaking of the Jews, ignorant of all the parts through which they were to pa.s.s, setting forth on a journey for which they had made no provision; "but nothing distressed them so much," he continues, "as want of water; and they were lying all over the plains, not far from the point of death, when a herd of wild a.s.ses quitted the pasture for a rock overgrown with copse and brushwood: Moses followed, and found, as he had conjectured from the spot being covered with verdure, abundant springs of water." "Omnium ignari, fortuitum iter incipiunt: sed nihil aeque quam inopia aquae fatigabat: jamque haud procul exitio, totis campis procubuerant, c.u.m grex asinorum agrestium e pastu in rupem nemore opacam concessit: secutus Moses, conjectura herbidi soli, largas aquarum venas aperit." (Hist. v. 3). Tacitus is infinitely more offensive, and, certainly, most untruthful, when he says that the Jews "kept for worship in their holy of holies the image of an a.s.s, as the animal by whose guidance they had slaked their thirst and brought their wanderings to a happy sequel": "effigiem animalis, quo monstrante errorem sitimque depulerant, penetrali sacravere."

(Hist. v. 4)

[Endnote 074] This, I take it, is what the author of the Annals means. "Tibicen" was, of course, not a violin, but species of pipe among the ancients; the Egyptians were not famous for their performances upon this instrument, if they were acquainted with the "tibicen" at all. The question then arises,--Was the author of the Annals cognizant of the existence of such people as "Gipsies"?

The last part of the Annals (where, it will be seen, this pa.s.sage occurs,) was forged after the first quarter of the fifteenth century; was this nomad horde in Europe at that time? If there be one established fact it is that the "Gipsies" (then called "Aegyptiani") came into Europe at the commencement of the fifteenth century in the reign of the Emperor Sigismund. Martin Zeiller in his "Topographia Ha.s.siae" says they were first caught sight of in Hesse in 1414, which is four years earlier than all historians fix the date of their advent into Germany, from following Jacob Thomasius, who makes that statement in the 16th and 17th sections of his "Disputatio de Cingaris." Two years after their arrival in Germany, (that is 1416, according to Zeiller, but 1420, according to Thomasius and the historians,) this curious people, separating into several bands, found their way into Italy.

Here they may have attracted the attention of the author of the Annals, as well as in his frequent visits to Germany and the princ.i.p.ality of Hesse. In fact, they attracted universal attention by their sporadic habitations, their nomadic lives, their wandering and dwelling, like the Thespians of old, in waggons, their shabby and ragged clothes, yet the heaps of gold and silver they had with them, their trains of horses, mules and a.s.ses, their love of music (to this day they are great experts with the violin), their favourite practice of fortune-telling, magic, palmistry, and those arts of sorcery, of which we hear so much in the Annals, the author of which must have been further impressed with their giving out that, though heathens coming from Lower Egypt, they wanted to embrace the Christian faith. This vagabond people had at their head a "king," whom the chroniclers style a "n.o.ble Count,"--as Martin Cursius in his Annals of Swabia (sub A.D. 1453): "obiit n.o.bilis Comes Petrus de Minori Egypto, in die Philippi et Jacobi Apostolorum." "Peter" was preceded on the gipsy throne by "Panuel," who, styled also "n.o.bilis Comes" by the chroniclers, died in 1445, his immediate predecessor being "Michael," under whom the immigration into Europe was effected of these "Egyptian" wanderers numbering 14,000 men, women and children.

[Endnote 081] I am indebted for nearly the whole of this to Niebuhr's Essay in the "Rheinisches Museum" on "The Difference between Annals and History." But in saying that Aulus Gellius attempting to solve the same problem showed "more learning than thought," Niebuhr did not know how easy it was to retaliate upon him by saying that in his own investigation he exhibited "more thought than learning" from supposing that a writer in the time of Marcus Antoninus might have had his inquiry suggested to him by Tacitus's "History" and "Annals," when, down to the fifteenth century, as we have shown, one common t.i.tle, "Imperial History"

("Augusta Historia,") covered the historical productions of Tacitus, now known as "Annales" and "Historiae."

[Endnote 083] No overstatement but a fact. There are only 14 paragraphs in the Life and 8 letters, namely:--1. A letter from the Emperor Verus to Marcus Aurelius (-- 1); 2. Marcus Aurelius's Reply (-- 2); 3. A letter from Marcus Aurelius to his prefect (-- 5); 4. The prefect's reply (ibid); 5. A letter from Marcus Aurelius to Faustina (-- 9); 6. From Faustina to Marcus Aurelius (-- 10); 7. Marcus Aurelius's Answer (-- 11); and 8. A letter from Avidius Ca.s.sius to his son-in-law (-- 14); which ends the Life and enables the biographer to observe that "that letter showed what a stern and cruel emperor Avidius Ca.s.sius must have been": "haec epistola ejus indicat, quam severus et quam tristis futurus fuerit imperator."

[Endnote 136] The name of Emmanuel Chrysolaras must ever be a.s.sociated with the revival of the Greek language in Western Europe after the study of it had been discontinued since the close of the eighth century, or for six hundred years. One of the earliest pupils of Chrysolaras, Leonardi Bruni, speaks of him in terms of warm admiration in his interesting "Memoirs of Occurrences in Italy during his Time" ("Rerum suo Tempore in Italia Gestarum Commentarius"). Bruni says that Chrysolaras was "the only and sole Professor of Greek, and that if he had been lost sight of, there was no one afterwards who could have taught that tongue": "hic autem unus solusque Literarum Graecarum Doctor, si e conspectu se auferet, a quo postmodum ediscas, nemo reperietur" (Muratori XIX. 920). Chrysolaras was a native of Constantinople, and member of a n.o.ble family; the way in which his country was a.s.sailed by Bayazid, Sultan of the Turks, and threatened by Tamerlane, Sultan of Samarcand, caused him to leave home, a.s.sured, as he was, of the certain downfall of the Byzantine Empire; first he went to Venice, which he reached by sea; while he was there teaching the Greek language his reputation spread to Florence, the inhabitants of which, making him the offer of a public salary, pressed him to come to their city, to teach their young men, numbers of whom were desirous of making themselves masters of his native tongue. It was in the year 1399 when Chrysolaras, thus settling in Florence, revived the study of the Greek language, and thereby gave a new and wonderful impulse to literature, first throughout Italy, and then Spain, Portugal, France, and the other countries of Europe.

[Endnote 145] The letter, from which this extract is made, will be found in Bracciolini's works (Pog. Op. pp. 301-5), as well as in the collection of his Epistles, (of which we have the first volume only,) by the Chevalier de' Tonelli (pp. 11-20);--should the reader be fond of literary curiosities he will also find it reproduced, as if it were his own composition, by Reduxis de Quero in his "Chronicle of Trevigo,"--"Chronicon Tarvisinum,"-- preserved in Muratori's Rerum Italicarum Scriptores (tom. XIX.

829-33). As Bracciolini wrote to his friend Leonardo Bruni, Reduxis de Quero, not venturing to alter a word of what he pilfered, for fear of spoiling his pillage, takes his reader into his confidence and affectionately addresses him in the second person, while pretending, to have the exclusive information and personal recollections of Bracciolini, who, present at the Council of Constance, as a member of the court of John XXIII., witnessed the whole of the trial, defence and death of Jerome of Prague.

Muratori, in exposing the plagiarism, is surprised at the impudence of Reduxis stating that, at the time he wrote the account, he was enjoying some leisure moments as Castellan of the "great Castle of Brescia":--"nihil enim agens, _dum custodiae vacarem Castri magni Brixiae_, aliquid agere," &c. The narrative of Bracciolini, light and airy, yet withal touching and graphic, has a wonderful effect in the "Chronicon Tarvisinum": it's not unlike sunlight breaking in and brightly shining between banks of fog. It was, therefore, necessary that a cause should be given for this supreme gleaming amid the general mists of the dull and heavy Chronicle of de Quero; Muratori, accordingly, very properly dispels the wonder of the reader by informing him that he is "here listening to Poggio writing, and in a style," he adds, "which Reduxis was about the last man to imitate":--"itaque heic audis Poggium scribentem, et quidem stylo, quem aequare Redusius minime gentium poterat."

[Endnote 208] Father Hardouin, however, is outrageously extravagant.

He will admit that only two Greek authors and four Latin ones --Cicero, Pliny the Elder, (a big part of) Horace (the Satires and Epistles), and (a little bit of) Virgil (the Georgics), have come down to us, along with the sacred writings of the Old and New Testaments. Nothing else is genuine that we have from antiquity,--not even the coins,--certainly, not the productions of the Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church, nor the Ec.u.menical Councils down to that held at Trent, and to cap the climax of these appalling paradoxes, the parables and prophecies of the Saviour and the Apostles first appeared in Latin. More wondrous still! This wholesale fabrication all occurred in the 13th century, and the forgers were exclusively Benedictine monks.

Had the great Jesuit confined his playful erudition to profane people all would have been well with him; but as he trenched upon holy ground in the skittishness of his scepticism the ecclesiastical authorities set over him were bound to interfere: his superiors severely reprimanded him, his promotion in the Church was for ever after stopped, and the supreme French law court,--the Parlement de Paris,--suppressed the book containing the novel raciness:--"Chronologiae ex Nummis Antiquis Rest.i.tutae Prolusio de Nummis Herodiadum":--but wedded to his opinions, and stubborn in the maintenance of them, Hardouin reproduced the least reprehensible in his "Ad Censuram Scriptorum Veterum Prologomena."

From the manner in which he has been replied to by scholars all over Europe, especially in Holland, France and Germany, conspicuous among whom for pith of argument stand Basnage, Leclerc, Lacroze, Ittig and Bierling, n.o.body at the present day considers that what he said about the monuments of antiquity is worthy of the slightest attention, though everybody acknowledges his wonderful memory, sagacity, ingenuity, and mastery of all kinds of literature, especially history and chronology, and, above all, theology, of which he was a professor.

[Endnote 231] This I borrow from the Rev. Thomas Hunter, Vicar of Wrexham in the middle of the last century, and author of a book on Tacitus, from which I take the idea in the text. Hunter meant his work to be at once a philological and historical disquisition and a psychological and ethical a.n.a.lysis: he wrote it evidently from being thoroughly disgusted by what he had read in the Annals--(as well he might be);--and he laboured hard but in vain to show that the same faults which he found in that work he detected also in the History. His dissertation ends with a parallel between Livy and Tacitus, drawn expressly to disparage the latter, when every judicious, unbia.s.sed reader who will form his opinion of Tacitus solely from the narrative, maxims, and sentiments met with in his History, must freely admit that he stands on a par with (to the thinking of many, above) Livy as an historian, a moralist and a man, all of which is denied by the ingenious Denbighshire clergyman. By a sort of intuitive knowledge,--or that mental process, known as the evolution of inner consciousness,--the world has long arrived at the conclusion that the Vicar of Wrexham's production is not valuable as a literary venture that aims at imparting truth: accordingly, his small 8vo. of 1752 labelled "Observations on Tacitus" shares the fate of the vast majority of modern volumes--it rests in peace buried in dust upon bookshelves.

[Endnote 251] I know that Hallam says in one of his great books ("Literature of Europe") that n.o.body now living believes in the authenticity of the Rowley Poems: but poetry was not the forte of Henry Hallam. I am also aware that, towards the close of the last century, a long and heated controversy raged for years among literary men, who may be divided into two distinct cla.s.ses,-- Believers in the Natural,--as Mr. Jacob Bryant, Dr. Jeremiah Milles, the Dean of Exeter, Dr. Langhorne, and Dr. Glynne,--and Believers in the c.o.c.k Lane Ghost and the Supernatural as Dr. Johnson, and the Mysterious and Impossible, as Lord Camden and Horace Walpole; and that the world has denied its a.s.sent to the theory of the first set who maintained that the poems were Rowley's, agreeing with the other set that they were Chatterton's, who, in consequence of his tender years and ignorance, was placed, for inspiration and intuitive knowledge, on a higher pedestal than Jeremiah. The position of the controversialists which has been accepted amounts to this:--that a child at the age of twelve years wrote the pastoral "Elinoure and Juga," which is marked by finer pathos than anything that proceeded from the pa.s.sionate soul of Burns: that when a few months or so older this child wrote "Aella," which displays an energy equal, if not superior to Spencer's, and about the same time the "Tournament," which breathes the spirit of the middle ages more intensely than the Ivanhoe of Sir Walter Scott. Marvellous as all this is, it is found to be nearly a trifle by the side of this:--that the infant prodigy, when a lad in his eighteenth year, composed poetry that is not in accord with an improved information, but is a very deteriorated sort of stuff,--a reproduction of old fancies, too, in no new form,--as, to test it anywhere,--I take at random the opening lines of the "Invitation," as good as anything in "Kew Gardens," "Sly d.i.c.k," "f.a.n.n.y of the Hill," or any other piece composed by Chatterton towards the close of his life: