Tacitus and Bracciolini Part 5

Egreg. Viro Poggio Flor. 26 Maji 1455), to "the purest models of antiquity," and commends him for his "vigorous eloquence and encyclopaedic stores of information": "pristini socculi floret, et viget eloquentia, virtutisque thesaurus." Another of the best spirits of that age, Benedotto Accolti of Arezzo, in his work on the Eminent Men of his Time, puts him on a level with, if not superior to any of the ancient historians, Livy and Sall.u.s.t alone excepted; for he says, "some of whom" (he is speaking, along with Bracciolini, of Bruni, Marsuppini, Guarino, Rossi, Manetti, and Traversari) "so wrote history, that, with the exception of Livy and Sall.u.s.t, there were none of the ancients to whom they might not justly be considered as equal or superior"--"quorum aliqui ita historias conscripserunt, ut Livio et Sall.u.s.tio exceptis, nulli veterum sint, quibus illi non pares aut superiores fuisse recte existimentur" (Benedict. Accoltus Arez. in Dial. de Praest. Viris sui aevi. Muratori. t. XX. p. 179). L'Enfant does not make this exception, for, speaking of Bracciolini's History of Florence, he says, that in "reading it one is reminded of Livy, Sall.u.s.t and the best historians of antiquity":--"A legard de son Histoire, on ne sauroit le lire sans y reconnoitre t.i.te Live, Sall.u.s.te, et les meilleurs historiens de l'antiquite" (Poggiana, Vol. II. p. 83).

Sismondi, too, in the opening pages of the 8th volume of his "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes du Moyen Age," says in a footnote (p. 5) that Bracciolini, in common with Leonardo Bruni and Coluccio Salutati carried off the palm as a Latin writer from all his predecessors in the fourteenth century:--"a la fin du siecle on vit paroitre Leonardo Bruni, dit d'Aretin, Poggio Bracciolini, et Coluccio Salutati, qui devoient l'emporter, comme ecrivains Latins, sur tous leurs predecesseurs." Although Sismondi is quite right as to the date when Bruni and Salutati flourished, he is altogether wrong in supposing that Bracciolini made an appearance before the public at any time in the fourteenth century; quite at the end of it he was only in his twentieth year: the next century had well advanced towards the close of its first quarter before (with the exception of some Epistles) he began to write, which was not until after he had pa.s.sed his fortieth year.

Along with these superior merits of an intellectual writer thus freely accorded to him by some of his more distinguished contemporaries and by ill.u.s.trious historians, Bracciolini possessed the plastic power that makes the forger. He wrote in a great variety of styles and manners; sometimes treating subjects with condensation, and sometimes with diffusiveness. His language is elevated and his sentences are rounded and smooth in his Funeral Orations, in which there is no inflation, nothing declamatory, a perfect absence of straining after effect, yet a rising with ease into veins of sublime rhetoric, while he is close, severe and antique:--hence the princ.i.p.al position that is given to him as an orator by Porcellio in a poem where Marsuppini is called upon to chaunt the praises of Ciriano of Ancona (see Tiraboschi, VI. 286): in ascribing to Marsuppini the place of honour, Porcellio leaves others who are inferior in verse-making to follow; such as, he says, "_the_ Orator Poggio, the sublime Vegio, and Flavio, the Historian":--

Tuque, Aretine, prior, qui cantas laude poetam, Karole, sic jubeo, sit tibi primus honos.

Post alii subeant: Orator Poggius ille, Vegius altiloquus, Flavius Historicus.

Then it would seem that, as Vegio and Biondo Flavio were, in the opinion of Porcellio, unsurpa.s.sed, the first, for the sublimity of his diction, and the second, by his historical writing, so Bracciolini was lifted by his oratory above all his contemporaries. Wit, polish, and keen sarcasm, with abundance of acute observations on the human character, distinguish his Essay on Hypocrisy, published at Cologne in 1535 by Orthuinus Gratius Daventriensis in his "Fasciculus Rerum Expetendarum et Fugiendarum." His Letters are written in an easy, agreeable style, with constant sportiveness and endless felicity of expression. In his Dialogues he is delicate, lively, and careful. Facility and happiness of diction are conspicuous in his "Description of the Ruins of the City of Rome," along with accuracy and picturesqueness in representation of objects. But whatever he did, all his writings (including the Annals), bear the stamp of one mind: they indicate alike the predominance of three powers exercised in an equal and uncommon degree, and without which no one can stand, as he does, on the loftiest pedestal of literary merit,--sensibility, imagination and judgment, working together like one compact, indivisible faculty.

In addition to this versatility in composition, which enabled him to imitate any writer, his career fitted him for the production of the Annals by instilling into his mind the peculiar principles of morals and behaviour which find apt ill.u.s.tration in that work. No one could have written that book who had not been admitted within the veil which hides the daily transactions of the great from the profane eyes of the vulgar; and who had not come into frequent personal contact with courts that were corrupt, and with princes, ministers and leading men of society who were objects of unqualified abhorrence.

III. Young Bracciolini who as the son of a notary of Florence in embarra.s.sed circ.u.mstances, inherited no advantages of rank or fortune, when he had attained, at the age of 23, a competent knowledge of the learned languages under the instruction of Malpaghino, Chrysolaras [Endnote 136] and a Jewish Rabbi, made his first entry into life by receiving admission, perhaps,--it being the common custom in the fifteenth century,--by purchase, into the Pontifical Chancery as a writer of the Apostolic Letters. At that early age the scene that opened itself to his eyes was calculated to destroy all faith in the goodness of human nature. He found in the occupant of St. Peter's Chair, in Boniface IX., a man, ambitious, avaricious, insincere in his dealings, and guilty of the most flagrant simony, bestowing all Church preferments upon the best bidder, without regard to merit or learning, and making it his study to enrich his family and relations.

Bracciolini did not come into the closest communion with the Popes till he became their Princ.i.p.al Secretary, which was when he was between forty and fifty years of age, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, afterwards Pius II., stating in the 54th chapter of his History of Europe that he "dictated" (or caused to be written) "the Pontifical Letters during the time of three Popes";-"Poggium ...

qui Secretarius Apostolicas tribus quondam Romanis Pontificibus dictarat Epistolas";--and though Aeneas Sylvius does not mention the names of the Pontiffs, he must have meant Martin V. (1417), Eugenius IV. (1431) and Nicholas V. (1447). Nevertheless, as one of the writers of the Apostolic Letters, Bracciolini was in a position to have seen a great deal that left a lasting impression on his mind of the wickedness of a corrupt court, the Papal one at this period being thus described by Leonardo Bruni, to Francis, Lord of Cortona:--"full of ill-designing people, too apt to suspect others of crimes, which they themselves would not scruple to commit, and some, out of love for calumny, taking delight in spreading reports, which they themselves did not credit"; so that when Innocent VII. died suddenly of apoplexy, the rumour gained belief that he had been poisoned, a violent death seeming quite a natural end to a life of leniency to murder.

Not one star of light shone across the long and dreary gloom of the papal court experiences of Bracciolini. On the deposition of Gregory XII. for that Pope's duplicity and share in the intrigues and dissensions which disgraced the Pontifical palace for three years, Bracciolini seems to have retired from Rome, and to have remained a resident in Florence during the greater part of the ten months' reign of the mild, pious and philosophical Alexander V., the only able and virtuous divine, who sat in those dark times on St. Peter's throne.

IV. For losing that one glimpse of light in public life, Bracciolini was more than compensated by a beam of beneficent Fortune in his private career, which threw such l.u.s.tre on his path, that it rescued him from what must have been his inevitable fate, morbid cynicism: it was one of the happiest incidents that ever occurred to him:--he formed the acquaintance of a man, seventeen years his senior--who, in the lapse of a very short time, became to him a father and adviser, to whom present or absent he imparted every one of his schemes, thoughts, cares, sayings and doings; who was the unfailing allayer of his anxieties, alleviator of his sorrows, and most constant support of all his undertakings,--Niccolo Niccoli,--of whom I must take notice, as he was one of the most active stimulators of the forgery of the Annals.

Though by no means affluent, and frequently straitened in circ.u.mstances ("h.o.m.o nequaquam opulens, et rerum persaepe inops,"

says Bracciolini of him, Or. Fun. III.), nevertheless, he made enough money, as well as possessed the munificent spirit to build at his own expense, and present to the Convent of the Holy Spirit in Florence an edifice in which to deposit the books bequeathed to the Brothers by Boccaccio; and, at his death, he left to the public in the same City his own ma.n.u.scripts, which he had acc.u.mulated at great cost and with much pains. He was one of the few laymen, not to be found out of Italy, who had learning and a knowledge of Latin, which he had acquired with that eminent scholar, philosopher and theologian, about half a dozen of whose works have come down to us, Ludovicus Marsilius; but learning and Latin were essential to the carrying on of his very pleasant and most lucrative occupation;--that of amending and collating ma.n.u.scripts previous to their disposal for coin; a business, in which, we are told by Bracciolini, that he surpa.s.sed everybody in excessive expertness ("solertissimus omnium fuit in emendis ac comparandis libris fructuosissima ac pulcherrima omnium negotiatione," Or. in Fun. Nic. Nic.); we can, consequently, conceive what immense sums he must have received for ma.n.u.scripts of the best ancient Greek and Roman cla.s.sics, when properly spelt, correctly punctuated, and freed from errors.

His qualities, as enumerated by his friend, Bracciolini, in a most enthusiastic Funeral Oration over his remains (Pog. Op. 273-4), were such as to show, if there be no exaggeration in the description of him, that he was as much a wonder as any of the great Oracles of his age. His attainments were varied; his information extensive; his judgment sound, and to be relied upon, being given not for the mere sake of a.s.sent nor for flattery, but for what he believed to be true; "he got into a considerable sweat," says Bracciolini, "when he read Greek," ("in Graecis literis plurimum insudavit"), but was enabled to range over every department of literature in Latin, of which his knowledge was critical and most masterly, for the same authority a.s.sures us "not a word could be mentioned, the force and etymology of which he did not know"--"nullum proferebatur verb.u.m cujus vim et originem ignoraret" in geography he stood without a rival; for, his memory, being like a vice, retaining everything he read, even to names, he knew the minutiae, of every country better than those who had been residents in them; though he rarely practised the art, he was a master of rhetoric; as a conversationist he held his company in entranced silence from the wisdom of his remarks, the dulcet flow of his words, and his transcendent memory bringing together from all quarters, with appropriateness to every subject under discussion, the valuable stock of his miscellaneous reading.

Nothing could be more natural than that such a wonderful instance of the human intellect should court the congenial society of lovers of learning; he made his house the resort for them; and he placed at the disposal of the studious his library, which was the best in Florence, now that Salutati's, after his death, had been disposed of by his sons at auction.

Bracciolini was so struck by the attainments and captivated by the character of this man, that an acquaintance casually formed speedily ripened into an intimacy of the most confidential, cordial and communicative kind. Bracciolini, during his stay in Florence, was a guest in the house of Niccoli; and there, for nearly a year, he resumed and pursued his studies with ardour amid the rich stores of the large and select a.s.sortment of ma.n.u.scripts, amounting to not far from a thousand in number. He was thus adding to the treasures of his lore with daily a.s.siduity, when the news reached Florence that Cardinal Cossa had (notwithstanding the well-known virtues of Alexander V.) poisoned his predecessor, and had been elected to the pontifical chair by the t.i.tle of John XXIII.

Behold Bracciolini once more in the palace of the Pontiffs of Rome; and now acting, in the capacity of Secretary, or, more properly, writer of the Apostolic Letters, to a Pope who was a poisoner. John XXIII. was even worse than that: he was a most atrocious violator of laws, human and divine; and some crimes he committed were so heinous that it would be indecent to place them before the public. One can imagine how agreeable must have been the occupation to that Pope of a military rather than an ecclesiastic turn, and fonder of deeds of violence and bloodshed than of acts of meekness and Christianity, when he was presiding at Constance over that General Council, which sent to the stake those Bohemian followers of the Morning Star of the Reformation, Huss and Jerome of Prague, to be burnt alive, according to general belief, with their clothes and everything about them, even to their purses and the money in them, and their ashes to be thrown into the Rhine; but, as will be immediately seen, from the account of an eye-witness, in a state of perfect nudity.

V. Bracciolini, who witnessed the burning of Jerome of Prague, gives a description of it in one of his Epistles, in a manner equal to anything that may be found in the Annals;--indeed, many of his contemporaries thought that his Epistles reflected the style and spirit of antiquity,--Beccadelli of Bologna, for example, who says, writing to Bracciolini: "Your Epistles, which, in my opinion, reflect the very spirit of the ancients, and, especially, the antique style of Roman expression":--"Epistolae tuae, quae veterum sane, et antiquum illum eloquentiae Romanae morem, prae ceteris, mea sententia exprimunt" (at the end of Lusus ad Vencrem, p. 47). The style is simpler, more unambitious, and more flowing and smooth than is usually found in the Annals; but, (as in the descriptive pa.s.sages in that work), free play is given to the fancy which works unclogged by verboseness; and judgment marks the circ.u.mstances in a description which progresses, apparently without art, to the close of the beautiful climax, and strongly moves the compa.s.sion of the reader:--"When he persisted with increased contumacy in his errors, he was condemned of heresy by the Council, and sentenced to be burnt alive. With an unruffled brow and cheerful countenance he went to his end; he was unawed by fire, or any kind of torture, or death. Never did any Stoic suffer death with a soul of so much fort.i.tude and courage, as he seemed to meet it. When he came to the place of death, he stripped himself of his clothes, then dropping on his bended knees clasped the stake to which he was to be fastened: he was first bound naked to the stake with wet ropes, and then with a chain, after which not small, but large logs of wood with sticks thrown in among them were piled around him up to his breast; then when they were being set on fire he began to sing a sort of hymn, which the smoke and the flames hardly put a stop to. This was the greatest mark of his soul of fort.i.tude: when the executioner wanted to light the fire behind his back, so that he should not see it, he called out, 'Come here, and set fire to it before my eyes; for if I had been afraid of it, I never should have come to this place, which it was in my power to have avoided.' Thus did this man, perish, who was excellent in everything but faith. I saw the end of him; I watched every scene of it. Whether he acted from conviction or contumacy, you would have p.r.o.nounced his the death of a man who belonged to the school of philosophy. I have laid before you a long narrative for the sake of occupation; having nothing to do I wanted to do something, and give an account of things very different, indeed, from the stories of the ancients; for the famous Mutius did not suffer his arm to be burnt with a soul so bold, as this man his whole body; nor Socrates drink poison half so willingly as he endured burning."

I shall now place the pa.s.sage before the reader in the Latin, as it was written by Bracciolini, with some words in Italics, upon which I shall afterwards comment:--

"_c.u.m pertinacius_ in erroribus perseveraret, per Concilium haeresis d.a.m.natus est, et _igni_ combustus. Jucunda fronte et alacri vultu ad _exitum_ suum _accessit_, non _ignem_ expavit, non tormenti genus, non _mortis_. Nullus unquam Stoicorum fuit _tam constanti animo, tam_ forti _mortem_ perpessus, quam iste _oppetiisse_ videtur. _c.u.m_ venisset ad _loc.u.m mortis, se ipsum exuit vestimentis, tum_ proc.u.mbens, flexis genibus, veneratus est _palum_, ad quem ligatus fuit: primum funibus manentibus, _tum_ catena undus ad _palum_ constrictus fuit; ligna deinde circ.u.mposita pectore tenus non minuscula, sed grossa palaeis interjectis, _tum_ flamma adhibita canere coepit hymnum quendam, quem fumus et _ignis_ vix interrupit. Hoc maximum _constantis animi_ signum: _c.u.m_ lector _ignem_ post tergum, ne id _videret_, injicere vellet: --'huc,' inquit, '_accede_, atque in conspectu accende _ignem_; si enim illum timuissem, nunquam ad hunc _loc.u.m_ quem effugiendi facultus erat, _accessissem_.' Hoc modo vir, praeter fidem, egregius, consumptus est. _Vidi_ hunc _exitum_, singulos _actus_ inspexi. Sive perfidia, sive _pertinacia_ id _egerit_, certe philosophiae schola interitum _viri_ descripsisses. Longam tibi cantilenam _narravi_ ocii causa, nihil _agens_ aliquid _agere_ volui, et res tibi _narrare_ paulum similes histories priscorum.

Nam neque Mutius ille _tam_ fidenti _animo_ pa.s.sus est membrum uri, quam iste universum corpus; neque Socrates _tam_ sponte venenum bibit, quam iste _ignem_ suscepit." [Endnote 145]

It will be seen, as a peculiarity in composition, that, in this not very long sentence, several words are re-introduced, and sometimes over and over again, when the repet.i.tion could have been avoided, as: "accedere," "agere," "videre," "narrare," "pertinacia,"

"constans," "animus," "mors," "exitus," "ignis," "vir," "locus,"

"palus," "c.u.m," "tum," "tam," &c. As this runs through the whole of Bracciolini's compositions with much frequency, it is to be expected that it would be found to some extent in the Annals; because a man who so writes, writes thus unconsciously and unavoidably, and even when engaged in a forgery, striving to imitate the style and manner of another, he could not escape from so marked and distinctive a mannerism. Bracciolini, accordingly, is found adhering in the Annals to this uniformity of manner: many pa.s.sages more forcibly ill.u.s.trative of this peculiarity might be quoted; but I select the sham sea-fight in the XIIth book, for two reasons, because it is pretty much of the same length as the burning of Jerome of Prague, and because it is of a similar nature,--descriptive:--

"Sub idem _tempus_, inter _lac.u.m_ Fucinum amnemque Lirin perrupto monte, quo magnificentia _operis_ a pluribus _viseretur, lacu_ in ipso navale _proelium_ adornatur; ut quondam Augustus, structo cis Tiberim stagno, sed levibus navigiis et minore copia _ediderat._ Claudius triremes quadriremesque et undeviginti hominum millia armavit, cincto _ratibus_ ambitu, ne vaga effugia forent; _ac_ tamen spatium amplexus, ad _vim_ remigii, gubernantium artes, impetus _navium_, et _proelio_ solita. In _ratibus_ praetoriarum cohortium manipuli turmaeque adst.i.terant, antepositis propugnaculis, ex quis catapultae ballistaeque tenderentur: reliqua _lacus_ cla.s.siarii tectis _navibus_ obtinebant. Ripas et colles, _ac_ montium _edita_, in modum theatri _mult.i.tudo_ innumera complevit _proximis_ e municipiis, et alii urbe ex ipsa, _visendi cupidine_ aut officio in _principem_. Ipse insigni paludamento, neque procul Agrippina chlamyde aurata, praesedere. _Pugnatum_, quamquam inter sontes, fortium virorum animo; _ac_, post multum vulnerum, occidioni exempti sunt. Sed perfecto _spectaculo_ apertum _aquarum_ iter.

Incuria _operis_ manifesta fuit, haud satis depressi ad _lacus_ ima vel media. Eoque, _tempore_ interjecto, altius effossi specus, et contrahendae rursus _mult.i.tudini_ gladiatorum _spectaculum editur_, inditis pontibus pedestrem ad _pugnam_. Quin et convivium effluvio _lacus_ adpositum, magna formidine cunctos adfecit; quia _vis aquarum_ prorumpens _proxima_ trahebat, convulsis ulterioribus, aut fragore et sonitu exterritis. Simul Agrippina, trepidatione _principis_ usa, ministrum _operis_ Narcissum incusat _Cupidinis ac_ praedarum. Nec ille reticet, impotentiam muliebrem nimiasque spes ejus arguens."

(An. XII. 56-7).

In this pa.s.sage it will be observed that the same thing takes place in the repet.i.tion of words:--"lacus," "ratis," "vis," "navis," "ac,"

"mult.i.tudo," "Cupido," "princeps," "tempus," "spectaculum," "edere,"

"proelium," "visere," "proximus," "aqua," "opus" and "pugna." The conjunctive particle "ac," is more particularly to be noted as an out of the way word for the ordinary copulative "et": "_ac_ tamen spatium amplexus"; "_ac_ montium edita"; "_ac_ post multum vulnerum,"

occurring so frequently in such a brief sentence is just like the monotony of composition in the extract from Bracciolini with respect to "c.u.m": "_c.u.m_ pertinacius in erroribus perseveraret"; "_c.u.m_ venisset ad loc.u.m mortis"; "_c.u.m_ lictor ignem post tergum," &c.

But this is not all as to the resemblance which the pa.s.sage from Bracciolini bears to the writing in the Annals. The expression "quam iste _oppetiise_," i.e. mortem, "videtur," has its exact counterpart in the Second Book of the Annals in the phrase: "vix cohibuere amici, quo minus eodem mari _oppeteret_," i.e.

mortem (II. 24). When, too, Bracciolini says of Jerome of Prague, "_se ipsum exuit_ vestimentis," "_strips himself_ of his clothes,"

instead of simply, "takes off his clothes,"--"exuit vestimenta,"-- we have an expression precisely like that in the Annals, "_neutrum_ datis a se praemiis _exuit_," that is, "_strips neither_ of the rewards which he had given him" (XIV. 55), instead of "takes away the rewards,"--"praemia exuit."

But I will go by-and-bye more fully into matters of this kind. At present it is necessary that I should still pursue the career of Bracciolini,--or rather so much of it as is absolutely needed, in order that the reader may see how curiously it prepared and formed him to be the author of such a peculiar work as the Annals, which in its characteristic singularity, could have proceeded from him only, and by no manner of means from Tacitus.

CHAPTER II.

BRACCIOLINI IN LONDON.

Gaining insight into the darkest pa.s.sions from a.s.sociating with Cardinal Beaufort.--II. His pa.s.sage about London in the Fourteenth Book of the Annals examined.--And III. About the Parliament of England in the Fourth Book.

I. In the autumn of 1418, after the breaking up of the Council of Constance, Bracciolini left Italy and accompanied to England a member of the Plantagenet family, the second son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Henry Beaufort, whose placid and beardless face the great Florentine seems to have first seen at the Ec.u.menical Council which that princely prelate had turned aside to visit in the course of a pilgrimage he was making to Jerusalem. Henry Beaufort was then Bishop of Winchester, but afterwards a Cardinal, and though there was another Prince of the Roman Church, Kemp, Archbishop of York and subsequently of Canterbury, Beaufort was always styled by the popular voice and in public acts "The Cardinal of England," on account, perhaps, of his Royal parentage and large wealth, more enormous than had been known since the days of the De Spencers: he had lands in manors, farms, chaces, parks and warrens in seven counties, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Somersetshire, Hampshire and Surrey, besides having the Customs of England mortgaged to him, and the c.o.c.ket of the Port of Southampton with its dependencies,--an indebtedness of the State which is so far interesting as being the foundation of our National Debt.

Bracciolini had now an opportunity of watching and unravelling the wiles of this august prelate and patron of his; he thus gained still more insight into the ways of the worldly and the feelings of the ambitious; acquired a masterly knowledge of the dark pa.s.sions and became versed in the crooked policy of court intrigue. He had quitted provinces at home laid waste by hostile invasions and cities agitated by the discord of contending parties; Genoa sending warships to ravage in the Mediterranean, Venice reducing to subjection the smaller States along the Adriatic, and Florence warring with Pisa, still to fix his eyes on darkness and the degradation of humanity; for he was visiting a country,--as England was in the fifteenth century,--buried in the gloom of barbarism, and forlorn in its literary condition, with writers, unworthy the name of scholars, Walsingham and Whethamstede, Otterbourne and Elmham, inditing bald chronicles; students applying their minds to scholastic philosophy; divines confounding their wits with theological mysteries; and men with inclinations to science, as Thomas Northfield, losing themselves in witchcraft, divination and the barbarous jargon of astrology, while rendering themselves, at any moment, liable to be apprehended by order of the doctors and notaries who formed the Board of Commissioners for the discovery of magicians, enchanters and sorcerers; for it was the age when invention framed the lie of the day, the marvellous military leadership of Joan of Arc, and credulity stood as ready to receive it as little boys in nurseries the wondrous tale of Jack and the Beanstalk. Through this mist the figure of Cardinal Beaufort loomed largest, unsociable, disdainful, avaricious, immeasurably high-stomached (for he deemed himself on an equality with the king); and, in spite of immoderate riches, inordinately mean: along with these unamiable qualities, he upheld the policy of Martin V., which was to destroy the independence of the National Church of England: he was treacherous to his a.s.sociates, and murderous thoughts were not strangers to his bosom.

Bishop Milner, in his History of Winchester under the Plantagenets (Vol. I. p. 301), denies that there is solid ground in history for representing Beaufort as depraved, and condemns Shakespeare for having endowed Humphry, Duke of Gloucester, with merit of which he deprived the memory of Cardinal Beaufort. The late Dean Hook, too, in his elegantly written life of Archbishop Chicheley (p. 97) is of opinion that Beaufort "has appeared in history with his character drawn in darker colours than it deserves." Those two distinguished dignitaries, one of the Roman Catholic and the other of the English Church, do not then seem to have heard of the anecdote related by Agnes Strickland, in her Life of Katherine of Valois (p. 114), that Henry V., when Prince of Wales, was narrowly saved from murder by the fidelity of his little spaniel, whose restlessness caused the discovery of a man who was concealed behind the arras near the bed where the Prince was sleeping in the Green Chamber in the Palace at Westminster, and a dagger being found on the person of the intruder, he confessed that he was there by the order of Beaufort to kill the Prince in the night, showing that the Cardinal was guilty of a double treachery, for he was setting on the heir-apparent at the time to seize his father's crown; nor do Milner and Hook seem to have known that the death of the Duke of Gloucester was princ.i.p.ally contrived by Wykeham's successor in the See of Winchester, and that, whether poisoned or not, the Duke was hurried out of the world in a very suspicious manner, one of the first acts of Margaret of Anjou after her coronation being, in conjunction with the Wintonian diocesan to bring about the death of that Prince after arresting him in a Parliament called for the purpose at St. Edmund's Bury; Shakespeare, accordingly, had historic truth with him, when he represented the Cardinal suffering on his death-bed the tortures of a murderer's guilty conscience, from being implicated in taking away by violence the life of Humphry, Duke of Gloucester:--

"Alive again! Then show me where he is, I'll give a thousand pound to look upon him.

He hath no eyes, the dust hath blinded them.

Comb down his hair. Look, look! it stands upright Like lime twigs set to catch my winged soul.

Give me some drink; and bid the apothecary Bring the strong poison that I bought of him":--

to which a looker-on observes:--

"O! thou Eternal Mover of the Heavens, Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch."

It could have been with no gentle eye that Bracciolini looked on Cardinal Beaufort, whose "bad death," as Shakespeare makes the Earl of Warwick observe, "argued a monstrous life."

Repeatedly in letters to his friend Niccoli, during two years and more of anxiety and discontent pa.s.sed by him from 1420 to 1422 in the Palace of the Prince Prelate, Bracciolini complained bitterly of the magnificent promises not being fulfilled that the Cardinal had held forth to him on condition of his accompanying him to England. In vain he looked forward to considerable emolument; day after day he found himself doomed to the common lot of those who depend on the patronage of the great;--"in suing long to bide":--

"To lose good days that might be better spent; To waste long nights in pensive discontent; To speed to-day, to be put back to-morrow; To feed on hope; to pine on fear and sorrow; To fret the soul with crosses and with cares; To eat the heart through comfortless despairs; To fawn, to crouch, to wait, to ride, to run, To spend, to give, to want, to be undone."

And, really, Bracciolini may be said to have been "undone"; for when he got what he had bargained to purchase, the frivolous goodwill of his master, it was, as he expressed it, "the birth of the mouse after the labour of the mountain": he obtained a benefice of 120 florins a year, with what he did not antic.i.p.ate would be attached to it,--hard work.

In order to have a precise and not a vague and confused idea of the galling effect produced on his feelings by this offer, it is necessary to turn to two paragraphs (37, 38), in the Second Book of the Annals;--for I cannot divest myself of the suspicion that this incident in his life is there indirectly referred to, where an account is given that has no historical basis of the "n.o.bilis juvenis, in paupertate manifesta," Marcus Hortalus, whose n.o.ble parentage and straightened circ.u.mstances closely corresponded to the birth and means of Bracciolini. When seeking recompense from Tiberius for his four sons, he calls on the Emperor to behold in them "the scions and offspring of what a mult.i.tude of consuls!

what a mult.i.tude of dictators! which he says not to mortify, but to excite commiseration."--"En! stirps et progenies tot consulum!

tot dictatorum! nec ad invidiam ista, sed conciliandae misericordiae refero;" commenting on which Justus Lipsius bursts into the angry exclamation: "What a braggart, lying speech on this man's part! For where was this mult.i.tude of consuls, this mult.i.tude of dictators? Why, I can find only one dictator and one consul in the Hortensian family; the dictator in the year of Rome, 467, when the Commons revolted; and the Consul, Quintus Hortensius, the grandfather of the speaker,--who, perhaps, however, reckoned in the ancestors also in his mother's line": --"Vaniloqua hominis oratio et falsa! Ubi enim isti tot consules, tot dictatores? Certe ego in Hortensia gente unum, dictatorem reperio, et Consulem unum; dictatorem anno urbis 467 secessione plebis; consulem, Q. Hortensium hujus avum. Sed intellegit forta.s.se majores suos etiam ex gente materna."

Lipsius would have spared himself the trouble of inditing this indignant note and throwing out this useless suggestion had he known that Bracciolini forged the Annals, and playfully interspersed his fabrication occasionally with fanciful characters and fict.i.tious events. The picture of Marcus Hortalus, who had received from Augustus the munificent gift of a million sesterces, being in the days of Tiberius once more poor, married, with children, and seeking aid from the State for his four sons, seems to be all purely imaginary, introduced merely as a photograph from life, the feelings and conduct of Hortalus, after the treatment of his sons by Tiberius, being such a faithful reflex, as far as can be judged from his own confessions, of the feelings and conduct of Bracciolini himself after the way in which his hopes of preferment were blasted by Cardinal Beaufort. Just as Hortalus, if he had been left to himself, would have remained a bachelor, and only from pressure on the part of Augustus, became a husband, and, while incapable of supporting children, a father, so Bracciolini would have remained in Italy and never visited this country, had it not been for the importunities of the Cardinal, and never turned his thoughts to preferment in the Church, which he is invariably telling us he disliked, had not Beaufort given a.s.surance that he would put him in the way of holding some high and lucrative post in England; and then when he received a paltry benefice, instead of expressing thanks like the other dependents on the Prince Prelate, he was silent, from fear of the power possessed by Beaufort, or from retaining even in his contracted fortunes the politeness which he had inherited from his n.o.ble forefathers:--"egere alii grates; siluit Hortalus, pavore, an avitae n.o.bilitatis, etiam inter angustias fortunae, retinens"

(An. II. 38).

II. We are indebted to Bracciolini's stay among us for one or two matters that are interesting about our country. His two years'

residence here filled him with a marked admiration of London as well as with the most confused ideas of the antiquity and greatness of its commerce; and though comments have already been made on his description of it as eminently absurd, the pa.s.sage is too curious not to be examined again; the more so as it has misled good historians of London, who believing that the account actually proceeded from Tacitus, have taken it to be incontrovertibly true, whereas it is only true, if it be applied, as it is applicable only to the advanced state of society and the large commercial town of which Bracciolini was the eye witness towards the close of the reign of Henry V., and the commencement of that of his infant son and successor. The slightest investigation will carry conviction of this.