Part 96 (1/2)
”I forget. Addio, Fiammina. Addio, Ser Gerard. Be happy, be prosperous, as you are good.” And the Roman matron glided away, while Gerard was hesitating, and thinking how to offer to pay so stately a creature for her purchase.
The next day in the afternoon he went to Lucretia, and her boy took him to Fra Colonna's lodgings. He announced his business and feed Onesta, and she took him up to the friar. Gerard entered with a beating heart.
The room, a large one, was strewed and heaped with objects of art, antiquity, and learning, lying about in rich profusion, and confusion.
Ma.n.u.scripts, pictures, carvings in wood and ivory, musical instruments; and in this glorious chaos sat the friar, poring intently over an Arabian ma.n.u.script.
He looked up a little peevishly at the interruption. Onesta whispered in his ear.
”Very well,” said he. ”Let him be seated. Stay; young man, show me how you write!” And he threw Gerard a piece of paper, and pointed to an inkhorn.
”So please you, reverend father,” said Gerard, ”my hand, it trembleth too much at this moment; but last night I wrote a vellum page of Greek, and the Latin version by its side, to show the various character.”
”Show it me!”
Gerard brought the work to him in fear and trembling; then stood, heart-sick, awaiting his verdict.
When it came it staggered him. For the verdict was, a Dominican falling on his neck.
CHAPTER LXI
HAPPY the man who has two chain-cables; Merit, and Women.
Oh that I, like Gerard, had a ”chaine des dames” to pull up by.
I would be prose laureat, or professor of the spasmodic, or something, in no time. En attendant, I will sketch the Fra Colonna.
The true revivers of ancient learning and philosophy, were two writers of fiction--Petrarch, and Boccaccio.
Their labours were not crowned with great, public, and immediate success; but they sowed the good seed; and it never perished, but quickened in the soil, awaiting suns.h.i.+ne.
From their day Italy was never without a native scholar or two, versed in Greek; and each learned Greek who landed there was received fraternally. The fourteenth century, ere its close, saw the birth of Poggio, Valla, and the elder Guarino: and early in the fifteenth Florence under Cosmo de Medici was a nest of Platonists. These, headed by Gemistus Pletho, a born Greek, began about A. D. 1440, to write down Aristotle. For few minds are big enough to be just to great A without being unjust to capital B.
Theodore Gaza defended that great man with moderation; George of Trebizond with acerbity, and retorted on Plato. Then Cardinal Bessarion, another born Greek, resisted the said George, and his idol, in a tract ”Adversus calumniatorem Platonis.”
Pugnacity, whether wise or not, is a form of vitality. Born without controversial bile in so zealous an epoch, Francesco Colonna, a young n.o.bleman of Florence, lived for the arts. At twenty he turned Dominican friar. His object was quiet study. He retired from idle company, and faction fights, the humming and the stinging of the human hive, to St.
Dominic and the Nine Muses.
An eager student of languages, pictures, statues, chronology, coins, and monumental inscriptions. These last loosened his faith in popular histories.
He travelled many years in the East, and returned laden with spoils: master of several choice MSS., and versed in Greek and Latin, Hebrew and Syriac. He found his country had not stood still. Other lettered princes besides Cosmo had sprung up. Alfonso King of Naples, Nicolas d'Este, Lionel d'Este, &c. Above all, his old friend Thomas of Sarzana had been made pope, and had lent a mighty impulse to letters; had acc.u.mulated 5,000 MSS. in the library of the Vatican, and had set Poggio to translate Diodorus Siculus and Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Laurentius Valla to translate Herodotus and Thucydides, Theodore Gaza, Theophrastus; George of Trebizond, Eusebius, and certain treatises of Plato, etc., etc.
The monk found Plato and Aristotle under armistice, but Poggio and Valla at loggerheads over verbs and nouns, and on fire with odium philologic.u.m. All this was heaven; and he settled down in his native land, his life a rosy dream. None so happy as the versatile, provided they have not their bread to make by it. And Fra Colonna was Versatility. He knew seven or eight languages, and a little mathematics; could write a bit, paint a bit, model a bit, sing a bit, strum a bit; and could relish superior excellence in all these branches. For this last trait he deserved to be as happy as he was. For, gauge the intellects of your acquaintances, and you will find but few whose minds are neither deaf, nor blind, nor dead to some great art or science,
”And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.”
And such of them as are conceited as well as stupid, shall even parade, instead of blus.h.i.+ng for, the holes in their intellects.