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 sunshine.
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 nobleman 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, etc.Above all, his old friend Thomas of Sarzana had been made Pope, and had lent a mighty impulse to letters; had accumulated 5000 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 philologicum.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 arc 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 blushing for the holes in their intellects.
A zealot in art, the friar was a sceptic in religion.
In every age there are a few men who hold the opinions of another age, past or future.Being a lump of simplicity, his sceptism was as naif as his enthusiasm.He affected to look on the religious ceremonies of his day as his models, the heathen philosophers, regarded the worship of gods and departed heroes: mummeries good for the populace.But here his mind drew unconsciously a droll distinction.Whatever Christian ceremony his learning taught him was of purely pagan origin, that he respected, out of respect for antiquity; though had he, with his turn of mind, been a pagan and its contemporary, he would have scorned it from his philosophic heights.
Fra Colonna was charmed with his new artist, and having the run of half the palaces in Rome, sounded his praises so, that he was soon called upon to resign him.He told Gerard what great princes wanted him."But I am so happy with you, father," objected Gerard.
"Fiddlestick about being happy with me," said Fra Colonna; "you must not be happy; you must be a man of the world; the grand lesson I impress on the young is, be a man of the world.Now these Montesini can pay you three times as much as I can, and they shall too-by Jupiter."And the friar clapped a terrific price on Gerard's pen.It was acceded to without a murmur.Much higher prices were going for copying than authorship ever obtained for centuries under the printing press.
Gerard had three hundred crowns for Aristotle's treatise on rhetoric.
The great are mighty sweet upon all their pets, while the fancy lasts; and in the rage for Greek MSS.the handsome writer soon became a pet, and nobles of both sexes caressed him like a lap dog.
It would have turned a vain fellow's head; but the canny Dutchman saw the steel hand beneath the velvet glove, and did not presume.
Nevertheless it was a proud day for him when he found himself seated with Fra Colonna at the table of his present employer, Cardinal Bessarion.They were about a mile from the top of that table; but never mind, there they were and Gerard had the advantage of seeing roast pheasants dished up with all their feathers as if they had just flown out of a coppice instead of off the spit: also chickens cooked in bottles, and tender as peaches.