Greek from Marcus Musurus. In his youth he chose Statius for his model, but his severe and exquisite taste led him to condemn the style of his own earlier pieces. His taste is shown by his fondness for Pindar, whose odes he copied more than once, and by the value he set on the native simple style of Catullus, in whose honor he is recorded to have publicly burnt a copy of Martial, once every year. Perhaps it was the same severe taste, which led him, about the time of his death, to destroy several works, and among them his history of Venice, ten books of which he had composed as public historiographer. He worked on editions of Cicero, Terence, Lucretius, Ovid, Quintilian, which were printed at the Aldine press. The preliminary epistle to his edition of Cicero has been printed by itself. Other productions of his pen are funeral discourses, an Italian narrative of a journey into France and Spain, Italian and above all Latin poetry. He was sent by the republic of Venice upon embassies to Charles V. and to Francis I., and died on such an errand at Blois, in France, in 1529, when he was forty-six years old. He must have been a highly gifted man, and his Latin poems, few in number, rank in excellence among the best written by modern Latinists. We give a sample from an unfinished address to his home, on his return from an embassy to Spain:

Salve cura Deûm, mundi felicior ora,
Formosae Veneris dulces salvete recessus.
Ut vos post tantos animi mentisque labores,
Aspicio lustroque libens, ut munere vestro
Sollicitas toto depello e pectore curas.

Through the remainder of our essay, our attention will be directed exclusively to Rome and to those men who had somewhat intimate relations with Rome, until we come at the end to a final estimate of the revival of letters in its relation to the progress of mankind.

When we took our eyes off from Rome in treating of the first of our two periods, the great patron of letters, Nicholas V., had gathered around him or summoned into his service a large part of the learned men of Italy and the leading scholars among the Greek refugees. Great was the change for the

humanists when Nicholas was no more, and when Callistus III. (Alfonso Borgia), at the age of eighty, was elected to fill his place. He reigned only three years, but long enough to make his infamous nephew, Rodrigo Borgia, a cardinal, governor of the city, and commander of the papal guards. For letters and for humanists he had no sympathy; the books of Nicholas he is said to have wasted, the buildings of Nicholas he left untouched, the friends of Nicholas languished.

On the death of Callistus a man was chosen pope on whose patronage and sympathy the humanists might well calculate, for the spirit of no pope had been so thoroughly imbued with their culture. Enea Sylvio de' Piccolomini (Æneas Sylvius) belonged to a noble family in Siena, which, through the ascendency of the democratic faction, had been stripped of power and possessions. His father retired to a small estate at Corsignano-now called Pienza, after Pius II.,-and there by the labor of his own hands, saved himself from absolute want. There, in 1405, Æneas was born, the eldest of eighteen children, most of whom died before reaching maturity. He was educated at first in Siena, where Beccadelli, whom we have spoken of, was his contemporary, and where, although no Greek was taught, something of the taste and spirit of humanism reached him. He was still further brought under its sway during a two years' residence in Florence, where Filelfo was one of his principal masters. Like many of the humanists, he now made law, civil and canonical, his principal study, without an interest in the science, and against the grain, giving it up as soon as he found an opening in some other direction.

That opening came in the shape of an offer to accompany Domenico da Capranica, bishop of Fermo,-a member of the Colonna faction, whom Eugenius IV., in spite of solemn promises, refused to acknowledge as a cardinal,—to the Council of Basel, in the capacity of a secretary. He accepted the offer, and thus his devotion to the episcopal antimonarchical party in the Church for a number of years was secured, and his acquaintance with German ecclesiastical politics, which was begun at Basel, determined the rest of his life. Leaving Capranica, who had no money, he passed in succession into the

service of several masters, and in 1436 made an impressive speech at the Council, as orator of the Duke of Milan, in favor of removing the Council from Basel to Pavia. He became a scriptor or clerk of the Council, acquired the right of voting, and was employed in embassies and other business on their behalf. When, in 1539, the Council deposed the pope and appointed the hermit Duke of Savoy to that place, he still adhered to the antipapal party, became a secretary to the new pope, and composed his three books, de Basileensi concilio, his dialogues on the authority of a general council, and a letter to the Emperor Frederic III., all written to further the views of that interest. In 1442, while at Frankfurt in the train of a legate of the Council, he won the favor of the Emperor, and received in the next year the appointment of a secretary in the imperial chancery under Caspar Schlick, the chancellor.

His lot was now cast in Vienna, where he had a small income from his office. To increase his resources he looked about for some ecclesiastical place, and on receiving an appointment to a parish in Tyrol, submitted to ordination as a presbyter. Meanwhile the cause of the Council declined, and the Roman Pope Eugenius was gaining ground continually. Caspar Schlick was bribed by a promise of giving his brother the bishopric of Freisingen. The Emperor, from neutrality and indifference to the liberties of the Church in Germany, was won over to the side of Eugenius by payments and promises, while Æneas Sylvius drew off from the party of his vanquished friends, fell at the Pope's feet asking pardon, became an avowed apostate from his principles, and was a leading agent in composing the differences between the Pope and the Emperor, and in weakening the antipapal coalition in Germany. For his services, he was made, in 1447, bishop of Trieste, by Pope Nicholas V., at his accession to the Papacy, in conformity with the intentions of the deceased Pope.

Eneas was now forty-two years old, and up to this time his life of an adventurer, a turncoat, a thorough politician, and a man of the world, had been a vicious life also. He had erred like Poggio and Valla, and became the father of bastard children, but his frivolous reflections on his own life, and his be

numbed moral sense, show a deeper error of the heart. He had also been a lascivious poet and novelist. His Latin novel of Euryalus and Lucretia, an exceedingly objectionable work, was composed at Vienna when he was nearly forty years of age. Afterwards he professed to regret this work, and lays it to the account of his youth, which is certainly carrying the plea of juvenility very far. His frivolity amounted in fact to hypoc risy. "When," says Mr. Voigt, in his life of Pius II., "at the diet of Nuremburg in 1444, he assured one of his fellow secretaries that he was thinking more on preparation for death than on worldly things, and fortified himself by many common places in ornate speech, this did not hinder him from writing during the same days a brothel-comedy." This comedy, never printed, and thus not enjoying the vast popularity of others of his profligate works, exists in one manuscript, which Mr. Voigt has seen. "His exemplar," says he, "was Terence. The comedy shows a brilliant wit, and an intimate familiarity with the smut and obscenity of the Roman poets, but, as for the rest, is well worthy of being acted in a brothel, since it is concerned with prostitutes and their visitors, with pimps and like impurities."*

Eneas shows us the full blown humanist with his worst faults, his heathenish morality and frivolity, his love of reputation, his rhetorical varnish, his epicurean philosophy of corrupt common sense. But he was more than a humanist, or rather culture was a secondary thing to him. He was a man of the world and a many sided man, who could not have been content with a literary life immersed in classical studies, whose tastes and aims far outwent any position and reputation that the polite learning of the age could have secured for him; one, in short, who engrafted the culture and the bad traits of humanism on the clear practical thought and restlessness of a politician.

With his entrance into the ecclesiastical state, or at least from the time when he became bishop of Trieste, Æneas put on a cloak of more respectable morality. "The warning hand

* Voigt's Enea Silvio, Vol. I., 438; II., 195.

of time," says Mr. Voigt, "wrought in him a kind of moral revolution, which however did not express itself in religious depth-for this was always foreign to his nature, nor in too sour morals, at which his friends would have laughed. He had luckily got rid of priestly ordination, until an age of life when the sensual appetites needed not to be resisted, but grew dry and slept of themselves."*

The experience of Æneas, and his acquaintance especially with the affairs of Germany, called him into the Pope's political service almost continually. It was he mainly to whom was entrusted the task of keeping up a good understanding between the Emperor and the Pope, and of promoting a crusade against the Turks. In 1449 he was made Bishop of Siena. Three years later he waited upon and perhaps managed the Emperor Frederic, when he made his expedition into Italy, and there received coronation from the Pope. The elevation of Eneas to the cardinalate occurred in 1456, under Pope Callistus, a dignity which Nicholas V. had some years before promised to bestow on him, but had died without making his word good. On the death of Callistus he was chosen his successor in August, 1458, against Cardinal d' Estouteville, Archbishop of Rouen, who was put forward by the French interest. Eneas, or Cardinal Piccolomini, took the name of Pius II., not because he knew anything about so obscure a person as Pius I., but because the words of Virgil, "sum pius Æneas," with which his friends had teazed him, suggested the title.

—a

His papacy of just eight years was chiefly spent in endeav oring to strengthen the papal or monarchic principle which he had long endeavored to destroy, and in rousing Europe against the Turks. In both points his plans were failures, and if he died in a kind of halo, while superintending the departure of the fleet from Ancona, he was saved from the disgrace and the blame of an abortive enterprise.

We may not stain our pages with his confessions in the character of a worn out debauchee as late as 1446, which was after his ordination. They may be seen in Herzog's Encyclop., Vol. XI., voce Pius II., page 704, with which comp. page 700.