privilege to be, after he had accompanied the Cardinal to the palace, and was free from immediate employment. Nor was he a silent listener, although modest and unpretending, but a vehement disputer, whenever any discussion was going on. His powers of debate were called forth in the discussions at Ferrara and Florence with the Greeks, concerning the procession of the Holy Spirit. He was among the principal debaters,-as Vespasian assures us,-and one of the most esteemed, owing to his knowledge of Holy Scripture and of the doctors, ancient and modern, Greek and Latin. In the throng which the council had collected, there were Abyssinian, Armenian, and Jacobite Christians, whom it was important to bring back into the church: it was made the especial duty of Thomas to attempt this, and he performed his task with success. Nor were his employments those of the ecclesiastic only, but at the request of Cosimo, who was arranging the library of St. Mark, he suggested the way of so doing, which was followed not only there, but in the library of the Badia of Fiesole, and in those of the Duke of Urbino, and of Alexander Sforza.

Thomas was not only a reader but also, although poor, a collector of books. He never went out of Italy, as a companion of his cardinal on public service, without picking up some work which was not known south of the Alps. So speaks the bookseller again, and mentions several works which he brought with him, but they are works of the fathers or the doctors. In a letter to Niccolò Niccoli he mentions having seen a copy of Gregory Nazianzen, a very old Lactantius, a codex from a French Carthusian convent, containing amongst other things, twelve epistles of Ignatius and one of Polycarp, another of Irenæus, which he was expecting to obtain from the same place, a Cornelius Celsus, and others besides.

In 1443 Cardinal Albergati, his patron, died, and the Pope relieved the poverty of Thomas in some degree by making him Apostolical subdeacon, with a salary of three hundred ducats. This, if we are not deceived, was his first public place, outside

*His patron, Albergati, being an honored Carthusian, and a lover of letters also, probably aided him in thus obtaining access to these works.

of the Cardinal's family. He was now employed by the Pope in legations to France, Burgundy, Florence, Naples, and Germany. In Germany he succeeded in breaking up a combination of the electors adverse to the interests of the Pope, and intended to further the views of the council of Basel. For his public services, he was elevated to the bishopric of Bologna in 1444, and was made a Cardinal in 1446. His bishopric, however, brought him nothing, as Bologna was not under obedience to the Pope. He was therefore still so poor that it was hard work for him to find the means to pay his traveling expenses. On passing through Florence to go to France and Germany, "he called on me," says the old bookseller, "and his first words were that the Pope was poor and he himself very poor, having had no income from his see, and that Pope Eugenius, having no money, could not give him enough to carry him into France. Then he turned to me and said, I want you to go to Cosimo, and pray him to let me have a hundred ducats until my return, and tell him why. I went to Cosimo, and, said he, I will do better than he asks, and forthwith he sent Robert Martelli to him, and he said that he had a commission from Cosimo de' Medici to make out a general letter for him to all the companies and correspondents of the banking house, that they should pay him whatever sum he might desire." In his days of affluence and grandeur, Thomas did not forget this and other kindnesses of the wealthy Florentine. "Thou knowest," said he to the same Vespasian, soon after he had reached his highest dignity, "how many benefits Cosimo conferred on me in my needs, and for this I wish to reward him; therefore, to-morrow I will make him my depositary" (my banker). There was a time during the jubilee, when the bank of the Medicis held on deposit, subject to Pope's order, more than a hundred thousand florins.

On the death of Eugenius in 1447, this poor and unpretending lover of letters reached the highest dignity in the western church, and took the name of Nicholas V., in honor, as we suppose, of the ascetic Cardinal whom he had served with exemplary fidelity and affection a good part of his life. The few years of his reign are marked by events important to the

church and to society. In less than two years the hermit duke of Savoy, who had been created Pope by the fathers at Basel and had taken the name of Felix V., resigned his title, and thus a schism of some ten years standing is happily ended. The next year, being the year of jubilee, brought immense crowds to Rome, and great sums into the papal coffers, by which the Pope was better enabled to fulfill his liberal thoughts. The first years of the second half of the century are the date of important inventions in the printing art. In 1453 the English lose all their French possessions except Calais, and in the same. year Constantinople yields to Mahomet II. With these events the conspiracy of Stephen Porcari, at Rome, is contemporaneous. Italy enjoys a state of unusual tranquillity during the papacy of Nicholas.

But it is our part to consider him as a humanist and a Mæcenas of humanists, the patron of letters beyond all the men of his time. "In the poverty," says Mr. Voigt, "which had accompanied him up to the apostolical seat, we must find the cause why he showed himself so condescending and munificent a Mæcenas in his new elevation. In Florence nothing had appeared to him so lofty as the splendor in which science and art there clothed themselves, nothing seemed to him so mean. and unworthy as that artists and literati should be left to starve. For buildings and books, he was accustomed even then to say, he would like to spend all his money. He found in Cosimo de' Medici a Mæcenas who knew how to give assistance in an honorable and friendly way, and his pleasantest. thoughts and dreams followed this ideal."

In accordance with this remark, while Pope Nicholas V. did not neglect the supervision of the interests of the church nor show himself indifferent to the progress of Christianity, as he understood it, his main current of zeal ran in the direction of buildings and books. A warm and zealous Christian, a warm and zealous Romanist he seems not to have been, nor even a very warm and zealous supporter of the papal authority. He presents to us the spectacle of an honest, sincere, virtuous, ardent, and somewhat choleric man, unselfish and liberal even to profusion, in whom the humanistic spirit-its love of letters,

its love of fame-almost prevailed over the churchly, and cooled or neutralized the Christian. How unlike to his predecessors fighting against the councils of Constance and Basel, on behalf of the monarchical principal in the church against the aristocratic; how unlike to his successors, especially to that other Mæcenas Leo X. to whom Christianity was nothing, and to whom the papacy meant the power of enjoying the world with the least care and restraint.

The plans of Nicholas in the way of public edifices were so vast that a half century could scarcely have brought them to completion. They are given at large by Manetti,* and contemplated in part the ornamentation of Rome, as the capital of the Christian world, and in part the more perfect protection of the Pope and his court against enemies without and against the rebellious people. The Borgo with the Vatican was to be enclosed in a mighty wall, and the palace itself restored and enlarged. Here and all over Rome restorations were prosecuted, as well as in various parts of the State; and to mention but one part of the Pope's design, a library was to be added to the Vatican to contain the new collection of books.

These collection of books and the gathering of learned men at Rome concern us more intimately. With the accession of Nicholas a jubilee began for the humanists, and the Pope stood almost literally in his reception room with a purse of money in his hand for every humanist who might honor him with a call, regarding himself as the honored and obliged party. A great object was the gathering together of a library which was either to be procured by purchasing manuscripts already copied, or by setting scribes at the work of copying, or by employing learned men in the higher work of translations. He sent his explorers, says Manetti, through all Italy and the northern countries, and both before and after the fall of Constantinople learned men were employed at great salaries to ransack Greece for manuscripts. Scribes were set at work both in and out of the city, to write off both Greek and Latin authors. The

*Manetti's life of Nicholas V. is contained in part 2 of Vol. 3 of Muratori's Rer. Ital. Script.

translations made for him, many of them by the first scholars, were either new or intended to replace earlier ones which had been done when Greek was less understood. Manetti mentions two poetical translations of the Iliad, Strabo, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Diodorus Siculus, Appian, Philo Judæus, most of which had never before appeared in a Latin dress. Many works of Plato, Aristotle, and Theophrastus, as the Republic and the Laws, Aristotle's posterior Analytics, his physics, problems, metaphysics, magna moralia, and books de animalibus, as also Theophrastus de plantis, were now either first translated or first put into intelligible Latin. So also a number of the Greek ecclesiastical writers went through the same process-Eusebius de præparatione evangelica, works of Dionysius the Areopagite, of Basil, of Gregory Nazianzen, of Chrysostom, and of Cyrill.

The authors of most of these translations are known to us from Vespasian. Guarino translated Strabo,-as we have already seen;-Herodotus and Thucydides fell into the hands of Laurentius Valla; Xenophon and Diodorus into those of Poggio; Niccolò Perotti worked on Polybius; Theodore of Gaza, on Theophrastus de plantis, and the problems of Aristotle ; George of Trebisond on other works of the same philosopher. Among the ecclesiastical translations, that of the pseudoDionysius belongs to Ambrogio Traversari, and others to George already mentioned. "Many other works were translated or composed at the request of his Holiness," says Vespasian, "of which I have no knowledge. I have written only that of which I have a knowledge."

About 5000 books were thus collected by the efforts of Nicholas, which formed the nucleus of the Vatican.

Towards the leading scholars of his day, Nicholas manifested the most profuse liberality. We have already told the story of his generosity to Filelfo on his passing through Rome, and of the price paid to Guarino and to Lorenzo Valla for the translations which they executed. Manetti says of himself, that he had been enjoying the salary of a secretary from his old friend the Pope without being at Rome or performing any literary work, when, in the seventh year of the papacy of Nicholas,