Castiglione of Mantua was employed in important services first by the Duke of Urbino, and then by the Duke of Mantua. Being sent by the latter as his Ambassador to the Pope in 1519, he made a long stay at Rome, and thus added a new ornament to the brilliant society there gathered. He was a man of vast and varied acquisitions, an excellent poet in Latin and Italian, an explorer and collector of antiquities. His principal work, the Cortigiano or Courtier, first published in 1528, and containing the rules of court life as they ought to be, rather than as they were, calls forth a favorable notice from Mr. Hallam. (Hist. of Lit. I., 548).

Valerian (Giovanni Pierio Valeriano Bolzani), the son of poor parents, and the nephew of Fra Urbano, the Greek grammarian, was born at Belluno in 1512, and after various fortunes found himself at Rome, under the patronage of the Archbishop of Turin, who was then governor of the Castle of St. Angelo. He was also installed in the Gymnasium of Rome as professor, as appears by the list of professors to which we have already referred; and was appointed by the Pope tutor of Alessandro and of Ippolito de' Medici, the former of whom was afterwards Duke of Florence, and the latter a Cardinal of the Roman church. He was absent from Rome during the short papacy of Adrian, and returned to receive ecclesiastical preferments and the professorship of eloquence from Clement VII. The latter part of his life was passed in northern Italy, principally at Padua, where he died in 1558. In Latin poetry he reached only the second rank. His great work on hieroglyphics, in fifty-eight books, did little towards a correct explanation of his subject. He is best known by his work de infelicitate litteratorum, which contains a multitude of anecdotes concerning the scholars of his time not elsewhere to be found. D'Israeli, in his similar work on "the calamities of authors," has spoken disparagingly of his predecessor, but Sir Egerton Brydges has defended Valerian in an edition of this work, which appeared under his auspices at

* This is not noticed by Tiraboschi or any other authority which we have consulted.

Geneva in 1825, of which only twenty-seven copies were printed.

Another poet of Leo's time, deserving of mention, is Marcantonio Flaminio, whose father, Gianantonio, a professor of belles lettres, successfully cultivated the muses, and met with favor from Julius II. The son, born at Serravalle in 1498, and educated by his father, gave very early proofs of genius, and at sixteen was sent to Rome with a poem of his father's urging the Pope to make war on the Turks. Leo was struck by his marvelous precocity of talent, and wished to retain him at his capital. It is even asserted that offers came from Sadolet, inviting him to share his place of Secretary to the Pope. But his father seemed to have dreaded the moral influence of Rome, and took him away from the allurements and examples of the papal city. Thus his stay there amounted only to several long visits, which were fortunate to him in securing the friendship of some of the most illustrious men of Italy. His subsequent life was rather an unsettled one, owing chiefly, it would seem, to an infirm state of health. Without following him in his changes of residence, we will only say that no man in Italy seems to have been more loved than he, particularly by such men as the Cardinals Pole and Contarini, the semi-protestants of the Romish church, that he declined the office of secretary to the council of Tent, and was looked upon by some as a Protestant at heart. It is said that Paul IV. put his writings on the list of prohibited works. There is, however, no proof that his position differed from that of the cardinals already named, who were far from approving of the schism of the Protestants.

The Latin poems of Flaminio, collected in eight books, place him in the front rank of those who attempted no work of large compass. In the ode, the elegy, and other metrical poems suited for brief outpourings of the soul, he is perhaps unsurpassed by any modern. Navagero, of whom we have already spoken, comes nearest to being his peer.

About the same time with Flaminio, another youth of the same age, and similarly gifted, appeared at Rome,-Francisco Maria Molza, the child of a Modenese nobleman, born in 1489.

He gave himself to study and to vicious indulgence with equal zeal, until his father thought it best to recall him to Modena, and persuaded him to enter into married life. After some years, when now he had several children, he deserted his wife to go back again to Rome, and gave himself up here and elsewhere to a succession of mistresses, to the company of wits and to poetry, Italian and Latin. For his profligacy he was disinherited by his father. Molza was in the court of Cardinal Ippolite de' Medici, and after his death, in that of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. His manner of life often threw him into great straits, and his vices brought him to his end in 1544. He ranks in Latin verse, especially in the elegy, with the best writers of the period, and his Italian rhymes are said to display elegance, tenderness, and imagination.*

Such were some of the leading Latin poets at Rome in the days of Leo X. But besides these, there were others of an inferior class, improvisers in that language, who were a good deal round the person of the Pope, and at his table, and who contributed much more to his entertainment than authors of a higher class. Some of these persons were little better than court fools, as Querno, distinguished alike for his readiness in spouting Latin verse, and for his voracity. Two of the men possessed of this talent are entitled to the praise of real learning. One of these, Rafaelle Brandolini, a friend of the Pope's before his elevation to that dignity, had apartments in the papal palace, and was on such intimate footing with him as to be called his eye. Another, Andrea Marone of Mantua, reached a perfection almost incredible in the excellence of his offhand Latin verses, "having been desired, at a solemn entertainment given by the Pontiff to several of the ambassadors of foreign powers, to deliver extempore verses on the league which was then forming against the Turks, he acquitted himself in such a manner as to obtain the applause of the whole assembly, and the Pope immediately afterwards presented him with a benefice in the diocese of Capua."+

* Comp. Tirab. VIII., Book III, Chap. 3, § 7, Hallam I., 599, but especially Roscoe III., 244.

+ Roscoe III., 400.

Nor were there wanting men of more solid learning who felt the benefit of the Pope's smile upon their studies and literary labors. Thus Teseo Ambrogio was encouraged by him to acquire Syriac with other oriental tongues, and was appointed a professor in the University of Bologna, where he taught for the first time in Europe the Syriac and Chaldaic languages. Pagnini, again, (Sante Pagnini of Lucca), having undertaken a new translation of the Bible, Leo, on examination of it, offered to have it transcribed, and published it at his own expense. Here, too, we may, name the historian, Paul Jovius (Paolo Giovio), afterwards Bishop of Nocera, who, on reading parts of his history to the Pope, so delighted him by its Latinity that he made the author a cavalier, and gave him a pension.* And a much honester and abler historian, Guicciardini, although not residing at Rome, was in the Pope's military service.

And if we would make a fair estimate of Leo's brilliant reign, we should be required to take into account the cultivators of Italian poetry who frequented his court. Some of these, who wrote Latin also, we have spoken of already, as Bembo and Molza. Another was Leo's own cousin, and his Nuncio to France, Giovanni Ruccellai, whose poem on bees, after the manner of Virgil's fourth Georgic, is still read, and who was among the first writers of tragedy in the Italian language. His Oreste and Rosmunda may not have been composed until after Leo's death. Of earlier date was the Sofonisba of Trissino, who was one of Leo's ambassadors to for eign courts. Here, also, we may mention the prose comedy of Cardinal Bibbiena, which, licentious as it was, was acted before the court in honor of Isabella, duchess of Gonzaga, the Pope himself looking on.

Nor ought we to fail to bring into account the accomplished

*The leading works of Jovius are his history professedly in forty-five bookssix of which were lost at the sack of Rome in 1527, six never written,-his elogia or short biographies of men distinguished in war, with wood cuts of each, and a number of longer lives, among which there is one of Pope Leo. Jovius writes in a sounding, readable Latin, and is not overscrupulous in speaking for or against those whose actions he records.

men who were dignitaries of the church, or their polished attendants, or those others who promoted the cause of learning, or of polite letters by their patronage. Such a one was Agostino Chigi, a wealthy merchant from Siena, who established a printing press in his house, and employed Cornelius Benignus of Viterbo, to superintend the works issued from the press, one of which, Pindar, was the first Greek book printed at Rome. Another such Mæcenas was John Goritz from Luxemburg, called Gorizio by the Italians, and in Latin poetry Corycius. He is called a city judge in Rome by Roscoe, and elsewhere a master of petitions to the Pope. On the festival of Saint Anna, who was his tutelary saint, he provided a sumptuous banquet, a part of the entertainment at which consisted of literary exhibitions, such as had been usual in the academy of Pomponius Lætus. In the church of Saint Agostino he set up a celebrated piece of sculpture, Saint Anna with the Madonna and child, executed for him by Andrea Sansovino; and, on the occasion, all that there was of poetic talent in Rome united to do honor to his munificence. One hundred and twenty poets in Latin verse vied with one another at this time. The collection published in 1524, under the title Coryciana, by Blosius Palladius, one of the contributors, contains only these Latin poems: Italian poets also entered the lists.

But, after all, it must not be supposed that scholarship or solid learning was much advanced by the patronage of Leo V. The leading men of Italy, in their various departments, were not there; as Sannazaro and Navagero, Machiavelli, and many of the solid scholars of Northern Italy; or were there but a short time and received no impulse from the spirit there prevailing, as, for instance, Michael Angelo and Lionardo da Vinci. The culture of this reign, moreover, was a most superficial, empty, and voluptuous one. It has no earnestness, no love of truth, no originality, except among the artists, no spur to anything manly or noble. We cannot but feel when we count and weigh the age of Leo X., that it is found wanting not only in all religiousness, but in all that is greatly humana sober heathen being the judge. A noble minded Greek, of