The attacks and the satirical pictures began, as we have said, at an early period.For all strongly marked individuality, for every kind of distinction, a corrective was at hand in the national taste for ridicule.And in this case the men themselves offered abundant and terrible materials which satire had but to make use of.In the fifteenth century, Battista Mantovano, in discoursing of the seven monsters, includes the humanists, with any others, under the head 'Superbia.' He describes how, fancying themselves children of Apollo, they walk along with affected solemnity and with sullen, malicious looks, now gazing t their own shadow, now brooding over the popular praise they hunted after, like cranes in search of food.But in the sixteenth century the indictment was presented in full.Besides Ariosto, their own historian Gyraldus gives evidence of this, whose treatise, written under Leo X, was probably revised about the year 1540.Warning examples from ancient and modern times the moral disorder and the wretched existence of the scholars meet us in astonishing abundance, and along with these, accusations of the most serious nature are brought formally against them.Among these are anger, vanity, obstinacy, self-adoration, dissolute private life, immorality of all descriptions, heresy, theism; further, the habit of speaking without conviction, a sinister influence on government, pedantry of speech, thanklessness towards teachers, and abject flattery of the great, who st give the scholar a taste of their favours and then leave m to starve.The description is closed by a reference to the den age, when no such thing as science existed on the earth.these charges, that of heresy soon became the most dangers, and Gyraldus himself, when he afterwards republished a perfectly harmless youthful work, was compelled to take refuge neath the mantle of Duke Ercole II of Ferrara, since men had the upper hand who held that people had better spend their time on Christian themes than on mythological researches.
justifies himself on the ground that the latter, on the contrary, were at such a time almost the only harmless branches of study, as they deal with subjects of a perfectly neutral character.
But if it is the duty of the historian to seek for evidence in which moral judgement is tempered by human sympathy, he 11 find no authority comparable in value to the work so often quoted of Pierio Valeriano, 'On the Infelicity of the Scholar.' It was written under the gloomy impressions left by the sack of Rome, which seems to the writer, not only the direct cause of untold misery to the men of learning, but, as it were, the fulfilment of an evil destiny which had long pursued them.
Pierio is here led by a simple and, on the whole, just feeling.He does not introduce a special power, which plagued the men of genius on account of their genius, but he states facts, in which an unlucky chance often wears the aspect of fatality.Not wishing to write a tragedy or to refer events to the conflict of higher powers, he is content to lay before us the scenes of everyday life.We are introduced to men who, in times of trouble, lose first their incomes and then their places; to others who, in trying to get two appointments, miss both; to unsociable misers who carry about their money sewn into their clothes, and die mad when they are robbed of it; to others, who accept well-paid offices, and then sicken with a melancholy longing for their lost freedom.We read how some died young of a plague or fever, and how the writings which had cost them so much toil were burnt with their bed and clothes; how others lived in terror of the murderous threats of their colleagues; how one was slain by a covetous servant, and another caught by highwaymen on a journey, and left to pine in a dungeon, because unable to pay his ransom.Many died of unspoken grief from the insults they received and the prizes of which they were defrauded.We are told how a Venetian died because of the death of his son, a youthful prodigy; and how mother and brothers followed, as if the lost child drew them all after him.Many, especially Florentines, ended their lives by suicide; others through the secret justice of a tyrant.
