Graceful speakers no longer find the recognition and reward which they once did.The Consistorial advocates no longer prepare anything but the introductions to their speeches, and deliver the rest--a confused muddle--on the inspiration of the moment.Sermons and occasional speeches have sunk to the same level.If a funeral oration is wanted for a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred pieces of gold, but they hire for a trifle the first impudent pedant whom they come across, and who only wants to be talked of, whether for good or ill.The dead, they say, is none the wiser if an ape stands in a black dress in the pulpit, and beginning with a hoarse, whimpering mumble, passes little by little into a loud howling.Even the sermons preached at great Papal ceremonies are no longer profitable, as they used to be.Monks of all orders have again got them into their hands, and preach as if they were speaking to the mob.Only a few years ago a sermon at mass before the Pope might easily lead the way to a bishopric.'
The Treatise, and History in Latin From the oratory and the epistolary writings of the humanists, we shall here pass on to their other creations, which were all, to a greater or less extent, reproductions of antiquity.
Among these must be placed the treatise, which often took the shape of a dialogue.In this case it was borrowed directly from Cicero.In order to do anything like justice to this class of literature--in order not to throw it aside at first sight as a bore two things must be taken into consideration.The century which escaped from the influence of the Middle Ages felt the need of something to mediate between itself and antiquity in many questions of morals and philosophy; and this need was met by the writer of treatises and dialogues.Much which appears to us as mere commonplace in their writings, was for them and their contemporaries a new and hard-won view of things upon which mankind had been silent since the days of antiquity.The language too, in this form of writing, whether Italian or Latin, moved more freely and flexibly than in historical narrative, in letters, or in oratory, and thus became in itself the source of a special pleasure.Several Italian compositions of this kind still hold their place as patterns of style.
Many of these works have been, or will be mentioned on account of their contents; we here refer to them as a class.From the time of Petrarch's letters and treatises down to near the end of the fifteenth century, the heaping up of learned quotations, as in the case of the orators, is the main business of most of these writers.Subsequently the whole style, especially in Italian, was purified, until, in the 'Asolani' of Bembo, and the 'Vita Sobria' of Luigi Cornaro, a classical perfection was reached.Here too the decisive fact was this, that antiquarian matter of every kind had meantime begun to be deposited in encyclopedic works (now printed), and no longer stood in the way of the essayist.
It was inevitable too that the humanistic spirit should control the writing of history.A superficial comparison of the histories of this period with the earlier chronicles, especially with works so full of life, color, and brilliancy as those of the Villani, will lead us loudly to deplore the change.How insipid and conventional appear by their side the best of the humanists, and particularly their immediate and most famous successors among the historians of Florence, Leonardo Aretino and Poggio! The enjoyment of the reader is incessantly marred by the sense that, in the classical phrases of Fazio, Sabellico, Foglietta, Senarega, Platina in the chronicles of Mantua, Bembo in the annals of Venice, and even of Giovio in his histories, the best local and individual coloring and the full sincerity of interest in the truth of events have been lost.Our mistrust is increased when we hear that Livy, the pattern of this school of writers, was copied just where he is least worthy of imitation--on the ground, namely, 'that he turned a dry and walled tradition into grace and richness.' In the same place we meet with the suspicious declaration that it is the function of the historian-- just as if he were one with the poet--to excite, charm, or overwhelm the reader.We ask ourselves finally, whether the contempt for modern things, which these same humanists sometimes avowed openly, must not necessarily have had an unfortunate influence on their treatment of them.Unconsciously the reader finds himself looking with more interest and confidence on the unpretending Latin and Italian annalists, like those of Bologna and Ferrara, who remained true to the old style, and still more grateful does he feel to the best of the genuine chroniclers who wrote in Italian--to Marino Sanuto, Corio, and Infessura--who were followed at the beginning of the sixteenth century by that new and illustrious band of great national historians who wrote in their mother tongue.
