and knavish politics,--of his time.

II. Everybody knows the fable of the old man, the boy and the ass;
but not one in a thousand knows that it was written nearly four
hundred years ago by a man who for forty years was a member of the
Secretariate to nine Popes, from Innocent VII. to Calixtus III.
First in the Bugiale of the Vatican, where the officers of the
Roman Chancery, when discussing the news of the day, were making
merry with sarcasms, jests, tales and anecdotes, one of the party
having observed that those who craved popularity were chained to a
miserable slavery, it being impossible from the variety of
opinions that prevailed to please everybody, some approving one
course of conduct, and others another, the fable in question was
narrated in confirmation of that statement.

Poggio Bracciolini was not only the author of that fable, I am now
about to bring forward reasons for believing, and with the view of
inducing the reader to agree with me, that he,--and nobody else
but he,--was the writer of the Annals of Tacitus.

He was in every way qualified to undertake, and succeed in, that
egregious task. He was one of the most profound scholars of his
age, more learned than Traversari, the Camaldolese, and if less
learned than Andrea Biglia, superior to the Augustinian Hermit in
a more natural, easy and cultivated style of composition and in a
wider knowledge of the world: acquainted somewhat with Greek and
slightly with Hebrew, he possessed a masterly and critical
knowledge of Latin which he had carefully studied in his native
city, Florence, with the most accomplished Latinist of the day,
Petrarch's valued friend, the illustrious Giovanni Malpaghino of