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Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century by John Wilson Ross
page 121 of 375 (32%)
footnote (p. 5) that Bracciolini, in common with Leonardo Bruni
and Coluccio Salutati carried off the palm as a Latin writer from
all his predecessors in the fourteenth century:--"a la fin du
siecle on vit paroitre Leonardo Bruni, dit d'Aretin, Poggio
Bracciolini, et Coluccio Salutati, qui devoient l'emporter, comme
ecrivains Latins, sur tous leurs predecesseurs." Although Sismondi
is quite right as to the date when Bruni and Salutati flourished,
he is altogether wrong in supposing that Bracciolini made an
appearance before the public at any time in the fourteenth
century; quite at the end of it he was only in his twentieth year:
the next century had well advanced towards the close of its first
quarter before (with the exception of some Epistles) he began to
write, which was not until after he had passed his fortieth year.

Along with these superior merits of an intellectual writer thus
freely accorded to him by some of his more distinguished
contemporaries and by illustrious historians, Bracciolini
possessed the plastic power that makes the forger. He wrote in a
great variety of styles and manners; sometimes treating subjects
with condensation, and sometimes with diffusiveness. His language
is elevated and his sentences are rounded and smooth in his
Funeral Orations, in which there is no inflation, nothing
declamatory, a perfect absence of straining after effect, yet a
rising with ease into veins of sublime rhetoric, while he is
close, severe and antique:--hence the principal position that is
given to him as an orator by Porcellio in a poem where Marsuppini
is called upon to chaunt the praises of Ciriano of Ancona (see
Tiraboschi, VI. 286): in ascribing to Marsuppini the place of
honour, Porcellio leaves others who are inferior in verse-making
to follow; such as, he says, "_the_ Orator Poggio, the
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