Tacitus and Bracciolini - The Annals Forged in the XVth Century by John Wilson Ross
page 121 of 375 (32%)
page 121 of 375 (32%)
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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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