Romola

esca.' His arms - an azure ladder transverse on a golden field, with the motto Gradatim placed over the entrance - told all comers that the miller's son held his ascent to honours by his own efforts

s gold crown on the occasion, and all the people cried, 'Viva Messer Bartolommeo!' - had been on an embassy to Rome, and had there been made titular Senator, Apostolical Secretary, Knight of the Golden Spur; and had, eight years ago, been Gonfaloniere - last goal of the Florentine citizen's ambition. M

better listeners. Yet, to say nothing of the gout, Messer Bartolommeo's felicity was far from perfect: it was embittered by the contents of certain papers that lay before him, consisting chiefly of a correspondence between himself and Politian. It was a human foible at that period (incredible as it may seem) to recite quarrels, and favour scholarly visitors with the communication of an entire and lengthy correspondence; and this was neither the first nor the second time t

o, sitting in gouty slippers, 'penned poetical trifles' entirely for their own amusement, without any view to an audience, and, consequently, sent them to their friends in letters, which were the literary periodicals of the fifteenth century. Now Scala had abundance of friends who were ready to praise his writings: friends like Ficino and Landino - amiable browsers in the Medicean park along with himself - who found his Latin prose style elegant and masculine; and the terrible Joseph Scaliger, who was

s born from the waters. Scala, in reply, begged to say that his verses were never intended for a scholar with such delicate olfactories as Politian, nearest of all living men to the perfection of the ancients, and of a taste so fastidious that sturgeon itself must seem insipid to him; defended his own verses, nevertheless, though indeed they were written hastily, without correction, and intended as an agreeable distraction during the summer heat to himself and such friends as were satisfied with mediocrity, he, Scala, not being like some other people, who courted publicity through the booksellers. For the rest, he had barely enough Greek to make out the sense of the epigram so graciously sent him, to say nothing of tasting its elegances; but - the epigram was Politian's: what more need be said? Still, by way of postscript, he feared that his incomparable friend's comparison of the gnat to Venus, on account of it's origin from the waters, was in many ways ticklish. on the one hand, Venus might be offended; and on the other, unless the poet intended an allusion to the doctrine of Thales, that cold and damp origin seemed doubtful to Scala in the case of a creature so fond of warmth; a fish were perhaps the better comparison, or, when the power of flying was in question, an eagle, or in

n honours, that by a sort of compensation men of letters might feel themselves his equals. In return, Politian was begged to examine Scala's writings: nowhere would he find a more devout admiration of antiquity. The secretary was ashamed of the age in which he lived, and blushed for it. Some, indeed, there were who wanted to have their own works praised and exalted to a level with the divine monuments of antiquity; but he Scala, could not oblige them. And as to the honours which were offensive to the envious, they had been well earn

table to mention Politian, a man of eminent ability indeed, but a little too arrogant - assuming to be a Hercules, whose office it was to destroy all the literary monstrosities of the age, and writing letters to his elders without signing them, as if they were miraculous revelations that could only have one source. And after all were not his own criticisms often questionable and his taste perverse? He was fond of saying pungent things about the men who thought they wrote like Cicero because they ended every sentence with 'esse videtur: but while he was boasting of his freedom from servile imitation, did he not fall into the other extreme, running after strange

g publicity through the booksellers, was never unprovided with 'hasty uncorrected trifles,' as a sort of sherbet for a visitor on a hot day, or, if the weather were cold, why then as a cor

atter as a reinforcement of his preventives against the gout, which gave him such severe twinges that it was plain enough how intolerable it would be if he were not well supplied with rings of rare virtue, and with an amulet worn close under the right breast. But Tito was assured that he himself was more interesting than

he might laugh a little at his ease over the affair of the culex, he felt that fortune could hardly mean to t