at it all meant. Then
one of the contractors for this transport, wiping the sweat from his
forehead, in utter weariness of the vexatious labour, at the last
end of his temper, answered: 'May the gods destroy all poets, past,
present, and future.' I inquired what he had to do with poets, and
how they had annoyed him. 'Just this,' he replied, 'that this poet,
lately deceased, a fool and windy-pated fellow, has ordered a
monument for himself; and with a view to erecting it, these marbles
are being dragged to Montepulciano; but I doubt whether we shall
contrive to get them up there. The roads are too bad.' 'But,' cried
I, 'do you believe _that_ man was a poet--that dunce who had no
science, nay, nor knowledge either? who only rose above the heads of
men by vanity and doltishness?' 'I don't know,' he answered, 'nor
did I ever hear tell, while he was alive, about his being called a
poet; but his fellow-townsmen now decide he was one; nay, if he had
but left a few more money-bags, they'd swear he was a god. Anyhow,
but for his having been a poet, I would not have cursed poets in
general.' Whereupon, the malevolent Bruni withdrew, and composed a
scorpion-tailed oration, addressed to his friend Poggio, on the
suggested theme of 'diuturnity in monuments,' and false ambition.
Our old friends of humanistic learning--Cyrus, Alexander,
Caesar--meet us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes,
Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric
'thick and slab.' The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration
of invective against 'that excrement in human shape,' who had had
the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the
Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the
easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse the rancour of his
fellow-humanists.

I have dwelt upon this episode, partly because it illustrates the
peculiar thirst for glory in the students of that time, but more
especially because it casts a thin clear thread of actual light upon
the masterpiece which, having been transported with this difficulty
from Donatello's workshop, is now to be seen by all lovers of fine
art, in part at least, at Montepulciano. In part at least: the
phrase is pathetic. Poor Aragazzi, who thirsted so for 'diuturnity
in monuments,' who had been so cruelly assaulted in the grave by
humanistic jealousy, expressing its malevolence with humanistic
crudity of satire, was destined after all to be defrau