ht for MSS. of Cicero with peculiar ardour. He found the
speech _pro Archia_ at Liege in 1333, and in 1345 at Verona made his
famous discovery of the letters to Atticus, which revealed to the
world Cicero as a man in place of the "god of eloquence" whom they had
worshipped. Petrarch was under the impression in his old age that he
had once possessed Cicero's lost work _de Gloria_, but it is probable
that he was misled by one of the numerous passages in the extant
writings dealing with this subject.[22] The letters _ad Familiares_
were discovered towards the close of the 14th century at Vercelli. The
largest addition to the sum of Ciceronian writings was made by Poggio
(Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini) in the course of his celebrated
mission to the Council of Constance (1414-1417). He brought back no
less than ten speeches of Cicero previously unknown to the Italians,
viz. _pro Sexto Roscio_, _pro Murena_, _pro Cacina_, _de lege agraria_
i.-iii., _pro Rabirio perduellionis reo_, _pro Rabirio Postumo_, _pro
Roscio Comoedo_, and _in Pisonem_. An important discovery was made at
Lodi in 1422 of a MS. which, in addition to complete copies of the _de
Oratore_ and _Orator_, hitherto known from mutilated MSS., contained
an entirely new work, the _Brutus_. The second book of Cicero's
letters to Brutus was first printed by Cratander of Basel in 1528 from
a MS. obtained for him by Sichardus from the abbey of Lorsch.[23]

All these MSS. are now lost, except that containing the _Epistolae ad
Familiares_, a MS. written in the 9th century and now at Florence
(Laur. xlix. 9). A similar fate overtook three other MSS. containing
the letters to Atticus, independent of the _Veronensis_, viz. a
mutilated MS. of Books i.-vii. discovered by Cardinal Capra in 1409, a
Lorsch MS. used by Cratander (C), and a French MS. (Z), generally
termed _Tornaesianus_ from its owner, Jean de Tournes, a printer of
Lyons, probably identical with No. 492 in the old Cluny catalogue,
used by Turnebus, Lambinus and Bosius. A strange mystification was
practised by the last named, a scholar of singular brilliancy, who
claimed to have a mutilated MS. which he called his _Decurtatus_,
bought from a common soldier who had obtained it from a sacked
monastery; also to have been furnished by a friend, Pierre de
Crouzeil, a doctor of Limoges, with variants taken from an old MS.
found at Noyon, and entered