angrily to Niccoli on the 26th February, 1429; “and
I gave him a sound rating for it; he has given me
his assurance that he will be back aoain soon for
he is carrying on a suit about his abbey in the law-courts,
and will bring the book. He made heavy demands
upon me; but I told him I would do nothing for him
until I have the book; I am, therefore, in
hopes that I shall have it, as he is in need of my
good offices":—“Monachus Hersfeldensis
venit absque libro; multumque est a me increpatus ob
eam causam; asseveravit se cito rediturum, nam litigat
nomine Monasterii, et portaturum librum. Rogavit
me multa; dixi me nil facturum, nisi librum haberemus;
ideo spero et illum nos haberemus, quia eget favore
nostro " (Ep. III. 29).
VI. As he anticipated, the book ultimately turned
up; it might have been in a week or two, or it might
not have been till two or three months after; for
in a letter that bears the date of neither the year
nor the day,—(which I think was sometime
in March 1429, though the Chevalier de Tonelli, in
his Collection of the Letters of Bracciolini, conjectures
must have been in the first week in May,—some
time before the 6th of that month,)—a passage
occurs in which Bracciolini informs his friend Niccoli
that, as far as himself was concerned, everything
was “now complete with respect to the ‘Little
Work,’ concerning which he would on some future
opportunity write to him, and at the same time send
it to him to read in order to get his opinion of it”:
“Ego jam Opusculum absolvi, de quo alias ad
te scribam, et simul legendum mittam, ut exquirendum
judicium tuum” (Ep. III. 30). I take
it that he is here alluding in his customary jesting
manner (from his writing “opusculum” with
a big O, to his “great” undertaking, the
Annals. If he is not joking, but serious, he
must, then, of course, be referring to his treatise,
“De Avaritia,” which is, certainly, a
“little affair,” and which he wrote in
1429. However, the monk in the Abbey of Fulda,
who had taken a very long time in his transcription
of the forgery, had finished his work by the 26th of
February, 1429, and must have placed it in Bracciolini’s
hands a little before or after the month of March
in that year.
The deed was then now done. With the consummation
of the forgery, all that correspondence suddenly came
to an end which had been carried on for years by Bracciolini
with Niccoli relative to Tacitus; that correspondence
has given much additional colouring of truthfulness
to the theory I have proposed to myself to uphold;
if there had been nothing else convincing, it should,
by itself, leave no shadow of a shade of doubt that
Bracciolini forged the Annals of Tacitus. Though,
too, we have no positive record of it, we may be as
sure as if we had, that the last six books of that
production first saw the light some time in the spring
of the year 1429.
