BRACCIOLINI SETTING ABOUT THE FORGERY OF THE ANNALS.
I. The Proposal made in February, 1422, by a Florentine,
named Lamberteschi, and backed by Niccoli.—II.
Correspondence on the matter, and Mr. Shepherd’s
view that it referred to a Professorship refuted.—III.
Professional disappointments in England determine
Bracciolini to persevere in his intention of forging
the Annals.—IV. He returns to the Papal
Secretaryship, and begins the forgery in Rome in October,
1423.
I. About this period Bracciolini commenced the forgery
of the Annals. In noticing the preliminary steps
to that fabrication, and then glancing back at a few
circumstances peculiar to his age, while touching
upon some incidents hitherto passed over in his biography,
we shall have all the necessary lights and shades in
his life that will be of use to us in the maintenance
and illustration of our theory.
Although he received in exchange for the living of
120 florins a year another of the annual worth of
L40 with slighter duties attached to it, he still
continued to express dissatisfaction at his fortunes,
and desire a sinecure canonry in England that would
enable him to live in literary ease at home. When,
however, an alternative was presented to him of returning
to the Pontifical Secretariate, through the intercession
of one of his powerful Italian friends, Cardinal Adimari,
Archbishop of Pisa, he rudely scouted the overture
upon these grounds: that he would “rather
be a free man than a public slave”; that he
had “a smaller opinion of the Papacy and its
limbs than the world believed”; that “if
he had thought as highly of the Secretaryship to the
Pope, as many did, he would long before have gone
back to it; and that if he lost everything, from what
he now had, he would not want.”—“Video
quae Cardinalis Pisanus scribit de Secretariatu.
Sane si ego illud officium tantum existimarem, quantum
nonnulli, ego jamdudum istuc rediissem: sed si
omnia deficerent, hoc quod nunc habeo, non deerit
mihi. Ego minus existimo et Pontificatum et ejus
membra quam credunt. Cupio enim liber esse, non
publicus servus” (Ep. I. 17).
Just as he was in this bad humour, disgusted with
his patron and the world, and in the most cynical
of moods, a proposal reached him from Florence, which,
as set forth to view by himself in communications
to his friend Niccoli, is so dimly disclosed as to
be capable of two interpretations: The Rev. William
Shepherd in his Life of him understands his ambiguous
terms as having reference to a professorship, the
words of Mr. Shepherd being:
—“Piero Lamberteschi ... offered
him a situation, the nature of which is not precisely
known, but which was probably that of public professor
in one of the Italian Universities” (Life of
Poggio Bracciolini, p. 138). Now I conceive, and
shall attempt to prove that the proposal was not about
a “situation,” but to forge additional
books to the hopelessly lost History of Tacitus.
