BRACCIOLINI AS A BOOKFINDER.
I. Doubts on the authenticity of the Latin, but not
the Greek Classics.—II. At the revival
of letters Popes and Princes offered large rewards
for the recovery of the ancient classics.—III.
The labours of Bracciolini as a bookfinder.—IV.
Belief put about by the professional bookfinders that
MSS. were soonest found in obscure convents in barbarous
lands.—V. How this reasoning throws
the door open to fraud and forgery.—VI.
The bands of bookfinders consisted of men of genius
in every department of literature and science.—VII.
Bracciolini endeavours to escape from forging the
Annals by forging the whole lost History of Livy.—VIII.
His Letter on the subject to Niccoli quoted, and examined.—
IX. Failure of his attempt, and he proceeds with
the forgery of the Annals.
I. When we thus see Bracciolini setting to work in
this quiet, business-like manner to forge the Annals
of Tacitus, as if it were a general, common-place
occurrence, a grave suspicion enters the mind whether
it was not a thing very ordinarily done in his day;
if so, whether we may not have a wholesale fabrication
of the Latin classics; which is very annoying to contemplate
when we remember the number of works we shall have
to reject as not having been written by ancient Romans
but by modern Italians, of the fifteenth, and possibly
the close of the fourteenth centuries. The suspicion
becomes all the stronger with the fact before us that
the literature of the ancient Romans was totally extinguished
in Europe in the very opening centuries of the Christian
aera; and that their language would have been also
lost had it not been preserved till the age of Justinian
(527-565) by the pleadings and writings of the leading
lawyers; after which it is generally believed that
it was continued to be preserved, along with the literature
of the ancient Romans, in the buildings founded by
the various monastic orders of Christians. Here
again we are met by another equally vexing circumstance,
it being excessively questionable whether monasteries
ever really conserved, to any, even the least extent,
the interests of human knowledge. Monks never
had any love for learning; did not appreciate the volumes
of antiquity; in fact, could not read them; for the
Latin was not their Latin; and they are not likely
to have preserved what they did not appreciate and
could not read: the libraries they founded were
for bibles, missals and prayer-books: the schools
they established were for teaching children to read
the Testament and prayer book, and to sing hymns and
psalms, while the ancient manuscripts they transcribed
were, at best, the hagiological productions of the
Fathers of the Christian Church.
