et another name with those of the famous
trio. George of Trebisond was a faithful expounder of the classics, the
discoverer of many a lost treasure, and the author of a whole library of
criticism. His life and labours were denounced in the once celebrated
_Book of the Georges_. He was more than a lover of Aristotle, said his
enemies: he was the enemy of the divine Plato, an apostate among the
Greeks, who had even dared to oppose their patron Bessarion. The Cardinal
Bessarion was complimented as 'the most Latin of the Greeks'; he might
have ruled as Pope in Rome, some said, if it had not been for Perotti
refusing to disturb him in the library. But George of Trebisond was
vilified after Poggio's fashion, and called 'brute' and 'heretic,' and
'more Turkish than the filthiest Turk,' with a hailstorm of still harder
epithets. Yet he was certainly a very accurate scholar; and he showed a
proper manly spirit when he boxed Poggio's ears in the Theatre of Pompey
for reminding him of the cleverness expected from 'a starving Greek.' His
life, one is glad to think, had a very peaceful end. The old man had a
house at Rome in the Piazza Minerva: his tombstone, much defaced, is
before the curtain as one enters the Church of S^ta. Maria. His son
Andrea used to help him in his work, and launched a pamphlet now and
again at Theodore of Gaza. The brilliant scholar fell into a second
childhood, and might be seen muttering to himself as he rambled with
cloak and long staff through the streets of Rome. The grand-daughter who
took charge of him married Madalena, a fashionable poet; and Pope Leo X.
delighted in hearing their anecdotes about old times, when George and
Theodore fought their paper-wars, and wielded their pens in the battle of
the books.

Before leaving the subject of the libraries in the two great capitals, we
ought to bestow a word or two upon those splendidly endowed institutions
by which a few Florentine book-collectors have kept up the literary fame
of their city, without pretending to emulate the splendour of the Medici,
or the wealth of the Vatican, or the curious antiquities of St. Mark. We
desire especially to say something in remembrance of the 'Riccardiana'
which, from its foundation in the sixteenth century, has been famous for
the value of its historical manuscripts. Among these are the journals of
Fra Oderigo, an early traveller in the East, a treatise in Galileo's own
writing, and a defence of Savonarola's policy in