etender to the love and the hand of
Scala's daughter, kept a very sharp and learned tooth in readiness
against the too prosperous and presumptuous secretary, who had declined
the greatest scholar of the age for a son-in-law. Scala was a
meritorious public servant, and, moreover, a lucky man--naturally
exasperating to an offended scholar; but then--O beautiful balance of
things!--he had an itch for authorship, and was a bad writer--one of
those excellent people who, sitting in gouty slippers, "penned poetical
trifles" entirely for their own amusement, without any view to an
audience, and, consequently, sent them to their friends in letters,
which were the literary periodicals of the fifteenth century. Now Scala
had abundance of friends who were ready to praise his writings: friends
like Ficino and Landino--amiable browsers in the Medicean park along
with himself--who found his Latin prose style elegant and masculine; and
the terrible Joseph Scaliger, who was to pronounce him totally ignorant
of Latinity, was at a comfortable distance in the next century. But
when was the fatal coquetry inherent in superfluous authorship ever
quite contented with the ready praise of friends? That critical
supercilious Politian--a fellow-browser, who was far from amiable--must
be made aware that the solid secretary showed, in his leisure hours, a
pleasant fertility in verses, which indicated pretty clearly how much he
might do in that way if he were not a man of affairs.

Ineffable moment! when the man you secretly hate sends you a Latin
epigram with a false gender--hendecasyllables with a questionable
elision, at least a toe too much--attempts at poetic figures which are
manifest solecisms. That moment had come to Politian: the secretary had
put forth his soft head from the official shell, and the terrible
lurking crab was down upon him. Politian had used the freedom of a
friend, and pleasantly, in the form of a Latin epigram, corrected the
mistake of Scala in making the _culex_ (an insect too well-known on the
banks of the Arno) of the inferior or feminine gender. Scala replied by
a bad joke, in suitable Latin verses, referring to Politian's
unsuccessful suit. Better and better. Politian found the verses very
pretty and highly facetious: the more was the pity that they were
seriously incorrect, and inasmuch as Scala had alleged that he had
written them in imitation of a Greek epigram, Politian, being on such
friendly terms, woul