, and such opprobrious remarks that I
sometimes scarcely know whether I am standing on my head or heels.'
'They come to the lecture-room armed with poignards, and when I reprove
them for their indecencies, they threaten over and over again to cut my
face open if I do not hold my tongue.' The walls, he adds, are scrawled
over with obscene emblems and disgusting epigrams, so that this haunt of
learning presents the aspect of the lowest brothel; and the professor's
chair has become a more intolerable seat than the pillory, owing to the
missiles flung at him and the ribaldry with which he is assailed. The
manners and conversation of the students must have been disgusting
beyond measure, to judge by a letter of complaint from a father
detailing the contamination to which his son was exposed in the Roman
class-rooms, and the immunity with which the lewdest songs were publicly
recited there.[142] But the total degradation of learning at this epoch
in Rome is best described in one paragraph of Vittorio de'Rossi,
setting forth the neglect endured by Aldo Manuzio, the younger. This
scion of an illustrious family succeeded to the professorship of Muretus
in 1588. 'Then,' says Rossi, 'might one marvel at or rather mourn over,
the abject and down-trodden state of the liberal arts. Then might one
perceive with tears how those treasures of humane letters, which our
fathers exalted to the heavens, were degraded in the estimation of
youth. In the good old days men crossed the seas, undertook long
journeys, traversed the cities of Greece and Asia, in order to obtain
the palm of eloquence and salute the masters of languages and learning,
at whose feet they sat entranced by noble words. But now these fellows
poured scorn upon an unrivaled teacher of both Greek and Latin
eloquence, whose services were theirs for the asking, theirs without the
fatigue of travel, without expense, without exertion. Though he freely
offered them his abundance of erudition in both learned literatures,
they shut their ears against him. At the hours when his lecture-room
should have been thronged with multitudes of eager pupils you might see
him, abandoned by the crowd, pacing the pavement before the door of the
academy with one, or may be two, for his companions.'[143]

[Footnote 140: Dejob, _Marc Antoine Muret_, p. 349.]

[Footnote 141: The original is printed by Dejob, _Marc Antoine Muret_,
pp. 487-489.]

[Footnote 142: The original letter, printed by Dejob,