120

THK DECLINE AND PALL

CHAP.LX VI.

Tin ir(units andmerits.

the names of Theodore Gaza , of George of Tre-bizond, of John Argyropulus , and Demetrius Chalcocondyles , who taught their native lan-guage in the schools of Florence and Rome .Their labours were not inferior to those of Bes-sarion, whose purple they revered, and whosefortune was the secret object of their envy. Butthe lives of these grammarians were humble andobscure; they had declined the lucrative pathsof the church : their dress and manners seclud-ed them from the commerce of the world ; andsince they were confined to the merit, they mightbe content with the rewards of learning. Fromthis character, Janus Lascaris “ will deserve anexception. His eloquence, politeness, and im-perial descent, recommended him to the French mouarchs ; and in the same cities he was alter-nately employed to teach and to negociate. Dutyand interest prompted them to cultivate thestudy of the Latin language; and the most suc-cessful attained the faculty of writing and speak-ing with fluency and elegance in a foreign idiom.But they ever retained the inveterate vanity oftheir country: their praise, or at least theiresteem, was reserved for the national writers, towhom they owed their fame and subsistence;and they sometimes betrayed their contempt inlicentious criticism or satire on Virgil’s poetry

“ He was born before the taking of Constantinople , but his honour-able life was stretched far into the sixteenth century (a. it. 1535).Leo X. and Francis I. were his noblest patrons, under whose auspiceshe founded the Greek colleges of Rome and Paris (Hody, p. 247-275).He left posterity in France ; but the counts de Vintimille, and theirnumerous branches, derive the name of Lascaris from a doubtful mar-riage in the thirteenth century with the daughter of a Greek emperor(Ducango Tam. Uyzaut, p. 224-230).