Complete Works

Music cultivated

...[wor]ds and unfolded them, which he would have altogether divided into many chapters if he had lived. He had also composed two prayers to God, one in Italian rhymes and the other in elegiac meter, so that he might sometimes soothe his mind with singing to the lyre when it was exhausted by weightier studies. For in the first years of his youth, he had so thoroughly mastered every kind of musical art that the melodies devised by him, and the harmonies noted down with the proper rhythms, were considered famous. We have also seen many things in his desks, though in disorder, from which I nevertheless thought some useful work might be compiled, especially his commentary on the Psalms. Moreover, about fifty letters emerged, published at various times—some familiar, some doctrinal, some exhortatory—along with the oration which he would have delivered at Rome if the disputation had taken place. This oration does not merely smack of a youth not yet twenty-four years old, of a most perspicacious talent and most abundant learning (as indeed all his writings do), but it offers us the richest testimony of his most fertile eloquence. He always used a style truly to be approved: not adopted, but natural, and multiform according to the variety of subjects; and although it may have exhausted (as they say) the whole perfume-box of Isocrates, it nevertheless preserved the ornaments of purity and the grace of majesty. Indeed, those celebrated kinds of speaking—of which Gellius enumerates three and Macrobius four—are collected from his commentaries without any lack: there is the "copious" in which Cicero is said to be master; the "brief" which is ascribed to Sallust; the "dry" given to Fronto; and the "rich and florid" in which they have reported Pliny and Symmachus to have been unrestrained. But perhaps Brutus would not have called this copiousness weak, nor Sallust called it immoderate. An orator of sound judgment would easily perceive that Fronto's dryness was here moistened, Sallust's brevity extended, and the florid richness of Pliny carried out into a broader field. Add to these the milky fountain of Livy, perhaps without "Patavinity" (as that man said), with very many little flowers of Apuleius added. Yet he did not exercise himself here in philosophy borrowed from the Greeks, nor in "Attic Nights," nor in "Saturnalia" fashioned almost for the purpose of praising Virgil's Aeneid, nor in Roman history, nor in mere natural history devoid of the highest and most difficult speculations; rather, he labored in that admirable fabric of the world, in attacking the enemies of the most holy Catholic Church, and he was exhausted in eliminating the astrologers. He labored in the examination of theological questions and in the harmony of Aristotle and Plato; he applied himself to the explanation of sacred utterances. He bestowed his effort on moving and exhorting his friends. Truly, he was so far from affecting this eloquence of which we treat that he rather condemned those who, scrupulously seeking out pigmented allurements, applied all the powers of their talent to investigating the origins of words. This path turned many more readily toward admiration of him, since he had long and most diligently turned his attention to the writings of those who did not profess Latin letters filled with the flowers of eloquence. Let the excessive lovers of antiquity bear these things with an even mind; for though they are stated briefly and summarily, they are perhaps truer for the fact that men more learned than I—Hermolao Barbaro, Battista the Carmelite, Marsilio Ficino, Matteo Bosso, and many other most learned and eloquent men—have recorded them. He both read through and excerpted vast libraries of both Latin and Greek with incredible speed, and (if the opportunity were given) he passed over no commentaries unread. He had attained such knowledge of the ancient Doctors of the Church as is difficult to believe, even in one who had consumed his whole life solely in unfolding them. Regarding the modern theologians who used that style commonly called "Parisian," there resided in him such great judgment that if anyone unexpectedly asked for the unraveling of some obscure and poorly explained question of theirs, he would open it with such fertility of talent and unlock it with such skill that he was said...

Multiform letters

Approved character of speaking

Kinds of speaking

Copious

Brief

Dry, florid, and rich

Velocity of reading