INTRODUCTION.

the home of a celebrated physician and scholar, Nicolaus Leonicenus, best known as the author of the earliest treatise on Syphilis, the fearful malady at that time beginning to be known; but also celebrated for having translated several works of Galen from the Greek. One of these versions, that of the treatise De motu musculorum On the Motion of Muscles was afterwards published by Linacre with some of his own. Leonicenus was much older than Linacre (though he survived him) and in after years, as we know from a letter of Croke to Henry VIII., spoke of Linacre as his pupil⁴.

The reputation of this now almost forgotten scholar was very high among his contemporaries. Aldus Romanus, in the dedication of the Aristotle already spoken of to Albertus Pius, Prince of Carpi, speaks of Leonicenus as 'easily the prince of the philosophers and physicians of our age' original: "philosophorum ætatis nostræ medicorumque facile princeps". A correspondence which has been preserved between Leonicenus and Angelus Politianus is full of mutual compliments; and shews that the two scholars regarded themselves as allies in the common warfare against 'barbarism' a foe that had to be expelled from the fields of philosophy and medicine as well as from that of letters⁵.

It is certain that the example of such a man could not have been without effect on so apt a pupil as Linacre, and the influence of Vicenza is clearly apparent in some of his later work.

On leaving Italy, Linacre is said to have indulged in an antiquarian caprice which seems little in harmony with what we afterwards hear of his staid character, though in his hot youth and under the influence of the classical sentiment it may have been possible, and even natural. The story is that on bidding farewell to Italy at some mountain pass he indulged his fancy in building a cairn of stones, which he crowned with