This proemium explains Alberti's position in all his Italian writings. Aiming at the general good, convinced that a living nation cannot use a dead language with dignity and self-respect, he makes the sacrifice of a scholar's pride to public utility, and has the sense to perceive that the day of erudite exclusiveness is over. No one felt more than Alberti the greatness of the antique Roman race. No one was prouder of his descent from those patricians of the Commonwealth, who tamed and ruled the world. The memory of that Roman past, which turned the generation after Dante into a nation of students, glowed in Alberti's breast with more than common fervor.[219] The sonorous introduction to the first book of the _Family_ reviews the glories of the Empire and the decadence of Rome with a pomp of phrase, a passion of eloquence, that stir our spirit like the tramp of legions waking echoes in a ruined Roman colonnade.[220] Yet in spite of this devotion to the past, Alberti, like Villani, felt that his Italians of the modern age had destinies and auspices apart from those of ancient Rome. He was resolved to make the speech of that new nation, heiress of the Latin name, equal in dignity to Cicero's and Livy's. What Rome had done, Rome's children should do again. But the times were changed, and Alberti was a true son of the Renaissance. He approached his task in the spirit of a humanist. His style is over-charged with Latinisms; his periods are cumbrous; his matter is loaded with citations and scholastic instances drawn from the repertories of erudition.[221] The _vivida vis_ of inspiration fails. His work is full of reminiscences. The golden simplicity of the _trecento_ yields to a studied effort after dignity of diction, culture of amplitude. Still the writer's energy is felt in massive paragraphs of powerful declamation. His eloquence does not degenerate into frothy rhetoric; and when he wills, he finds pithy phrases to express the mind of a philosopher and poet. That he was born and reared in exile accounts for a lack of racy Tuscan in his prose; and the structure of his sentences proves that he had been accustomed to think in Latin before he made Italian serve his turn.[222] Still, though for these and other reasons his works were not of the kind to animate a nation, they are such as still may be read with profit and with pleasure by men who seek for solid thoughts in noble diction.