[Footnote 409: Vol. I., _Age of Despots_, App. V.]
Valeriano's dialogue 'De Literatorum Infelicitate' opens with a description of Rome in the pontificate of Leo.[410] Never since the downfall of the Empire, he says, had letters flourished so freely or had men of learning found more generous patronage. Of that brilliant company Valeriano was himself an ornament. The friend of Egidius and the favourite of Leo, he spent his time in the composition of Latin poems, panegyrical and satiric, and in the exploration of antiquities. Afterwards he became the protonotary of Clement, and supervised the education of the Medicean bastards Alessandro and Ippolito. His good fortune carried him to Piacenza in the fatal year of 1527. On his return to Rome after the siege, he looked in vain for his old comrades and associates. 'Good God!' he exclaims in the dialogue before us, 'when first I began to inquire for the philosophers, orators, poets, and professors of Greek and Latin literature, whose names were written on my tablets, how great, how horrible a tragedy was offered to me! Of all those lettered men whom I had hoped to see, how many had perished miserably, carried off by the most cruel of all fates, overwhelmed by undeserved calamities: some dead of plague, some brought to a slow end by penury in exile, others slaughtered by a foeman's sword, others worn out by daily tortures; some, again, and these of all the most unhappy, driven by anguish to self-murder.' John Goritz, captured by his countrymen, had ransomed himself with the sacrifice of all his wealth, and now was dying of despair at Verona. Colocci had seen his house, with its museums and MSS., burned before his eyes. Angelo Cesi, maltreated by the Spanish soldiers on a sick bed, died of his injuries before the year was out. Marone, the brilliant improvisatore, stripped of everything and deprived of his poems, the accumulated compositions of years spent in Leo's service, breathed his last in a miserable tavern. Marco Fabio Calvi, Raphael's friend and teacher, succumbed to sickness in a hospital. Julianus Camers, maddened by the sight of the torments inflicted on his servants, had thrown himself from a window in his house, and was killed. Baldus, the professor, after watching his commentary upon Pliny used to light the camp fires of the soldiery, had died himself of hunger. Casanova, the poet, fell a victim to the plague. Paolo Bombasi, another poet, was murdered in the streets of Rome. Cristoforo Marcello had been tortured by the Spaniards. Exposed naked on a tree, his nails were daily drawn from his fingers by these human fiends; he only escaped their clutches to die of his injuries at Gaeta. Laomedon Tardolus and John Bonifacius Victor suffered similar indignities and torments. Francesco Fortunio and John Valdes slew themselves. To enumerate all the scholars who succumbed to fear, plague, famine, torture, and imprisonment in this fatal year; to relate how numbers left Rome, robbed of everything, to wander over Italy, and die of hunger by the wayside, or of fever in low hovels; to describe the losses of their MSS., their madness, beggary, mysterious disappearances, and deaths by hands of servants or of brigands on the high roads, would occupy more space than I have left at my command. The ghastly muster roll is told with terrible concision by Valeriano, who adds divers examples, unconnected with the sack, of early deaths by over-study, lingering illnesses, murders by poison or the knife, and accidents of every kind, attributable more or less directly to the shifting career of students at that time in Italy.