The next prose author whom it is necessary to mention, ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI, afterwards Pope Pius the Second (1405-64), writing solely in Latin, has no place in the literary history of the Italian language, but is perhaps the most typical example of the fifteenth-century man of letters, accomplished, versatile, adroit, imperfectly restrained by principle, but inspired by a genuine zeal for culture and humanity. No literary personage since Petrarch had displayed such various activity, or, by his controversial, no less than by his diplomatic ability, had exerted an equal influence in the affairs of Church and State. Apart from the substantial merits of his writings, Æneas is a typical figure as indicating that the pen was beginning to govern the world, and that literary dexterity could make a Pope of a struggling adventurer. As an author he has come down to our day by his Commentaries of his own times, one of that valuable class of histories whose authors can say, “Pars magna fui”; and by his _Euryalus and Lucretia_, a romance founded on an actual occurrence, and noteworthy as a precursor of the modern novel. In LEONE BATTISTA ALBERTI (1404-72) we at length encounter a humanist accomplished alike in the learned and the vulgar tongue; while, like Leonardo da Vinci, to whom he offers a strong resemblance, less remarkable for any particular work than for the universality of his genius. An architect and mathematician, an engineer and the inventor of the camera obscura, he was almost the first of the moderns to treat these subjects scientifically, and extended his researches to painting and sculpture. His literary celebrity, however, arises rather from his treatise _Della Famiglia_, a model of practical wisdom, couched in the clear and cheerful spirit of a Goethe, and affording a pleasing insight into the Italian family life of the period, as yet unspoiled by luxury. “What he says about the beauty of the body is worthy of a Greek, what he says about exercise might have been written by an Englishman” (Symonds). The third book, superior to the others in diction, has been attributed to Agnolo Pandolfini, a distinguished Florentine statesman of an earlier date, but Alberti’s claim to it seems satisfactorily established. His _Iciarchia_, a treatise on the ideal prince, is also a remarkable work; and his novelette, _Ippolito and Leonora_, founded on a Florentine tradition, is distinguished by pathos and simplicity. Alberti was the natural son of a Florentine exile, and was born at Genoa. His early years were years of hardship. Restored to his ancestral city, he there executed important architectural and engineering works, and subsequently metamorphosed into a splendid temple the old church at Rimini, which Sigismondo Malatesta dedicated in its altered form to the memory of his mistress Isotta. He was afterwards abbreviator of Papal briefs at Rome. Deprived of this office, along with sixty-nine other eminent scholars, by the Philistine