forty-five copyists, and in twenty-two months finished the two hundred volumes deemed necessary for a good library. His list included the Bible and concordances and commentaries, beginning with that by Origen; the works of St. Ignatius, St. Basil, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. John Chrysostom, and all the works of the Greek fathers which had been translated into Latin; St. Cyprian, Tertullian, and the four doctors of the Latin Church; the mediaeval masters St. Bernard, Hugo of St. Victor, St. Anselm, St. Isidore of Spain; the scholastic philosophers, Albertus Magnus, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventura; Aristotle, and commentaries; books of canon law; the Latin prose classics, Livy, Caesar, Suetonius, Plutarch, Sallust, Quintus Curtius, Valerius Maximus, Cicero, Seneca; the Latin poets, Virgil, Terence, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Plautus; and "all the other books necessary to a library." One wonders if this clause includes Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, or whether the humanists did not regard them as necessary or appropriate to culture. Taken altogether Cosimo may stand as an heroic model of the Florentine burgher, such as one sees in the frescoes of the time, shrewd, prudent, thoughtful, cautious in plan and prompt in action, interested in the best things of this world, and in a measure generous, but wholly without romance, chivalry, or idealism. At the close of his life he used to stay hours at a time, wrapt in thought, without speaking a word. One of the women of the house asked him the reason of this. He answered: "When you have to go out of town, you spend a fortnight all agog to prepare for going; and now that I have to go from this life to another, doesn't it seem to you that I have something to think about?" The last book he is reported by his biographer to have read was the "Ethics" of Aristotle. Cosimo was named _Pater Patriae_, though his real work was the foundation of the House of the Medici, which ruled in Tuscany for centuries and mingled its blood with the royalties of Europe; but for us he is the patron of the arts, the friend of artists, and serves as the central figure round which to group the men of artistic genius.