During the reigns of the last Visconti and of the first Sforza, or from about 1440 to 1474, literature became fashionable at the Court of Milan. Filippo Maria Visconti is described as a superstitious and repulsive tyrant, and he could hardly by his own personality have attracted to Lombardy men of intellectual tastes. Visconti appears, however, to have considered that his Court would be incomplete without scholars, and to have been willing to pay liberally for their attendance. Piero Candido Decembrio was one of the most industrious of the writers who were supported by Visconti. According to his epitaph, he was responsible for no less than 127 books. Symonds speaks of his memoir of Visconti as a vivid and vigorous study of a tyrant. Gasparino da Barzizza was the Court letter-writer and rhetorician, and, as the official orator, filled an important place in what was considered the intellectual life of the city. By far the most noteworthy, however, of the scholars who were attracted to Milan by the Ducal bounty was Francesco Filelfo. He could hardly be said to belong to Lombardy, as he was born in Ancona and educated at Padua, and had passed a number of years in Venice, Constantinople, Florence, Siena, and Bologna. The longest sojourn of his life, however, was made in Milan, where he arrived in 1440, and where he enjoyed for some years liberal emoluments from the Court. Filelfo was evidently a man with great powers of acquisition and with exceptional versatility. He brought back with him from Constantinople (where he had remained for some years) a Greek bride from a noble family, an extensive collection of Greek manuscripts, and a working knowledge of the Greek language; and at a time when Greek ideas and Greek literature were attracting the enthusiastic attention not merely of the scholars but of the courtiers and men of fashion, these possessions of Filelfo were exceptionally serviceable, and enabled him to push his fortunes effectively. He seems to have possessed a self-confidence at least equal to his learning. He speaks of himself as having surpassed Virgil because he was an orator, and Cicero because he was a poet. Symonds says, however, that, notwithstanding his arrogance, he is entitled to the rank of the most universal scholar of his age, and his self-assertion doubtless aided not a little in securing prompt recognition for his learning. Venice paid him, in 1427, a stipend of 500 sequins for a series of lectures on Eloquence. A year later he accepted the post of lecturer in Bologna on Moral Philosophy and Eloquence, with a stipend of 450 sequins. Shortly afterwards, flattering offers tempted him to Florence, where he lectured on the Greek and Latin classics and on Dante, with a stipend first of 250 sequins, and later of 450 sequins. He found time while there for the preparation of translations of the _Rhetoric_ of Aristotle, and of a number of other Greek works.