Francus was a true poet, endowed with a vivid imagination and with a delicate and subtle wit. He scorned the coarse invective in which the satirists of his day used to delight. He had many enemies on account of his plain-spoken words and keen criticisms. The problem which perplexed the Patriarch Job--the happiness of prosperous vice, the misery of persecuted virtue--tormented his mind and called forth his embittered words. He inveighed against the reprobates and fools, the crowds of monsignors who were as vain of their effeminacy as the Scipios of their deeds of valour; he combated abuses, and with indignant pen heaped scorn upon the fashionable vices of the age. The Pope and his Cardinals, stung by his shafts of satire, cruelly avenged themselves upon the unhappy poet, and, as we have said, doomed him to death in the year 1569. His Dialogues were printed in Venice by Zuliani in 1593, under the title _Dialoghi piacevolissimi di Nicolo Franco da Benevento_; and there is a French translation, made by Gabriel Chapins, published at Lyons in 1579, entitled _Dix plaisans Dialogues du sieur Nicolo Franco_. Lorenzo Valla, born at Rome in 1406, was one of the greatest scholars of his age, and contributed more than any other man to the revival of the love of Latin literature in the fifteenth century. His works are voluminous. He translated into Latin _Herodotus_ (Paris, 1510), _Thucydides_ (Lyons, 1543), _The Iliad_ (Venice, 1502), _Fables of Aesop_ (Venice, 1519); and wrote _Elegantiae Sermonis Latini_, a history of Ferdinand Aragon (Paris, 1521), and many other works, which are the monuments of his learning and industry. But Valla raised against him many enemies by the severity of his satire on almost all the learned men of his time. He spared no one, and least of all the clerics, who sought his destruction. A friend advised him that, unless he was weary of life, he ought to avoid heaping his satirical abuse on the Roman priests and bishops. He published a work on the pretended Donation of Constantine to the Papal See, and for this and other writings pronounced heretical by the Inquisition he was cast into prison, and would have suffered death by fire had not his powerful friend Alphonso V., King of Aragon, rescued him from the merciless Holy Office. Valla was compelled publicly to renounce his heretical opinions, and then, within the walls of a monastery, his hands having been bound, he was beaten with rods. It is unnecessary to follow the fortunes of Valla further. He was engaged in a long controversy with the learned men of his time, especially with the facetious Poggio, whose wit was keener though his language was not so forcible. Erasmus in his Second Epistle defends Valla in his attacks upon the clergy, and asks, "Did he speak falsely, because he spoke the truth too severely?" Valla died at Naples in 1465. The following epigram testifies to the correctness of his Latinity and the severity of his criticisms:--