This treatise was extant in the 14th century. A copy had been presented to Petrarch, from his vast collection of books, by Raymond Soranzo, a Sicilian lawyer(477). Petrarch long preserved this precious volume with great care, and valued it highly. Unfortunately a man called Convenoli, who resided at Avignon, and who had formerly been his preceptor, begged and obtained the loan of it; and having afterwards fallen into indigent circumstances, pawned it for the relief of his necessities, to some unknown person, from whom Petrarch never could regain its possession. Two copies, however, were still extant in the subsequent century, one in a private library at Nuremburg, and another in that of a Venetian nobleman, Bernard Giustiniani, who, dying in 1489, bequeathed his books to a monastery of nuns, to whom Petrus Alcyonius was physician. Filelfo was accused, though on no good foundation, of having burned the Nuremburg copy, after inserting passages from it in his treatise _De Contemptu Mundi_(478). But the charge of destroying the original MS. left by Giustiniani to the nuns, has been urged against Alcyonius on better grounds, and with more success. Paulus Manutius, of whose printing-press Alcyonius had been at one time corrector, charged him with having availed himself of his free access to the library of the nuns, whose physician he was, to purloin the treatise _De Gloria_, and with having destroyed it, to conceal his plagiarisms, after inserting from it various passages in his dialogue _De Exilio_(479). The assertion of Manutius is founded only on the disappearance of the MS.,—the opportunities possessed by Alcyonius of appropriating it, and his own critical opinion of the dialogue _De Exilio_, in which he conceives that there are many passages composed in a style evincing a writer of talents, far superior to those of its nominal author. This accusation was repeated by Paulus Jovius and others(480). Mencken, in the preface to his edition of the dialogue _De Exilio_, has maintained the innocence of Alcyonius, and has related a conversation which he had with Bentley on the subject, in the course of which that great scholar declared, that he found nothing in the work of Alcyonius which could convict him of the imputed plagiarism(481). He has been defended at greater length by Tiraboschi, on the strong grounds that Giustiniani lived after the invention of printing, and that had he actually been in possession of Cicero’s treatise _De Gloriâ_, he would doubtless have published it—that it is not said to what monastery of nuns Giustiniani bequeathed this precious MS.—that the charge against Alcyonius was not advanced till after his death, although his dialogue _De Exilio_ was first printed in 1522, and he survived till 1527; and, finally, that so great a proportion of it relates to modern events, that there are not more than a few pages which could possibly have been pilfered from Cicero, or any writer of his age(482). M.