Fortune continued to favour Bartolommeo Scala, and even in the great commotion of 1494 he was not overthrown. Posts of honour, embassies, knighthood, riches, fell to his share. He was Lorenzo’s confidant, and in constant correspondence with him on civil and political affairs. In the storms of 1478 and the following years he was of no small use to him, and it was chiefly through him that Lorenzo always kept the Signoria well in hand. Scala had a pretty villa—which afterwards passed to the Guadagni[60]—on the slope of the hill at Fiesole, and his town house (now belonging, with its beautiful gardens, to the Count della Gherardesca) still bears on its walls the coat of arms which he adopted in allusion to his name. As two of his predecessors had written a history of Florence, he thought it needful to do the same. His work, which comes down to Charles of Anjou, has no intrinsic value; and his other writings are even more utterly forgotten than those of the obscurest among his contemporaries. That he was most anxious to give no ground of displeasure to foreign princes on whose relations to Florence he was obliged to touch in his history is shown by his oft-repeated request to the Ferrarese ambassador for information about the Este family, ‘because he wished to write in praise of that illustrious house.’[61] Bartolommeo Scala’s position made him boastful. His letters to Poliziano are full of the most ridiculous conceit.[62] ‘Thou wilt hardly venture to compete with my honours. The Florentine people have raised me first to the Priorship, then to the Gonfaloniership, and now to the rank of senator and knight, with such unanimity that many were of opinion there had never been a more popular act; besides which I have the brilliant testimony of Lorenzo de’ Medici that distinction was never conferred on one more worthy.’ Whereupon Poliziano did not fail to pay him back with an abusive answer. His boast of praise from Cosimo and Lorenzo was a lie; the latter had often said that in advancing him he was influenced by other considerations, not by his own opinion, and had often given Poliziano Scala’s official papers to correct, as the latter must have known very well. Lorenzo had prevented the former from destroying the mocking iambics on Scala,[63] saying it was a pity to sacrifice such good verses. Lorenzo de’ Medici was dead when the two became involved in that violent strife which gave rise to accusations as passionate, coarse, and spiteful as those flung about by Filelfo, Poggio, and Valla. But in the lifetime of Lorenzo a quarrel broke out between the two men, who emulated each other in abasing the moral dignity of scholarship.