The credit of all this was justly given to Lorenzo. ‘I heard a few days ago,’ wrote Antonio de’ Pazzi to him from Padua, January 29, 1473,[92] ‘that by your direction a new university is to be founded at Pisa; at which not only we Florentine students, but foreign ones too, are greatly delighted, seeing that Pisa is a city eminently suited for it, and because the scheme proceeds from a man who will strive to acquire honour by this as by all else that he undertakes.’ Scholars came flocking from all parts, and first among them Francesco Filelfo. He had found an asylum with the Sforza at Milan; but, dissatisfied and restless, extravagant and in debt, he tried to change his position. During the pontificate of Pius II. he made several attempts to this end, but, failing in his hopes, he attacked the pontiff before and after death with his usual invectives, and in consequence was imprisoned for a time. In April 1473 he applied to Lorenzo. Some time before he had managed to flatter Lorenzo’s father into forgetting his offences against Cosimo so far as to hold one of his sons over the font; and when in Florence in the autumn of 1469, shortly before Piero’s death, he obtained a loan from Lorenzo.[93] The letter which he now addressed to the latter[94] is curiously characteristic of the man. He attacks those who had long been in their graves—Marsuppini, Poggio, and their ‘synagogue.’ He begins by declaring that the Milanese chancellor, Cecco Simonetta, had advised him to prefer Pisa to Rome, where he was much wanted; and he ends with the artless assurance that Lorenzo must know well he cannot find in all the world a second Filelfo nor one more devoted to him. In another letter he remarks in the same style: ‘You are aware that at the present time no one can stand a comparison with me in my own branch.’ Simonetta, from Pavia, seconded the appeal, and sang the vain man’s praises. Lorenzo answered by asking what salary would be required, but the negotiation fell through, which Medici probably did not much regret, as he must have felt some hesitation in attaching the quarrelsome old man to his young establishment. Besides, the sentence of banishment once passed on Filelfo was still in force, and his services in the way of literary invective after the conspiracy of the Pazzi had not yet smoothed the way to his return. When he was at last summoned to Florence as professor of eloquence and moral philosophy, he had scarcely time to greet the city he had left for nearly half a century before he died, a few days after his arrival, in the summer of 1481, in his eighty-third year.