Textual criticism was a work taken up less by foreigners than by Italians: in Rome, especially by Lorenzo Valla and Pomponio Leto; in Florence, by Landino, Poliziano, and Pico. Lorenzo not only encouraged those personally intimate with him to this work, but urged others to it, particularly the members of the Academy, which, having weathered the storms of Paul II.’s reign, flourished with renewed vigour under Sixtus IV., a Pope who felt no fear of the baptized heathens. Bartolommeo Platina, writing to Lorenzo[97] to recommend the Milanese sculptor Andrea Fusina, adds that the man felt assured of obtaining his desire if he, Platina, interceded for him. ‘Farewell, and believe me, thou hast few who love and honour thee like Platina.’ On March 30, 1488, Lorenzo wrote to Lanfredini on behalf of a friend of Pomponio Leto:[98] ‘Doubtless you know, at least by name, Pomponio, one of the most famous scholars in Rome, if not the very first, and a man much attached to me and our whole house, so that I am greatly desirous of doing him a favour.’ The art of studying manuscripts had first to be put on a sound basis. The rich harvest of discoveries was now almost at an end, a few objects of interest turning up only occasionally. Collectors had naturally enough given themselves up to delight in the prizes thus gained, without troubling themselves much about criticism. The necessity of criticism became more strongly felt and exercised as continued study of the old authors involved a stricter examination of the correctness of the manuscripts. At first people had been too much inclined to believe generally in their great age, and had been misled in individual cases by the chronological notes at the end of the codices. Often, as in the Medicean codex of the later books of the Annals of Tacitus, the date was fixed in the fourth Christian century, when in reality the parchments were written on by a later copyist. The corrupt state of the manuscripts called for correction, but the correction was mostly arbitrary. Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Francesco Barbaro, and others, sought to supply what was needed, but of rules they knew nothing. In this, above all, shines the transcendent merit of Poliziano; though even he indulged largely in conjecture, when in his youth he self-complacently fancied that his work on Catullus surpassed everything of the kind. Nor did he stand alone in this respect. Ermolao Barbaro in his edition of Pliny in 1492, Marullus in his critical works on Lucretius, confess how often they had had recourse to emendations of their own devising. But Poliziano thoroughly perceived that a secure basis was only to be obtained by a comparison of MSS. where more than one existed. When this was not the case he tried to get a foundation for his conjectures from notes and parallel passages. Many printed books from his library bear on their margins traces of this comparison of MSS., to which he alludes in one of his letters to