[Footnote 200: 'Stabat impavidus, intrepidus, mortem non contemnens solum sed appetens ut alterum Catonem dixeris.'--_Opp. Omnia_, p. 301. This most interesting letter, addressed to Lionardo Bruni, is translated by Shepherd, _Life of Poggio Bracciolini_, pp. 78-88.] [Footnote 201: _Opera Omnia_, p. 297. See Shepherd, pp. 67-76, for a translation of this letter to Niccolo de' Niccoli.] [Footnote 202: Cardinal Beaufort had invited him to England.] In literature he embraced the whole range of contemporary studies, making his mark as a public orator, a writer of rhetorical treatises and dialogues, a panegyrist of the dead, a violent impeacher and impugner of the living, a translator from the Greek, an elegant epistolographer, a grave historian, and a facetious compiler of anecdotes and epigrams. He possessed a style at once easy and pointed, correct in diction and varied in cadence, equally adapted for serious discourse and witty trifling, and not less formidable in abuse than delicate in flattery. This at least was the impression which his copious and facile Latin, always fluent and yet always full of sense, produced on his contemporaries. For us its finest flights of rhetoric have lost their charm, and its best turns of phrase their point. So impossible is it that the fashionable style of one age should retain its magic for posterity, unless it be truly classical in form, or weighted with sound thought, or animated with high inspiration. Just these qualities were missed by Poggio and his compeers. Setting no more serious aim before them than the imitation of Livy and Cicero, Seneca and Cæsar, they fell far short of their originals; nor had they matter to make up for their defect of elegance. Poggio's treatises 'De Nobilitate,' 'De Varietate Fortunæ,' 'De Miseriâ Humanæ Conditionis,' 'De Infelicitate Principum,' 'An Seni sit Uxor ducenda,' 'Historia Disceptiva Convivialis,' and so forth, were as interesting to Italy in the fifteenth century as Voltaire's occasional essays to our more immediate ancestors. His controversial writings passed for models of destructive eloquence, his satires on the clergy for masterpieces of sarcastic humour, his Florentine history for a supreme achievement in the noblest Latin manner. Yet the whole of this miscellaneous literature seems coarse and ineffective to the modern taste. We read it, not without repugnance, in order to obtain an insight into the spirit of the author's age.