It is pleasant to turn from Poggio's wrangling to more honourable passages in his biography. Since the year 1434 he had owned a farm not far from Florence. Here he built a country residence, vying, if not in splendour, at least in elegance, with the villas of the Florentine burghers. He called it his Valdarniana, and adorned it with the fragments of antique sculpture, inscriptions, and coins, collected by him partly in person on the Roman Campagna and partly by purchase from Greece. In the following year (1435) Poggio, then a man of fifty-five, married a girl of eighteen, named Vaggia, of the noble Buondelmonte blood. In forming this connection he had to separate from a mistress who had borne him fourteen children, four of them then living. His biographer, Shepherd, indulges in some sentimental reflections upon the pain this leave-taking must have cost him. Yet the impartial critic will hardly be brought to pity Poggio, seeing that he cancelled the brief whereby he had previously legitimised his natural children, and responded with raptures to the congratulations of friends upon his new engagement. He had already been admitted to the burghership of Florence, and exempted from its taxes in consideration of his literary services; so that, on the death of his friend Carlo Aretino, in 1453, no one was found more fitting for the post of Chancellor to the Republic. As an increase of dignity, Poggio fulfilled the office of Prior, and sat among the Signory. The 'History of the Florentine Republic,' written in continuation of Lionardo Aretino's, occupied the closing years of his life. He left it still unfinished in the year 1459, when he died, and was buried in the Church of Santa Croce. I cannot find that his funeral was accompanied by the peculiar honours voted in the case of his two predecessors. The Florentines, however, erected his statue on the façade of Santa Maria del Fiore, and placed his picture by Antonio dal Pollajuolo in the hall of the Proconsolo. The fate of this statue, a work of Donatello's, was not a little curious. On the occasion of some alterations in 1560, it was removed from its first station, and set up as one among the Twelve Apostles in another part of the cathedral.