[Footnote 231: I may refer to Petrarch's Letters passim, and to the solemn peroration of the _Africa_.] [Footnote 232: See Vol. I., _Age of the Despots_, pp. 445, 446.] [Footnote 233: _Vita di Alfonso_, p. 59. _Vita di Manetti_, p. 451.] [Footnote 234: See Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib. i. cap. 2, 17.] [Footnote 235: Pontano, _De Principe_, and Panormita, _De Dictis et Factis Alphonsi Regis_, furnish these anecdotes.] [Footnote 236: The MS. of Livy referred to above is now in the library at Holkham; see Roscoe's _Lorenzo_, p. 389.] Among the humanists who stood nearest to the person of this monarch, Antonio Beccadelli, called from his birthplace Il Panormita, deserves the first place. Born at Palermo in 1394, he received his education at Siena, where he was a fellow-student with Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini. The city of Siena, _molles Senæ_, as the poet himself called it, was notorious throughout Italy for luxury of living. Here, therefore, it may be presumed that Beccadelli in his youth enjoyed the experiences which he afterwards celebrated in 'Hermaphroditus.'[237] Nothing is more striking in that amazing collection of elegies than the frankness of their author, the free and liberal delight with which he dwells on shameless sensualities, and the pride with which he publishes his own name to the world. Dedicated to Cosimo de' Medici, welcomed with applause by the grey-headed Guarino da Verona,[238] extolled to the skies by Antonio Losco, eagerly sought after by Bartolommeo, Bishop of Milan--this book, which Strato and Martial might have blushed to own, passed from copyist to copyist, from hand to hand. Among the learned it found no serious adversaries. Poggio, indeed, gently reminded the poet that even the elegance of its Latinity and the heat of its author's youth were hardly sufficient excuses for its wantonness.[239] Yet the almost unanimous verdict of students was favourable. Its open animalism, as free from satire as from concealment, took the world by storm; while the facile elegance of fluent verse with which the sins of Sodom and Gomorrha were described placed it, in the opinion of scholars, on a level with Catullus.[240] When the Emperor Sigismund crowned Beccadelli poet at Siena in 1433, he only added the weight of Imperial approval to the verdict of the lettered public. [Footnote 237: Published at Paris in 1791 among _Quinque illustrium Poetarum Lusus in Venerem_, and again at Coburg in 1824, with annotations by F.G. Forberg.] [Footnote 238: A man of about sixty-three, and father of twelve legitimate children.] [Footnote 239: _Poggii Opera_, pp. 349-354.]