Filelfo's last journey was undertaken in 1481. Ill at ease, and sore of heart, the veteran of scholarship still longed for further triumphs. All his wishes for some time past had been set on ending his days at Florence, near the person of Lorenzo de' Medici; and when an invitation to the Chair of Greek Literature arrived, it found him eager to set forth. He was so poor, however, that the Duke's secretary, Jacopo Antiquari, had to lend him money for the journey.[284] He just managed to reach Florence, where he died of dysentery a fortnight after his arrival, at the age of eighty-three. The Florentines buried him in the Church of the Annunziata. [Footnote 284: I cannot allow this mention of Antiquari's name to pass without a note upon his life and services to letters. He was born and educated at Perugia, entered the service of the Papal Legate Battista Savelli as secretary at Bologna, and afterwards received the post of secretary and diplomatic writer to the Sforza family at Milan. The Duke Galeazzo Maria was his first master. At Milan he played the part of an amiable and refined Mæcenas, while he carried on a correspondence in Latin--still delightful to read--with Poliziano and all the greatest scholars of his age. His biography, written at some length, with valuable miscellaneous appendices by Vermiglioli, was published at Perugia in 1819.] The sketch which I have given of Filelfo's life, abounds in details beyond the just proportions of the present chapter. This is due partly to the copiousness and the excellence of the authorities collected by Rosmini in his exhaustive biography, but more to the undoubted fact that Filelfo ranks as the typical humanist of his age. The universality of his acquirements and the impression they made upon contemporaries, his enormous physical vigour and incessant mental activity, the vehemence with which he prosecuted his literary warfares and the restlessness that drove him from capital to capital in Italy, are themselves enough to mark him out as the representative hero of the second period of humanism. Not less characteristic were the quality and the form of his literary work--ridiculously over-valued then, and now perhaps too readily depreciated. There is something pathetic in the certainty of everlasting fame that sustained the student through so many years of unremitting labour. It makes us wonder whether the achievements of the human intellect, in science and discovery, acceptable as these may be to their own time, are not, equally with Filelfo's triumph of scholarship, foredoomed to speedy obscuration. Nothing is imperishable but high thought, to which art has communicated the indestructible form of beauty. The 'Age of the Despots'[285] contains a promise of further details concerning Vittorino da Feltre, to redeem which the time has now come. His father's name was Bruto de' Rambaldoni; but having been born at Feltre in the year 1378, he took from his birthplace the surname by which he is best known.