Guarino, like his friend Vittorino, was celebrated for the method of his teaching and for the exact order of his discipline.[298] Students flocked from all the cities of Italy to his lecture-room; for, as soon as his tutorial engagements with the prince permitted, he received a public appointment as professor of eloquence from the Ferrarese Consiglio de' Savi. In this post he laboured for many years, maintaining his reputation as a student and filling the universities of Italy with his pupils. A sentence describing his manner of life in extreme old age might be used to illustrate the enthusiasm which sustained the vital energy of scholars in that generation:--'His memory is marvellous, and his habit of reading is so indefatigable, that he scarcely takes the time to eat, to sleep, or to go abroad; and yet his limbs and senses have the vigour of youth.[299] Guarino was one of the few humanists whose moral character won equal respect with his learning. When he died at the age of ninety, the father of six boys and seven girls by his wife Taddea Cendrata of Verona, it was possible to say with truth that he had realised the ideal of a temperate scholar's life. Yet this incomparable teacher of youth undertook the defence of Beccadelli's obscene verses: this anchorite of humanism penned virulent invectives with the worst of his contemporaries.[300] Such contrasts were common enough in the fifteenth century. [Footnote 298: See the details collected by Rosmini, _Vita di Guarino_, pp. 79-87.] [Footnote 299: Timoteo Maffei, quoted by Tiraboschi, vol. vi. lib. iii. cap. 5, 8.] [Footnote 300: He carried on literary feuds with Niccolo de' Niccoli, Poggio, Filelfo, and Georgios Trapezuntios.] The name of Giovanni Aurispa must not be omitted in connection with Ferrara. Born in 1369 at Noto in Sicily, he lived to a great age, and died in 1459. He too travelled in early youth to Constantinople, and returned, laden with MSS. and learning, to profess the humanities in Italy. His life forms, therefore, a close parallel with that of both Guarino and Filelfo. Aurispa, however, was gifted with a less unresting temper than Filelfo; nor did he achieve the same professorial success as Guarino. In his school at Ferrara he enjoyed the calmer pleasures of a student's life, 'devoted,' as Filelfo phrased it, 'to the placid Muses.'[301] [Footnote 301: 'Placidis Aurispa Camoenis Deditus,' _Sat._, dec. i. hec. 5. Valla, _Antid. in Pogium_, p. 7, describes him as 'virum suavissimum et ab omni contentione remotissimum.']