Julianus Camers, maddened by the sight of the torments inflicted on his servants, had thrown himself from a window in his house, and was killed. Baldus, the professor, after watching his commentary upon Pliny used to light the camp fires of the soldiery, had died himself of hunger. Casanova, the poet, fell a victim to the plague. Paolo Bombasi, another poet, was murdered in the streets of Rome. Cristoforo Marcello had been tortured by the Spaniards. Exposed naked on a tree, his nails were daily drawn from his fingers by these human fiends; he only escaped their clutches to die of his injuries at Gaeta. Laomedon Tardolus and John Bonifacius Victor suffered similar indignities and torments. Francesco Fortunio and John Valdes slew themselves. To enumerate all the scholars who succumbed to fear, plague, famine, torture, and imprisonment in this fatal year; to relate how numbers left Rome, robbed of everything, to wander over Italy, and die of hunger by the wayside, or of fever in low hovels; to describe the losses of their MSS., their madness, beggary, mysterious disappearances, and deaths by hands of servants or of brigands on the high roads, would occupy more space than I have left at my command. The ghastly muster roll is told with terrible concision by Valeriano, who adds divers examples, unconnected with the sack, of early deaths by over-study, lingering illnesses, murders by poison or the knife, and accidents of every kind, attributable more or less directly to the shifting career of students at that time in Italy. [Footnote 410: Printed at Venice, 1620.] Though the wars in Lombardy proved scarcely less fatal to men of letters than the siege of Rome, those disasters fell singly and at intervals. The ever-memorable stage of the Eternal City was reserved for the crowning tragedy of arts and letters. Whatever vicious seeds had been sown in Italy by the humanists had blossomed and borne fruit in Rome; and there the Nemesis of pride and insolence, and godlessness of evil living, fell upon them like a bolt from heaven. In essays, epistles, and funeral orations they amply recognised the justice of their punishment. A phrase of Hieronymus Niger's in a letter to Sadoleto--'Rome, that is the sink of all things shameful and abominable'--might serve as the epitome of their conscience-stricken Jeremiads.[411] All Italy re-echoed with these lamentations; and though Clement VII. and Paul III. did their best to repiece the ruins of Leo's golden house of fame, the note of despair and anguish uttered by the scholars in 1527 was never destined to be drowned by chorus hymeneal or triumphal chant again. What remained of humanism among the Italians assumed a different form, adapted to the new rule of the Spaniards and the new attitude of the Church. To the age of the Humanists succeeded the age of the Inquisitors and Jesuits.