foul contagion wherever you come, that they who afforded you an asylum were soon compelled to banish you.”[330]—Upbraiding his antagonist with the obscurity of his origin, Poggio affirmed that he was the offspring of an adulterous intercourse between a parish priest and the wife of a rustic, whose hands, he said, were so rough with continual labour, that he was accustomed to use them instead of a curry comb in dressing his horses.[331] Tracing the course of Filelfo’s early life, he noticed his residence in Padua, and his visit to Venice and Constantinople, from all which places he affirmed that he was driven by the infamy of his vices. Narrating his transactions after his return to Italy, he charged him with fraudulently retaining certain books, in payment for which he had received sums of money from Leonardo Giustiniano and Guarino Veronese. He also enumerated many more instances of his alleged dishonesty. Amongst other imputations of this nature, he asserted, that Filelfo, being once admitted into Leonardo Aretino’s library, took advantage of the absence of his host to steal a box of gold rings. He reminded him of the precipitancy of his flight from Florence, and affirmed that he left Siena in disgrace, and fled to Milan in circumstances of the utmost distress. Having exhausted all the topics of obloquy which suggested themselves to his fertile imagination, Poggio concluded his invective with the following peroration. “Since you are conscious that these things are true, I wonder that you do not withdraw from the light, and fly from the aspect of men into some distant solitudes, where the villany of Filelfo is unknown. But your mind, delighting in wickedness and blinded by passion, your obscene manners, your abandoned life, your secret vices, hurry you headlong to your fate, drive you onward by the instigation of the furies, prevent you from profiting by wholesome counsel, and render you insensible of the distinction between right and wrong. As Hercules traversed the world to benefit mankind by his labours, so you have visited every country and climate to disgust them by your vices. Whither would you betake yourself should you be deprived of the countenance of your present patron? You have now wandered like a common mendicant through every district of Italy. What will you do if your present resources fail you? Whose assistance will you implore? To whose protection will you commend yourself? I know what you will do. You will enlist into some army; and, such is your ambition, you will have the vanity to aspire to the chief command. But you will make your exit at the gallows—an exit well befitting a man of your vicious character. For when your patron shall perceive that he does not obtain praise, but ignominy from your ridiculous writings his sentiments will be changed, and he will drag you from your obscene retreat, and inflict upon you the punishment due to your crimes.”[332]