remember that God suffers no wicked action to pass unpunished. Remember, that if you do not repent, you will incur the pain of damnation. Other punishments are comparatively light, because they endure but for a season. But the soul, when once lost, is lost to all eternity; and unless you repent, you will be doomed, with other heresiarchs, to sustain the horrors of everlasting fire.”[386] These animadversions of Poggio upon the conduct of Amedæus and his abettors, were calculated to inflame resentment rather than to prepare the way for conciliation. The pacific spirit of Nicolas suggested measures much more conducive to the extinction of the schism. By the grant of a cardinal’s hat, and the privilege of precedence in the conclave, the antipope was induced to renounce the equivocal honours which he held by so dubious a title, and to render homage to his rival, as the true successor of St. Peter. After the fulfilment of these terms of pacification, which were concluded in the year 1449, Amedæus retired to his hermitage of Ripaille, where he devoted the remainder of his days to works of piety, and in the neighbourhood of which he terminated his mortal career on the seventh of January, 1451.[387] Nicolas being thus freed from the vexation and apprehension which had been excited in his mind by the claims of his rival, applied himself with renewed spirit to the promotion of classical learning. At his request, and under his patronage, the scholars who frequented his court applied themselves with the most earnest assiduity to the study of the Greek tongue. Among the rest, Poggio contributed to the illustration of Grecian literature, by publishing a Latin version of the work of Diodorus Siculus,[388] which he dedicated to his revered patron. This was not, however, his first essay as a translator from the Greek. A little before the accession of Nicolas to the pontificate he had translated into Latin the Cyropædia of Xenophon.[389] Having completed this task, he deliberated for some time on the choice of a patron under whose auspices he might submit it to the inspection of the learned. At length the fame of the splendid talents and liberal disposition of Alfonso, king of Naples, determined him to inscribe his translation to that monarch.[390] On this occasion some of the Neapolitan scholars, who regarded Poggio with a considerable degree of animosity, gratified their malevolence, by vilifying his work to the king, who seems to have lent too ready an ear to their censures. Poggio highly resented this conduct of Alfonso, whom he stigmatized in a letter to Bartolomeo Facio, one of the learned men who enjoyed that monarch’s favour and protection,[391] as a prince who, in consequence of his own ignorance, gave implicit credit to the opinions of others, and declared, that he would avail himself of the earliest opportunity to retract every thing which he had said in his commendation.[392] It should appear, that these remonstrances of Poggio