The expense occasioned by these literary excursions was a heavy incumbrance upon Poggio, whose property could by no means bear any extraordinary diminution: and the fatigue and inconvenience which he experienced in the course of his travels in quest of manuscripts, induced him at one time to declare to Niccolo Niccoli that he could not possibly spend more time in this pursuit.[97] This declaration was however nothing more than the result of a temporary dejection of spirits. During the remainder of his life he eagerly took advantage of every opportunity of recovering the lost works of the writers of antiquity, many of which he transcribed with his own hand. In several of his letters the zeal with which he endeavoured to procure good copies of the Latin classics is strikingly conspicuous. His inquiries were incessantly and anxiously directed after the ancient compositions which had not yet been rescued from beneath the ruins of ages. In the course of his investigations, he once entertained hopes of recovering the lost Decads of Livy. A Swede, of the name of Nicolaus, had solemnly assured him, that he had seen a perfect copy of Livy’s Roman history in a monastery of Cistercian monks in Hungary. On the receipt of this intelligence, he immediately applied by letter to Niccolo Niccoli, not doubting but that he could persuade Cosmo de’ Medici to dispatch one Gherardo de’ Buris to the monastery where the manuscript was said to be deposited. He was also in hopes that cardinal Ursini would send a confidential agent to procure this valuable work; but in these expectations he was disappointed.[98] The testimony of Nicolaus the Swede being a few years afterwards corroborated by another traveller, Poggio wrote a letter to Leonello d’Este, Marquis of Ferrara, giving him an account of the information which he had received, and intimating, that though the authority upon which it rested was not of the highest nature, still it was worthy of attention. Whether Leonello was induced by Poggio’s letter to institute any inquiry after the manuscript in question, cannot perhaps now be ascertained. Certain it is, that the learned still lament the imperfect state of the history of Livy.[99] Poggio had also at one time conceived hopes of obtaining from a German monk a copy of the works of Tacitus, containing many portions of that historian’s writings, which had till then lain neglected beneath the accumulated dust of ages. These hopes were likewise frustrated. By the course of events, however, it was afterwards proved that they were not void of foundation: for during the pontificate of Leo. X. an ancient manuscript containing five books of the history of Tacitus, which had been long regarded as irrecoverably lost, was found in Germany, and presented to that pontiff, according to whose directions it was deposited in the Laurentian library at Florence.[100]