Francus was a true poet, endowed with a vivid imagination and with a
delicate and subtle wit. He scorned the coarse invective in which the
satirists of his day used to delight. He had many enemies on account of
his plain-spoken words and keen criticisms. The problem which perplexed
the Patriarch Job--the happiness of prosperous vice, the misery of
persecuted virtue--tormented his mind and called forth his embittered
words. He inveighed against the reprobates and fools, the crowds of
monsignors who were as vain of their effeminacy as the Scipios of their
deeds of valour; he combated abuses, and with indignant pen heaped scorn
upon the fashionable vices of the age. The Pope and his Cardinals, stung
by his shafts of satire, cruelly avenged themselves upon the unhappy poet,
and, as we have said, doomed him to death in the year 1569. His Dialogues
were printed in Venice by Zuliani in 1593, under the title _Dialoghi
piacevolissimi di Nicolo Franco da Benevento_; and there is a French
translation, made by Gabriel Chapins, published at Lyons in 1579, entitled
_Dix plaisans Dialogues du sieur Nicolo Franco_.
Lorenzo Valla, born at Rome in 1406, was one of the greatest scholars of
his age, and contributed more than any other man to the revival of the
love of Latin literature in the fifteenth century. His works are
voluminous. He translated into Latin _Herodotus_ (Paris, 1510),
_Thucydides_ (Lyons, 1543), _The Iliad_ (Venice, 1502), _Fables of Aesop_
(Venice, 1519); and wrote _Elegantiae Sermonis Latini_, a history of
Ferdinand Aragon (Paris, 1521), and many other works, which are the
monuments of his learning and industry.
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