Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/538

Rh 514 M A N M A N rare a man ; and he received tempting offers from the Spanish court. Yet his life was a long struggle with pecuniary difficulties. To prepare correct editions of the classics, and to print them in a splendid style, has always been a costly undertaking. And, though Paolo s publica tions were highly esteemed, their sale was slow. In 1556 he received for a time external support from the Venetian Academy, founded by Federigo Badoaro. But Badoaro failed disgracefully in 1559, and the academy was extinct in 1562. Meanwhile Paolo had established his brother, Antonio, a man of good parts but indifferent conduct, in a printing office and book shop at Bologna. Antonio died in 1559, having been a source of trouble and expense to Paolo during the last four years of his life. Other pecuniary embarrassments arose from a contract for supplying fish to Venice, into which Paolo had somewhat strangely entered with the Government. In 1561 Pope Pius IV. invited him to Rome, offering him a yearly stipend of 500 ducats, and undertaking to establish and maintain his press there. The profits on publications were to be divided between Paolo Manuzio and the apostolic camera. Paolo accepted the invitation, and spent the larger portion of his life, under three papacies, with varying fortunes, in the city of Rome. Ill health, the commercial interests he had left behind at Venice, and the coldness shown him by Pope Pius V., induced him at various times and for several reasons to leave Rome. But of these excursions it is not necessary to take particular notice. As was natural, his editions after his removal to Rome were mostly Latin works of theology and Biblical or patristic literature. Paolo married his wife, Caterina Odoni, in 1546. She brought him three sons and one daughter. His eldest son, the younger Aldus, succeeded him in the management of the Venetian printing house when his father settled at Rome in 1561. Paolo had never been a strong man, and his health was overtaxed with studies and commercial worries. Yet he lived into his sixty-second year, and died at Rome in 1574. III. ALDUS MANUTIUS, JUNIOR (1547-1597). The younger Aldo, born in the year after his father Paolo s marriage, cradled in scholarship, and suckled as it were with printer s ink, proved what is called an infant prodigy. When he was nine years old, his name was placed upon the title page of the famous Eleganze della lingua Toscana e Latina. What his share was in that really excellent selection cannot be ascertained ; but it is hardly possible that a boy of nine could have compiled it without assistance. The Eleganze was probably a book made for his instruction and in his company by his father. In 1561, at the age of fourteen, he produced a work upon Latin spelling, called Ortho- graphix Ratio. During a visit to his father at Rome in the next year, he was able to improve this treatise by the study of inscriptions, and in 1575 he completed his labours in the same field by the publication of an Epitome Ortliograplii&. Whether Aldo was the sole composer of the work on spelling, in its first edition, may be doubted ; but he appropriated the subject and made it his own. Probably his greatest service to scholarship is this analysis of the principles of orthography in Latin. Aldo remained at Venice, prosecuting studies in literature and superintending the Aldine press. But in these days of early manhood he was not satisfied with the career of scholarship and business. At one time he hankered after the more worldly honours of the law, at another he built a country house at Asola, perplexing his father, who had given him too easy independence, with the humours of his age. A marriage came to make these matters straight. The Giunta family had been steadily rising in the world as printers, in proportion as the Aldi declined through want of concentration upon commerce. In 1572 Aldo took for his wife Francesca Lucrezia, daughter of Bartolommeo Giunta, and great-grandchild of the first Giunta, who founded the famous printing house in Venice. This was an alliance which augured well for the future of the Aldines, especially as the young husband, in the midst of distractions, had recently found time to publish a new revised edition of Velleius Paterculus. Two years later the death of his father at Rome placed Aldo at the head of the firm. In concert with hia new relatives, the Giunta, he now edited an extensive collection of Italian letters, and in 1576 he appeared again before the public as a critic with his commentary upon the Ars Poetica of Horace. Printing, in this case, as in the case of his father, went hand in hand with original authorship. About the same time, that is to say, about the year 1576, he was appointed professor of literature to the Cancelleria at Venice. The Aldine press continued through this period to issue books, but none of signal merit ; and in 1585 Aldo determined to quit his native city for Bologna, where he occupied the chair of eloquence for a few months. In 1587 he left Bologna for Pisa, and there, in his quality of professor, he made the curious mistake of printing Alberti s comedy Philodoxiiis as a work of the classic Lepidus. Sixtus V. drew him in 1588 from Tuscany to Rome; and at Rome he hoped to make a permanent settlement as lecturer. But his public lessons were ill attended, and he soon fell back upon his old vocation of publisher under the patronage of a new pope, Clement VIII. In the tenth year of his residence at Rome, that is, in 1597, he died, leaving children, but none who cared or had capacity to carry on the Aldine press. Aldo himself, though a precocious student, a scholar of no mean ability, and a publisher of some distinction, was the least remarkable of the three men who gave books to the public under the old Aldine ensign. Times had changed in Italy since Aldo the elder conceived the great idea of reaping for the press the harvest of Greek literature. And his posterity had changed with the times for the worse. This does not of necessity mean that we should adopt Scaliger s critique of the younger Aldo without reservation. Scaliger called him &quot;a poverty- stricken talent, slow in operation; his work is very commonplace ; he aped his father.&quot; What is true in this remark lies partly in the fact that scholarship in Aldo s days had flown beyond ,the Alps, where a new growth of erudition, on a basis different from that of the Italian Renaissance, had begun. Renouard s Annales de VImprimcric des Aides, Paris, 1834, and Didot s Aide Manuce, Paris, 1873, contain all necessary informa tion regarding the lives of the Manutii and their publica tions. (J- A - S.) MANZONI, ALESSANDRO FRANCESCO TOMMASO ANTONIO (1785-1873), founder of the romantic school in Italian literature, was born at Milan, March 7, 1785. Don Pietro, his father, then about fifty, represented an old family settled near Lecco, but originally feudal lords of Barzio, in the Valsassina, where the memory of their violence is still perpetuated in a local proverb, comparing it to that of the mountain torrent. The poet s maternal grandfather, Cesare Beccaria, was a well-known author, and his mother Giulia a woman of some ^literary ability. Manzohi s intellect was slow in maturing, and at the various colleges where his school days were passed he ranked among the dunces. At fifteen, however, he developed a passion for poetry, and wrote two sonnets of considerable merit. On the death of his father in. 1805, he joined his mother at Auteuil, and spent two years there, mixing in the literary set of the so-called &quot;idealogues,&quot; philosophers of the 1 8th century school, among whom he made many friends, notably Claude Fauriel. There too he imbibed the negative creed of Voltairianism, and only after