Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/172

 162 F I L F I L violent animosity ; and when Cosimo was exiled by the Albizzi party in 1433, he urged the signoria of Florence to pronounce upon him the sentence of death. On the return of Cosimo to Florence, Filelfo s position in that city was no longer tenable. His life, he asserted, had been already once attempted by a cut-throat in the pay of the Medici ; and now he readily accepted an invitation from the state of Siena. In Siena, however, he was not destined to remain more than four years. His fame as a professor had grown great in Italy, and he daily received tempting offers from princes and republics. The most alluring of these, made him by the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, he decided on accepting; and in 1440 he was received with honour by his new master in the capital of Lombardy. Filelfo s life at Milan curiously illustrates the multifarious importance of the scholars of that age in Italy. It was his duty to celebrate his princely patrons in panegyrics and epics, to abuse their enemies in libels and invectives, to salute them with encomiastic odes on their birthdays, and to com pose poems on their favourite themes. For their courtiers he wrote epithalamial and funeral orations ; ambassadors and visitors from foreign states he greeted with the rhetorical lucubrations then so much in vogue. The students of the university he taught in daily lectures, passing in review the weightiest and lightest authors of antiquity, and pouring forth a flood of miscellaneous erudition. Not satisfied with these outlets for his mental energy, Filelfo went on translating from the Greek, and prosecuted a paper warfare with his enemies in Florence. He wrote, moreover, politi cal pamphlets on the great events of Italian history ; and when Constantinople was taken by the Turks, he procured the liberation of his wife s mother by a message addressed in hi own name to the sultan. In addition to a fixed stipend of some 700 golden florins yearly, he was continu ally in receipt of special payments for the orations and. poems he produced ; so that, had he been a man of frugal habits or of moderate economy, he might have amassed a considerable fortune. As it was, he spent his money as fast as he received it, living in a style of splendour ill befitting a simple scholar, and indulging his taste for pleasure in more than questionable amusements. In con sequence of this prodigality, he was always poor. His letters and his poems abound in impudent demands for money from patrons, some of them couched in language of the lowest adulation, and others savouring of literary brigandage. During the second year of his Milanese residence Filelfo lost bis first wife, Theodora. He soon married again ; and this time he chose for his bride a young lady of good Lombard family, called Orsina Osnaga. When she died, he took in wedlock for the third time a woman of Lombard birth, Laura Magiolini. To all his three wives, in spite of numerous infidelities, he seems to have been warmly attached; and this is perhaps the best trait in a character otherwise more remarkable for arrogance and heat than for any amiable qualities. On the death of Filippo Maria Visconti, Filelfo, after a short hesitation, transferred his allegiance to Francesco Sforza, the new duke of Milan; and in order to curry favour with this parvenu, he began his ponderous epic, the Sforziad, of which 12,800 lines were written, but which was never published. When Francesco Sforza died, Filelfo turned his thoughts towards Rome. He was now an old man of seventy-seven years, honoured with the friendship of princes, recognized as the most distinguished of Italian humanists, courted by pontiffs, and decorated with the laurel wreath and the order of knighthood by kings. Crossing the Apennines and passing through Florence, he reached Rome in the second week of 1475. The terrible Sixtus IV. now ruled in the Vatican ; and from this pope Filelfo had received an invitation to occupy the chair of rhetoric with good emoluments. At first he was vastly pleased with the city and court of Rome ; but his satisfaction ere long turned to discontent, and he gave vent to his ill humour in a venemous satire on the pope s treasurer, Milliardo Cicala. Sixtus himself soon fell under the ban of his displeasure ; and when a year had passed, he left Rome never to return. Filelfo reached Milan to find that his wife had died of the plague in his absence, and was already buried. His own death followed speedily. For some time past he had been desirous of displaying his abilities and adding to his fame in Florence. Years had healed the breach between him and the Medicean family ; and on the occasion of the Pazzi conspiracy against the life of Lorenzo de Medici, he had sent violent letters of abuse to his papal patron Sixtus, denouncing his participation in a plot so dangerous to the security of Italy. Lorenzo now invited him to profess Greek at Florence, and thither Filelfo journeyed in 1481. But two weeks after his arrival he succumbed to dysentery, and was buried at the age of eighty-three in the church of the Annunziata. Filelfo deserves commemoration among the greatest humanists of the Italian Renaissance, not for the beauty of his style, not for the elevation of his geuius, not for the accuracy of his learning, but for his energy, and for his complete adaptation to the times in which he lived. His erudition was large but ill-digested ; his knowledge of the ancient authors, if extensive, was superficial ; his style was vulgar ; he had no brilliancy of imagination, no pungency of epigram, no grandeur of rhetoric. Therefore he has left nothing to posterity which the world would not very willingly let die. But in his own days he did excellent service to learning by his untiring activity, and by the facility with which he used his stores of knowledge. It was an age of accumulation and preparation, when the world was still amassing and cataloguing the fragments rescued from the wrecks of Greece and Rome. Men had to receive the very rudiments of culture before they could appreciate its niceties. And in this work of collection and instruction Filelfo excelled, passing rapidly from place to place, stirring up the zeal for learning by the passion of his own enthusiastic temperament, and acting as a pioneer for men like Poliziano and Erasmus. All that is worth knowing about Filelfo is contained in Rosmini s admirable Vita di Filelfo, Milan, 1808 ; but the student may also consult Roscoe s Life of Lorenzo de Medici, Vespasiano s Vite di Uomini lllustri, and Burckhardt s Italian Renaissance, with profit. (J. A. s.) FILIBUSTER, a name first given to the buccansers, a band of piratical adventurers who maintained themselves chiefly in the Caribbean seas during the 17th century (see BUCCANEEK). The origin of the term has been explained in two ways, some deriving it from the English word fiyboat, French flibot, Spanish flibote, a name given to a small vessel not exceeding 100 tons, which, on account of its sailing qualities, was much used by pirates, while others make it synonymous with the Dutch iry butter, German freibeuter, English freebooter, the word changing first into fribtistier, and then into French JJibustier, Spanish filibustero. Flibustier has passed into the French language and filibustero into the Spanish language as a general name for a pirate, and the term filibuster was revived in America to designate those adventurers who, after the termination of the war between Mexico and the United States, organized expeditions within the United States against the Spanish West Indies. FILICAIA, VINCENZO DA (1642-1707), sprang from an ancient and noble family of Florence, was born in that city December 30, 1G42. From an incidental notice in one of his letters, stating the amount of house rent paid during