Page:Notes by the Way.djvu/35

Rh letters of the thirty-eight chapters into which the book is divided gave the following device: 'Poliam frater Franciscvs Colvmna peramavit.'

"A Dominican of the name of Francisco Colonna died in Venice in July, 1525, at the age of over eighty years. Little or nothing definite is known about him, though Renaissance Italian literature abounds in conjecture concerning him, much of it demonstrably inaccurate, and almost all of it void of authority. Rabelais mentions the author under the name Polyphile in the ninth chapter of the first book of 'Gargantua,' misnaming his book, which he calls songe d'amours, and coupling him with Orus Apollon [Horapollo], a Greek grammarian of the fourth century, the author of 'Hieroglyphica,' a work printed by Aldus in 1505 with the 'Vitæ et Fabellæ Æsopi.' Temanza, the biographer of Venetian architects, who flourished in the eighteenth century, devotes to him some space, and assigns him to the illustrious family of the Colonna. Crediting Columna, or Colonna, himself with the adventures of Poliphilus, he builds up a love romance and makes Polia a contraction of the name of Ippolita, niece of Teodoro Lelio, a bishop of Feltre. Against this supposition, founded upon a MS. note now no longer traceable in a copy of the work formerly existing in the library of the Dominican fathers delle Zatere, it may be urged that Polia herself declares her baptismal name to have been Lucretia: 'Et postomi il præstante nome della casta Romana che per il filio del superbo Tarquino se occise.' By the same ingenious fiction Polia is said to have been attacked by the plague which ravaged Treviso, to have vowed to take the veil in case she recovered, and, keeping her oath, to have driven her lover into the cloister. This ingenious and indefensible theory inspired Charles Nodier, who founded on it in the Bulletin des Amis des Arts his last nouvelle. A much more plausible interpretation is that favoured by M. Claudius Popelin, the latest and best translator of the work, that Polia is the name of an imaginary mistress, such as the great Italian poets, and, after them, the writers constituting the Pléiade, devised, transmitting the fashion to English successors of Tudor and Stuart times. Now the name Polia, which the author expressly assigns his mistress, is the Greek adjective πολία, indicating grey hair, and used to express antiquity. A lover of Polia is, then, a lover of antiquity. This view is not only ingenious, but also defensible. It is borne out by the whole tenor of the work, which has been supposed to be, among other things, a protest in favour of classical architecture against the aggression of Gothic, at that time overwhelmingly manifest

"Perfect copies, especially in Grolier bindings—Grolier appears to have greatly admired the work—are of high value. The finest existing copy must be that on vellum, and in a Grolier binding,