Note 37 — Chapter VI

Our author has given ample opportunities to Mr. Tenhove, a Dutch writer on nearly the same subject with his own, to display a disparity of manner singularly contrasting with his own sober and authentic page. Mr. T. is apparently a wit and a man of feeling, but at all times ready to sacrifice matter to whim, or to substitute assertion for proof: thus, in talking of the celebrated cameo representing the punishment of Marsyas, once the property of Lorenzo, he tells us, that of old it belonged to Nero, who used it as the seal of his death-warrants, and who probably assumed the attitude of the Apollo engraved on it, whilst he assisted at the flogging of one Menedemus, a singer who had excited his jealousy; a tale partly invented, partly perverted from Suetonius, who tells something similar of Caligula and Apelles. In another place, (p. 178, note b.) after ridiculing with somewhat prolix propriety the Florentine custom of substituting, even in grave writing, the nicknames of their countrymen to their real ones, he adds, that it is a custom laughed at and disapproved by the rest of Italian writers, though undoubtedly he had read of Cola di Rienzi, Massaniello, Titta Borghese, Giorgione, Il Tintoretto, Frà Bastiano, and Titian himself. " Pauperis esset numerare pecus."