Many died of unspoken grief from the
insults they received and the prizes of which they were defrauded. We
are told how a Venetian died because of the death of his son, a
youthful prodigy; and how mother and brothers followed, as if the lost
child drew them all after him. Many, especially Florentines, ended
their lives by suicide; others through the secret justice of a tyrant.
Who, after all, is happy?--and by what means? By blunting all feeling
for such misery? One of the speakers in the dialogue in which Pierio
clothed his argument, can give an answer to these questions-- the
illustrious Gasparo Contarini, at the mention of whose name we turn
with the expectation to hear at least something of the truest and
deepest which was then thought on such matters. As a type of the happy
scholar, he mentions Fra Urbano Valeriano of Belluno, who was for years
a teacher of Greek at Venice, who visited Greece and the East, and
towards the close of his life travelled, now through this country, now
through that, without ever mounting a horse; who never had a penny of
his own, rejected all honours and distinctions, and after a gay old
age, died in his eighty-fourth year, without, if we except a fall from
a ladder, having ever known an hour of sickness. And what was the
difference between such a man and the humanists? The latter had more
free will, more subjectivity, than they could turn to purposes of
happiness.
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