Graceful speakers no longer find the recognition and reward which they once did.The Consistorial advocates no longer prepare anything but the introductions to their speeches, and deliver the rest--a confused muddle--on the inspiration of the moment.Sermons and occasional speeches have sunk to the same level.If a funeral oration is wanted for a cardinal or other great personage, the executors do not apply to the best orators in the city, to whom they would have to pay a hundred pieces of gold, but they hire for a trifle the first impudent pedant whom they come across, and who only wants to be talked of, whether for good or ill.The dead, they say, is none the wiser if an ape stands in a black dress in the pulpit, and beginning with a hoarse, whimpering mumble, passes little by little into a loud howling.Even the sermons preached at great Papal ceremonies are no longer profitable, as they used to be.Monks of all orders have again got them into their hands, and preach as if they were speaking to the mob.Only a few years ago a sermon at mass before the Pope might easily lead the way to a bishopric.'
The Treatise, and History in Latin From the oratory and the epistolary writings of the humanists, we shall here pass on to their other creations, which were all, to a greater or less extent, reproductions of antiquity.
Among these must be placed the treatise, which often took the shape of a dialogue.In this case it was borrowed directly from Cicero.In order to do anything like justice to this class of literature--in order not to throw it aside at first sight as a bore two things must be taken into consideration.The century which escaped from the influence of the Middle Ages felt the need of something to mediate between itself and antiquity in many questions of morals and philosophy; and this need was met by the writer of treatises and dialogues.Much which appears to us as mere commonplace in their writings, was for them and their contemporaries a new and hard-won view of things upon which mankind had been silent since the days of antiquity.The language too, in this form of writing, whether Italian or Latin, moved more freely and flexibly than in historical narrative, in letters, or in oratory, and thus became in itself the source of a special pleasure.Several Italian compositions of this kind still hold their place as patterns of style.