Joseph Scaliger, the supreme judge in his day of all that related to
books, said that of all these men of the Italian renaissance he only
envied three. One of course was Pico of Mirandula, a man of marvellous
powers, who rose as a mere youth to the highest place as a philosopher
and linguist. The next was Politian, equally renowned for hard
scholarship and for the sweetness and charm of his voluminous poems. The
third was the Greek refugee, Theodore of Gaza, so warmly praised by
Erasmus for his versatile talent; no man, it was said, was so skilled in
the double task of turning Greek books into Latin, and rendering Latin
into Greek.
We should feel inclined to bracket another name with those of the famous
trio. George of Trebisond was a faithful expounder of the classics, the
discoverer of many a lost treasure, and the author of a whole library of
criticism. His life and labours were denounced in the once celebrated
_Book of the Georges_. He was more than a lover of Aristotle, said his
enemies: he was the enemy of the divine Plato, an apostate among the
Greeks, who had even dared to oppose their patron Bessarion. The Cardinal
Bessarion was complimented as 'the most Latin of the Greeks'; he might
have ruled as Pope in Rome, some said, if it had not been for Perotti
refusing to disturb him in the library. But George of Trebisond was
vilified after Poggio's fashion, and called 'brute' and 'heretic,' and
'more Turkish than the filthiest Turk,' with a hailstorm of still harder
epithets.
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