After the expulsion of the Medici, John
Lascaris went to reside in Paris, where he gave lectures on poetry, and
employed himself in securing Greek lecturers for a new College; and he
was also engaged to help Budaeus, who had been his pupil, in arranging the
books at Fontainebleau.
Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary, had the largest library in Europe. It
was credited with containing the impossible number of 50,000 volumes; its
destruction during the Turkish wars is allowed to have been one of the
chief misfortunes of literature. Matthias began his long reign of
forty-two years in 1458, and during all that time he was adding to his
collections at Buda. Some have derided Corvinus as a mere gormandiser
with an appetite for all kinds of books. Some have blamed him for risking
such inestimable treasures upon a dangerous frontier. It is admitted that
he worked hard to dispel the thick darkness that surrounded the Hungarian
people. He kept thirty scribes continually employed at Buda, besides four
permitted to work at Florence by the courtesy of Lorenzo de' Medici. The
whole library may be regarded as in some sense a Florentine colony.
Fontius, the king's chief agent in the Levant, had been a well-known
author in Florence: his Commentary upon Persius, once presented to
Corvinus himself, is now in the library at Wolfenbuettel. Attavante, the
pupil of Fra Angelico, was employed to illuminate the MSS. A good
specimen of his work is the Breviary of St.
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