His rank, unweeded eloquence, abounding in a play of words, rabbinic
allegories, verses defiant of prosody, in the kind of erudition he
professed to despise, with a shameless image here or there, product
not of formal method, but of Neapolitan improvisation, was akin to
[243] the heady wine, the sweet, coarse odours, of that fiery,
volcanic soil, fertile in the irregularities which manifest power.
Helping himself indifferently to all religions for rhetoric
illustration, his preference was still for that of the soil, the old
pagan one, the primitive Italian gods, whose names and legends haunt
his speech, as they do the carved and pictorial work of the age,
according to the fashion of that ornamental paganism which the
Renaissance indulged. To excite, to surprise, to move men's minds,
as the volcanic earth is moved, as if in travail, and, according to
the Socratic fancy, bring them to the birth, was the true function of
the teacher, however unusual it might seem in an ancient university.
Fantastic, from first to last that was the descriptive epithet; and
the very word, carrying us to Shakespeare, reminds one how
characteristic of the age such habit was, and that it was pre-
eminently due to Italy. A bookman, yet with so vivid a hold on
people and things, the traits and tricks of the audience seemed to
revive in him, to strike from his memory all the graphic resources of
his old readings.
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