XXX INTRODUCTION

moreover the incident occurred in the presence of Montanus,'
our poet's professional rival, who was then with Cardinal de!
Medici at Naples. The austere8caliger, in & preface to four pages
of criticisms of the style of the poem, says in Poefice, Book
6: *^Now I come to Fracastorius. I usually find in him no
faults, and must admire rather than criticise. . . . His Syphilis
is a divine poem, but he sometimes falls below his own great—
ness^. But his earlier verdict had been that Fracastorius was
the best poet since Virgil; and when, after his death, the Council
of Verona voted him a marble statue, their decree stated that
in poetry he had surpassed all his contemporaries; Tesfafur
divinum iWud Syphihdis poema. Many similar eulogies have
been collected by Mencke, and they may be regarded as for the
most part conventional flatteries, for the humanists of the
Renaissance were not such poor critics as to think that Lucre—
tius was no longer the only poet who ever wrote genuine poetry
on a scientific theme; and it was absurd to call a sedulous
imitator of Virgil the equal of Virgil. But the poem was splen—
didly advertised. Every educated reader could then read
Latin, and must have desired to read a famous physician's
description, at once scientific and literary, and diversified with
charming myths, of the causes, symptoms and treatment of
the terrible, new malady. It was not the first, nor was it to
be the last, poem on syphilis? but it was the longest, the most
serious, the most eloquent and the best advertised. A. modern
reader can only say of it, that it is & readable and spirited poem,
surprisingly Virgilian in manner, which here and there rises
into real pathos, and that, when its author keeps his eye more

: Montanus maintained the American origin of the disease, denied
by Fracastorius; he disapproved of the mercury cure, and preferred
guaiac. In his Consilia, 1559, he describes his treatment of several
well—known persons, among them Pico della Mirandola, for the
morbus Gallicus.

:'The Vaticintum in Epidemicam Scabiem of T. Ulsenius of
Nürnberg, 1496, in 100 hexameters, is mythologica!l and astrolog—
ieal, and refers to the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 1484,
as the main cause of the epidemic.  The Spanish poem of Francisco
Lopez, El sumario de la medicina, con un tratado sobre las pestiferas
bubas, Salamanca, 1498, (a copy in the British Museum), is one of
the earliest descriptions of syphilis. 'The erotic poets of the 16th—
18th centt. welcome the theme, e. g. Droyn, Lyons, 1512, and le
Maire, Paris, 1525; others are mentioned by 'Haeser, Geschich£e
der Medicin, Jena, 1882, 3rd ed., Vol. III. pp. 248 foll.