Mr. Editor,--Among the well-wishers to your projected periodical,
as a medium of literary communication, no one would be more ready
to contribute to it than myself, did the leisure I enjoy permit me
often to do so. I have been a maker of _Notes and Queries_ for above
twenty-five years, and perhaps should feel more inclined to trouble
you with the latter than the former, in the hope of clearing up some
of the many obscure points in your history, biography, and poetical
literature, which have occurred to me in the course of my reading. At
present, as a very inadequate specimen of what I once designed to call
_Leisure Moments_, I beg to copy the following Note from one of my
scrap-books:--
In the year 1420, the Florentines sent an embassy to the state of
Venice, to solicit them to unite in a league against the ambitious
progress of Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan; and the historian
Daru, in his _Histoire de Venise_, 8vo., Paris, 1821, has fallen into
more than one error in his account of the transaction. Marino Sanuto,
who wrote the lives of the Doges of Venice in 1493 (Daru says,
erroneously, some fifty years afterwards), has preserved the Orations
made by the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, in opposition to the Florentine
proposals; which he copied, according to his statement, from a
manuscript that belonged to the Doge himself. Daru states, that the
MS. was communicated to him by the Doge; but that could not be, since
the Doge died in 1423, and Sanuto was not born till 1466. An abridged
translation of these Orations is given in the _Histoire de Venise_,
tom. ii, pp. 289-311.; and in the first of these, pronounced in
January, 1420 (1421, Daru), he is made to say, in reference to an
ambassador sent by the Florentines to the Duke of Milan, in 1414, as
follows: "L'ambassadeur fut _un Juif_, nommé Valori, banquier de sa
profession,", p. 291. As a commentary on this passage, Daru subjoins
a note from the Abbé Laugier, who, in his _Histoire de Venise_, liv.
21., remarks, 1. That it appears strange the Florentines should
have {36} chose a _Jew_ as an ambassador; 2. That his surname was
Bartolomeo, which could not have been borne by a Jew; 3. That the
Florentine historian Poggio speaks of Valori as having been one of the
principal members of the Council of Florence. The Abbé thence justly
concludes, that the ambassador could not have been a Jew; and it is
extraordinary that Daru, after such a conclusive argument, should have
admitted the term _Jew_ into his text. But the truth is, that this
writer (like many others of great reputation) preferred blindly
following the text of Sanuto, as printed by Muratori[2], to the
trouble of consulting any early manuscripts. It happens, however, that
in a manuscript copy of these Orations of Mocenigo, written certainly
earlier than the period of Sanuto, and preserved in the British
Museum, MS. _Add._ 12, 121., the true reading of the passage may be
found thus:--"Fo mandato Bartolomio Valori, _homo richo_, el qual
viveva de cambij." By later transcribers the epithet _richo_, so
properly here bestowed on the Florentine noble, was changed into
_iudio_ (_giudeo_), and having been transferred in that shape into
Sanuto, has formed the groundwork of a serious error, which has now
existed for more than three centuries and a half.