CHAPTER II
HUMANITIES
As the days passed and swelled into weeks, and these, in their turn,
accumulated into months, I grew rapidly learned in worldly matters at
Doctor Fifanti's house.
The curriculum I now pursued was so vastly different from that which my
mother had bidden Fra Gervasio to set me, and my acquaintance with the
profane writers advanced so swiftly once it was engaged upon, that I
acquired knowledge as a weed grows.
Fifanti flung into strange passions when he discovered the extent of my
ignorance and the amazing circumstance that whilst Fra Gervasio had made of
me a fluent Latin scholar, he had kept me in utter ignorance of the classic
writers, and almost in as great an ignorance of history itself. This the
pedant set himself at once to redress, and amongst the earliest works he
gave me as preparation were Latin translations of Thucydides and Herodotus
which I devoured--especially the glowing pages of the latter--at a speed
that alarmed my tutor.
But mere studiousness was not my spur, as he imagined. I was enthralled by
the novelty of the matters that I read, so different from all those with
which I had been allowed to become acquainted hitherto.
There followed Tacitus, and after him Cicero and Livy, which latter two I
found less arresting; then came Lucretius, and his De Rerum Naturae proved
a succulent dish to my inquisitive appetite.
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