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General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1875 Original Publisher: Longmans, Green, and Co. Subjects: Genoa (Italy) History / Europe / Italy Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER II. JACOPO BONFADIO. To possess genius -- to have cultivated your talents to a degree which places you above the level of a prejudiced and half-educated community -- to be incorruptible in a corrupt society -- to have acquired, in virtue of your office, secrets which make you dreaded by the guilty -- these are crimes which society, in a low state of morality, never has forgiven, never will forgive. They are, in fact, crimes which in every age have driven the perpetrator of them to exile, to proscription, and to death ! The truth of this statement has been illustrated by many noble examples, but of these there is not one more striking than that of Jacopo Bonfadio. One of the most brilliant writers of the sixteenth century, a philosopher, a poet, and a historian, occupying one of the most important posts in the republic of Genoa, it was the fate of Bonfadio to be sentenced to be burnt alive for an offence which he had not committed, simply because, in his Annals of the Genoese, he had given certain indication of thepossession of knowledge, which some influential families considered compromised themselves. This was the sole crime of Jacopo. He was a self-made man ; he had raised himself by his own abilities to the position he1 occupied; he was the intellectual life of Genoa; he possessed the confidence and affection of the learned; yet from this great position he was hurried to death by the machinations of the half-educated, corrupt, and demoralised amongst the influential families of the ' proud ci...