He must quiet the disagreeable wranglings of the German humanists.
Thus while among his own colleagues he seemed merely a hypocritical and arrogant priest, in his relations with his brother humanists, such as Cosimo de Medici, he appeared as the student of classical antiquities and especially of Greek theological authors.
To dwell upon such literary infamies would be below the dignity of the historian, were it not that these habits of the early Italian humanists imposed a fashion upon Europe which extended to the later age of Scaliger's contentions with Scioppius and Milton's with Salmasius.
He was a man of exemplary life and a friend of Erasmus and the humanists, besides being a persona grata at the court of Louise of Savoy and Francis I.
The movement of reform started, of necessity, with scholars rather than practising physicians - more precisely with a group of learned men, whom we may be permitted, for the sake of a name, to call the medical humanists, equally enthusiastic in the cause of letters and of medicine.
