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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.
But the cream and glory of the ancient writers I had yet to taste.

My first acquaintance with the poets came from the translation of Virgil upon which Messer Caro was at the time engaged.

He had definitely taken up his residence in Piacenza, whither it was said that Farnese, his master, who was to be made our Duke, would shortly come.