" His education passed later into the hands of a priest,
who had spent much time as a teacher in Vienna, and was impetuous,
choleric, and thoroughly German in principle. "I was given him to be
taught," says Giusti, "but he undertook to tame me"; and he remembered
reading with him a Plutarch for youth, and the "Lives of the Saints",
but chiefly was, as he says, so "caned, contraried, and martyred" by
him, that, when the priest wept at their final parting, the boy could
by no means account for the burst of tenderness. Giusti was then going
to Florence to be placed in a school where he had the immeasurable
good fortune to fall into the hands of one whose gentleness and wisdom
he remembered through life. "Drea Francioni," he says, "had not time
to finish his work, but he was the first and the only one to put into
my heart the need and love of study. Oh, better far than stuffing the
head with Latin, with histories and with fables! Endear study, even if
you teach nothing; this is the great task!" And he afterward dedicated
his book on Tuscan proverbs, which he thought one of his best
performances, to this beloved teacher.
He had learned to love study, yet from this school, and from others
to which he was afterward sent, he came away with little Latin and no
Greek; but, what is more important, he began life about this time as a
poet--by stealing a sonnet.
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