On peut attirer les c?urs par les qualites qu'on montre, mais on ne les fixe que par celles qu'on a=--People's affections may be attracted by the qualities which we affect, but they can only be won by those which we really possess.
The only qualities for real success in journalism are ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability. The capacity to steal other people's ideas and phrases ... is also invaluable. -- Nicolas Tomalin, "Stop the Press, I Want to Get On"
First of all there was formed a human individuality, which was wanting in the middle ages. As J. Burckhardt has said, the man was changed into the individual. He began to feel and assert his own personality, which was constantly attaining a fuller realization. As a consequence of this, the idea of fame and the desire for it arose. A really cultured class was formed, in the modern meaning of the word, and the conception was arrived at (completely unknown in former times) that the worth of a man did not depend at all on his birth but on his personal qualities. Poggio in his dialogue _De nobilitate_ declares that he entirely agreed with his interlocutors Niccolò Niccoli and Lorenzo de' Medici in the opinion that there is no other nobility but that of personal merit. External life was growing more refined in all particulars; the man of society was created; rules for civilized life were made; there was an increasing desire for sumptuous and artistic entertainments. The medieval idea of existence was turned upside down; men who had hitherto turned their thoughts exclusively to heavenly things, and believed exclusively in the divine right, now began to think of beautifying their earthly existence, of making it happy and gay, and returned to a belief in their human rights. This was a great advance, but one which carried with it the seeds of many dangers. The conception of morality became gradually weaker. The "fay ce que vouldras" of Rabelais became the first principle of life. Religious feeling was blunted, was weakened, was changed, became pagan again. Finally the Italian of the Renaissance, in his qualities and his passions, became the most remarkable representative of the heights and depths, of the virtues and faults, of humanity. Corruption was associated with all that is most ideal in life; a profound scepticism took hold of people's minds; indifference to good and evil reached its highest point. Entry: 3
Baldwin III. was the first of the kings of Jerusalem who was a native of the soil of Palestine. His three predecessors had all been emigrants from the West. His reign also marks a new departure from another point of view. His predecessors had been men of a type half military, half clerical--at once hard fighters and sound churchmen. Baldwin was a man of a subtler type--a man capable of dealing with the intrigues of a court and with problems of law, and, as such, suited for guiding the middle age of the kingdom, which the different qualities of his predecessors had been equally suited to found. Like his brother, Amalric I., he was a clerkly and studious king versed [v.03 p.0247] in law, and ready to discuss points of dogma. In an excellent sketch of Baldwin's character (xvi. cii.), William of Tyre tells us that he spent his spare time in reading and had a particular affection for history; that he was well skilled in the _jus consuetudinarium_ of the kingdom (afterwards recorded by lawyers like John of Ibelin and Philip of Novara as "the assizes of Jerusalem"); and that he had the royal faculty for remembering faces, and could generally be trusted to address by name anybody whom he had once met, so that he was more popular with high and low than any of his predecessors. He had, William also reports, a gift of impromptu eloquence, and a faculty both for saying witty things pleasantly at other people's expense and for listening placidly to witticisms directed against himself; while he was generous to excess without needing to make exactions in order to support his generosity, and always respected the Church. If in his youth he had been prone to gambling, and before his marriage with Theodora had been somewhat lax in his morals, when he became a man he put away childish things; his married life was a shining example to his people and he was abstemious both in food and drink, holding that "excess in either was an incentive to the worst of crimes." Even his enemy, Nureddin, said of him, when he died--"the Franks have lost such a prince that the world has not now his like." Entry: BALDWIN