A very characteristic incident belongs to this last act of his life.  Dissolute, treacherous, and inhuman as he was, the tyrant of Rimini had always encouraged literature, and delighted in the society of artists.  He who could brook no contradiction from a prince or soldier, allowed the pedantic scholars of the sixteenth century to dictate to him in matters of taste, and sat with exemplary humility at the feet of Latinists like Porcellio, Basinio, and Trebanio.  Valturio, the engineer, and Alberti, the architect, were his familiar friends; and the best hours of his life were spent in conversation with these men.  Now that he found himself upon the sacred soil of Greece, he was determined not to return to Italy empty-handed.  Should he bring manuscripts or marbles, precious vases or inscriptions in half-legible Greek character?  These relics were greedily sought for by the potentates of Italian cities; and no doubt Sigismondo enriched his library with some such treasures.  But he obtained a nobler prize—­nothing less than the body of a saint of scholarship, the authentic bones of the great Platonist, Gemisthus Pletho.[3] These he exhumed from their Greek grave and caused them to be deposited in a stone sarcophagus outside the cathedral of his building in Rimini.  The Venetians, when they stole the body of S. Mark from Alexandria, were scarcely more pleased than was Sigismondo with the acquisition of this Father of the Neopagan faith.  Upon the tomb we still may read this legend:  ’Jemisthii Bizantii philosopher sua temp principis reliquum Sig.  Pan.  Mal.  Pan.  F. belli Pelop adversus Turcor regem Imp ob ingentem eruditorum quo flagrat amorem huc afferendum introque mittendum curavit MCCCCLXVI.’  Of the Latinity of the inscription much cannot be said; but it means that ’Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, having served as general against the Turks in the Morea, induced by the great love with which he burns for all learned men, brought and placed here the remains of Gemisthus of Byzantium, the prince of the philosophers of his day.’

Sigismondo’s portrait, engraved on medals, and sculptured upon every frieze and point of vantage in the Cathedral of Rimini, well denotes the man.  His face is seen in profile.  The head, which is low and flat above the forehead, rising swiftly backward from the crown, carries a thick bushy shock of hair curling at the ends, such as the Italians call a zazzera.  The eye is deeply sunk, with long venomous flat eyelids, like those which Leonardo gives to his most wicked faces.  The nose is long and crooked, curved like a vulture’s over a petulant mouth, with lips deliberately pressed together, as though it were necessary to control some nervous twitching.  The cheek is broad, and its bone is strongly marked.  Looking at these features in repose, we cannot but picture to our fancy what expression they might assume under a sudden fit of fury, when the sinews of the face were contracted with quivering spasms, and the lips writhed in sympathy with knit forehead and wrinkled eyelids.