I have already dwelt at some length in a former volume on the most celebrated section of this treatise--the _Padre di Famiglia_ or the _Economico_.[229] To repeat those observations here would be superfluous. Yet I cannot avoid a digression upon a matter of much obscurity relating to the authorship of that book.[230] Until recently, this discourse upon the economy of a Florentine household passed under the name of Agnolo Pandolfini, and was published separately as his undoubted work. The interlocutors in the dialogue, which bore the title of _Governo della Famiglia_, are various members of the Pandolfini family, and all allusions to the Alberti and their exile are wanting. The style of the _Governo_ differs in many important respects from that of Alberti; and yet the arrangement of the material and the substance of each paragraph are so closely similar in both forms of the treatise as to prove that the work is substantially identical. Pandolfini's essay, which I shall call _Il Governo_, passes for one of the choicest monuments of ancient Tuscan diction. Alberti's _Economico_, though it is more idiomatic than the rest of his _Famiglia_, betrays the Latinisms of a scholar. It is clear from a comparison of the two treatises either that Alberti appropriated Pandolfini's _Governo_, brought its style into harmony with his own, and gave it a place between the second and the fourth books of his essay on the Family; or else that this third book of Alberti's _Famiglia_ was rewritten by an author who commanded a purer Italian. In the former case, Alberti changed the _dramatis personæ_ by substituting members of his own house for the Pandolfini. In the latter case, the anonymous compiler paid a similar compliment to the Pandolfini by such alterations as obliterated the Alberti, and presented the treatise to the world as part of their own history. That Agnolo Pandolfini was himself guilty of this plagiarism is rendered improbable by a variety of circumstances. Yet the problem does not resolve itself into the simple question whether Pandolfini or Alberti was the plagiary. Supposing Alberti to have been the original author, there is no difficulty in believing that the _Governo_ was a redaction made from his work by some anonymous hand in honor of the Pandolfini family. On the contrary, if we assume Agnolo Pandolfini to have been the author, then Alberti himself was guilty of a gross and open plagiarism.[231]