[675] Biogr. Univ.

Lexicon of Ferrari. 33. The Lexicon Geographicum of Ferrari, in 1627, was the chief general work on geography; it is alphabetical, and contains 9,600 articles. The errors have been corrected in later editions, so that the first would probably be required in order to estimate the knowledge of its author’s age.[676]

[676] Salfi, xi., 418. Biogr. Universelle.

Maps of Blaew. 34. The best measure, perhaps, of geographical science, are the maps published from time to time, as perfectly for the most part, we may presume, as their editors could render them. If we compare the map of the world in the “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum sive Novus Atlas” of Blaew, in 1648, with that of the edition of Ortelius, published at Antwerp in 1612, the improvements will not appear exceedingly great. America is still separated from Asia by the straights of Anian about lat. 60; but the coast to the south is made to trend away more than before; on the N.E. coast we find Davis’s Sea, and Estotiland has vanished to give way to Greenland. Canada is still most inaccurate, though there is a general idea of lakes and rivers better than in Ortelius. Scandinavia is far better, and tolerably correct. In the South, Terra del Fuego terminates in Cape Horn, instead of being united to Terra Australis; but in the East, Corea appears as an oblong island; the Sea of Aral is now set down, and the wall of China is placed north of the fiftieth parallel. India is very much too small, and the shape of the Caspian Sea is wholly inaccurate. But a comparison with the map in Hakluyt, mentioned in our second volume, will not exhibit so much superiority of Blaew’s Atlas. The latter, however, shows more knowledge of the interior country, especially in North America, and a better outline in many parts, of the Asiatic coast. The maps of particular regions in Europe are on a large scale, and numerous. Speed’s maps 1646, appear by no means inferior to those of Blaew; but several of the errors are the same. Considering the progress of commerce, especially that of the Dutch, during this half century, we may rather be surprised at the defective state of these maps.

Bodleian library founded. 38. The English universities are in one point of view very different from those of the rest of Europe. Their great endowments created a resident class, neither teachers nor students, who might devote an unbroken leisure to learning with the advantage of that command of books which no other course of life could have afforded: It is true that in no age has the number of these been great; but the diligence of a few is enough to cast a veil over the laziness of many. The century began with an extraordinary piece of fortune to the university of Oxford, which formed in the seventeenth century, whatever it may since have been, one great cause of her literary distinction. Sir Thomas Bodley, with a munificence which has rendered his name more immortal than the foundation of a family could have done, bestowed on the university a library collected by him at great cost, building a magnificent room for its reception, and bequeathed large funds for its increase. The building was completed in 1606; and Casaubon has, very shortly afterwards, given such an account of the university itself, as well as of the Bodleian library, as will perhaps be interesting to the reader, though it contains some of those mistakes into which a stranger is apt to fall.

Casaubon’s account of Oxford. 39. “I wrote you word,” he says, in July 1613, to one of his correspondents, “a month since, that I was going to Oxford, in order to visit that university and its library, of which I had heard much. Everything proved beyond my expectation. The colleges are numerous; most of them very rich. The revenues of these colleges maintain above two thousand students, generally of respectable parentage, and some even of the first nobility; for what we call the habits of pedagogues (pædagogica vitæ ratio) is not found in these English colleges. Learning is here cultivated in a liberal style; the heads of houses live handsomely, even splendidly, like men of rank. Some of them can spend ten thousand livres [about 1,000l. at that time, if I mistake not] by the year. I much approved the mode in which pecuniary concerns are kept distinct from the business of learning.[677] Many still are found, who emulate the liberality of their predecessors. Hence, new buddings rise every day; even some new colleges are raised from the foundation; some are enlarged, such as that of Merton, over which Savile presides, and several more. There is one begun by Cardinal Wolsey, which if it should be completed, will be worthy of the greatest admiration. But he left at his death many buildings which he had begun in an unfinished state, and which no one expects to see complete. None of the colleges, however, attracted me so much as the Bodleian library, a work rather for a king than a private man. It is certain that Bodley, living or dead, must have expended 200,000 livres on that building. The ground plot is the figure of the letter T. The part which represents the perpendicular stem was formerly built by some prince, and is very handsome; the rest was added by Bodley with no less magnificence. In the lower part is a divinity school, to which perhaps nothing in Europe is comparable. It is vaulted with peculiar skill. The upper story is the library itself, very well built, and fitted with an immense quantity of books. Do not imagine that such plenty of manuscripts can be found here, as in the royal library (of Paris); there are not a few manuscripts in England, but nothing to what the king possesses. But the number of printed books is wonderful, and increasing every year; for Bodley has bequeathed a considerable revenue for that purpose. As long as I remained at Oxford, I passed whole days in the library; for books cannot be taken out, but the library is open to all scholars for seven or eight hours every day. You might always see therefore many of these greedily enjoying the banquet prepared for them, which gave me no small pleasure.”[678]

[677] Res studiosorum et rationes separatæ sunt, quod valde probavi. I have given the translation which seemed best; but I may be mistaken.

[678] Casaub. Epist., 899.

40. The Earl of Pembroke, Selden, and above all, archbishop Laud, greatly improved the Bodleian library. It became, especially through the munificence of that prelate, extremely rich in Oriental manuscripts. The Duke of Buckingham presented a collection made by Erpenius to the public library at Cambridge, which, though far behind that of the sister university, was enriched by many donations and became very considerable. Usher formed the library of Trinity College, Dublin; an university founded on the English model, with noble revenues, and a corporate body of fellows and scholars to enjoy them.

Catalogue of Bodleian library. 41. A catalogue of the Bodleian library was published by James in 1620. It contains about 20,000 articles. Of these no great number are in English, and such as there are chiefly since the year 1600; Bodley, perhaps, had been rather negligent of poetry and plays. The editor observes that there were in the library three or four thousand volumes in modern languages. This catalogue is not classed, but alphabetical; which James mentions as something new, remarking at the same time the difficulty of classification, and that in the German catalogues we find grammars entered under the head of philosophy. One published by Draud, Bibliotheca Classica, sive Catalogus Officinalis, Frankfort, 1625, is hardly worth mention. It professes to be a general list of printed books; but as the number seems to be not more than 30,000, all in Latin, it must be very defective. About two fifths of the whole are theological. A catalogue of the library of Sion College, founded in 1631, was printed in 1650; it contains eight or nine thousand volumes.[679]

[679] In Museo Britannico.

Continental libraries. 42. The library of Leyden had been founded by the first prince of Orange. Scaliger bequeathed his own to it; and it obtained the oriental manuscripts of Golius. A catalogue had been printed by Peter Bertius as early as 1597.[680] Many public and private libraries either now began to be formed in France, or received great accessions; among the latter, those of the historian De Thou, and the president Seguier.[681] No German library, after that of Vienna, had been so considerable as one formed in the course of several ages by the electors Palatine at Heidelberg. It contained many rare manuscripts. On the capture of the city by Tilly, in 1622, he sent a number of these to Rome, and they long continued to sleep in the recesses of the Vatican. Napoleon, emulous of such a precedent, obtained thirty-eight of the Heidelberg manuscripts by the treaty of Tolentino, which were transmitted to Paris. On the restitution of these in 1815, it was justly thought that prescription was not to be pleaded by Rome for the rest of the plunder, especially when she was recovering what she had lost by the same right of spoliation; and the whole collection has been replaced in the library of Heidelberg.

[680] Jugler, Hist. Litteraria, c. 3.

[681] Id. ibid.

Italian academies. 43. The Italian academies have been often represented as partaking in the alleged decline of literary spirit during the first part of the seventeenth century. Nor is this reproach a new one. Boccalini, after the commencement of this period, tells us that these institutions, once so famous, had fallen into decay, their ardent zeal in literary exercises and discussions having abated by time, so that while they had once been frequented by private men, and esteemed by princes, they were now abandoned and despised by all. They petition Apollo, therefore, in a chapter of his Ragguagli di Parnasso, for a reform. But the god replies that all things have their old age and decay, and as nothing can prevent the neatest pair of slippers from wearing out so nothing can rescue academies from a similar lot; hence, he can only advise them to suppress the worst, and to supply their places by others.[682] If only such a counsel were required, the institution of academies in general would not perish. And, in fact, we really find that while some societies of this class came to nothing, as is always the case with self-constituted bodies, the seventeenth century had births of its own to boast, not inferior to the older progeny of the last age. The Academy of Humourists at Rome was one of these. It arose casually at the marriage of a young nobleman of the Mancini family, and took the same line as many had done, reciting verses and discourses, or occasionally representing plays. The tragedy of Demetrius, by Rocco, one of this academy, is reckoned among the best of the age. The Apatisti of Florence took their name from Fioretti, who had assumed the appellation of Udeno Nisielo, Academico Apatista. The Rozzi of Siena, whom the government had suppressed in 1568, revived again in 1605, and rivalled another society of the same city, the Intronati. The former especially dedicated their time to pastoral, in the rustic dialect (comedia rusticale), a species of dramatic writing that might amuse at the moment, and was designed for no other end, though several of these farces are extant. [683]

[682] Ragg., xviii., c. 1.

[683] Salfi, vol. xii.

The Lincei. 44. The Academy della Crusca, which had more solid objects for the advantages of letters in view, has been mentioned in another place. But that of the Lincei, founded by Frederic Cesi, stands upon a higher ground than any of the rest. This young man was born at Rome in 1585, son of the duke of Acqua Sparta, a father and a family known only for their pride and ignorance. But nature had created in Cesi a philosophic mind; in conjunction with a few of similar dispositions, he gave his entire regard to science, and projected himself, at the age of eighteen, an academy, that is, a private association of friends for intellectual pursuits, which, with reference to their desire of piercing with acute discernment into the depths of truth, he denominated the Lynxes. Their device was that animal, with its eyes turned towards heaven, and tearing a Cerberus with its claws; thus intimating that they were prepared for war against error and falsehood. The church, always suspicious, and inclined to make common cause with all established tenets, gave them some trouble, though neither theology nor politics entered into their scheme. This embraced, as in their academies, poetry and elegant literature; but physical science was their peculiar object. Porto, Galileo, Colonna, and many other distinguished men, both of Italy and the Transalpine countries, were enrolled among the Lynxes; and Cesi is said to have framed rather a visionary plan of a general combination of philosophers, in the manner of the Pythagoreans, which should extend itself to every part of Europe. The constitutions of this imaginary order were even published in 1624; they are such as could not have been realised, but from the organization and secrecy that seem to have been their elements, might not improbably have drawn down a persecution upon themselves, or even rendered the name of philosophy obnoxious. Cesi died in 1630, and his academy of Lynxes did not long survive the loss of their chief.[684]

[684] Salfi, xi., 102. Tiraboschi, xi., 42, 243.

Prejudice for antiquity diminished. 45. The tide of public opinion had hitherto set regularly in one direction; ancient times, ancient learning, ancient wisdom and virtue, were regarded with unqualified veneration; the very course of nature was hardly believed to be the same, and a common degeneracy was thought to have overspread the earth and its inhabitants. This had been at its height in the first century after the revival of letters, the prejudice in favour of the past, always current with the old, who affect to dictate the maxims of experience, conspiring with the genuine lustre of classical literature and ancient history, which dazzled the youthful scholar. But this aristocracy of learning was now assailed by a new power which had risen up in sufficient strength to dispute the pre-eminence. We, said Bacon, are the true ancients; what we call the antiquity of the world was but its infancy. This thought equally just and brilliant, was caught up and echoed by many; it will be repeatedly found in later works. It became a question whether the moderns had not really left behind their progenitors; and though it has been hinted, that a dwarf on a giant’s shoulders sees farther than the giant, this is, in one sense, to concede the point in dispute.[685]

[685] Ac quemadmodum pygmæus humeris gigantis insidens longius quam gigas prospicere, neque tamen se gigante majorem habere aut sipi multum tribuere potest, ita nos veterum laboribus vigiliisque in nostros usus conversis adjicere aliquid, non supercilia tollere, aut parvi facere, qui ante nos fuerunt, debemus. Cyprianus, Vita Campanellæ, p. 15.

46. Tassoni was one of the first who combated the established prejudice by maintaining that modern times are not inferior to ancient; it well became his intrepid disposition.[686] But Lancilotti, an Italian ecclesiastic, and member of several academies, pursued this subject in an elaborate work, intended to prove—first, that the world was neither morally worse nor more afflicted by calamities than it had been; secondly, that the intellectual abilities of mankind had not degenerated. It bears the general title, L’Hoggidi, To-Day; and is throughout a ridicule of those whom he calls Hoggidiani, perpetual declaimers against the present state of things. He is a very copious and learned writer, and no friend to antiquity; each chapter being entitled Disinganno, and intended to remove some false prejudice. The first part of this work appeared in 1623, the second, after the author’s death, not till 1658. Lancilotti wrote another book with somewhat a similar object, entitled Farfalloni degl’Antichi Istorici, and designed to turn the ancient historians into ridicule; with a good deal of pleasantry, but chiefly on account of stories which no one in his time would have believed. The same ground was taken soon afterwards by an English divine, George Hakewill, in his “Apology, or Declaration of the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World,” published in 1627. This is designed to prove that there is not that perpetual and universal decay in nature which many suppose. It is an elaborate refutation of many absurd notions which seem to have prevailed; some believing that even physical nature, the sun and stars, the earth and waters, were the worse for wear. A greater number thought this true of man; his age, his size, his strength, his powers of mind were all supposed to have been deteriorated. Hakewill patiently and learnedly refuted all this. The moral character of antiquity he shows to be much exaggerated, animadverting especially on the Romans. The most remarkable, and certainly the most disputable chapters, are those which relate to the literary merits of ancient and modern times. He seems to be one of the first who ventured to put in a claim for the latter. In this he anticipates Wotton, who had more to say. Hakewill goes much too far in calling Sydney’s Arcadia “nothing inferior to the choicest piece among the ancients”; and even thinks “he should not much wrong Virgil by matching him with Du Bartas.” The learning shown in this treatise is very extensive, but Hakewill has no taste, and cannot perceive any real superiority in the ancients. Compared with Lancilotti, he is much inferior in liveliness, perhaps even in learning; but I have not observed that he has borrowed anything from the Italian, whose publication was but four years earlier.

[686] Salfi, xi., 381.

Browne’s Vulgar Errors. 47. Browne’s Inquiry into Vulgar Errors displays a great deal of erudition, but scarcely raises a high notion of Browne himself as a philosopher, or of the state of physical knowledge in England. The errors he indicates are such as none but illiterate persons, we should think, were likely to hold; and I believe that few on the Continent, so late as 1646, would have required to have them exploded with such an ostentation of proof. Who did not know that the phœnix is a fable? Browne was where the learned in Europe had been seventy years before, and seems to have been one of those who saturate their minds with bad books till they have little room for anything new that is better. A man of so much credulity and such an irregular imagination as Browne was almost sure to believe in witchcraft and all sorts of spiritual agencies. In no respect did he go in advance of his age, unless we make an exception for his declaration against persecution. He seems to have been fond of those trifling questions which the bad taste of the schoolmen and their contemporaries introduced; as whether a man has fewer ribs than a woman, whether Adam and Eve had navels, whether Methusaleh was the oldest man; the problems of children put to adults. With a strong curiosity and a real love of truth, Browne is a striking instance of a merely empirical mind; he is at sea with sails and a rudder, but without a compass or log-book; and has so little notion of any laws of nature, or of any inductive reasoning either as to efficient or final causes, that he never seems to judge anything to be true or false except by experiment.

Life and character of Peiresc. 48. In concluding our review of the sixteenth century, we selected Pinelli, as a single model of the literary character, which loving and encouraging knowledge, is yet too little distinguished by any writings to fall naturally within the general subject of these volumes. The period which we now bring to a close will furnish us with a much more considerable instance. Nicholas Peiresc was born in 1580, of an ancient family in Provence, which had for some generations held judicial offices in the parliament of Aix. An extraordinary thirst for every kind of knowledge characterized Peiresc from his earliest youth, and being of a weak constitution, as well as ample fortune, though he retained, like his family, an honourable post in the parliament, his time was principally devoted to the multifarious pursuits of an enlightened scholar. Like Pinelli, he delighted in the rarities of art and antiquity; but his own superior genius, and the vocation of that age towards science, led him on to a far more extensive field of inquiry. We have the life of Peiresc written by his countryman and intimate friend Gassendi; and no one who has any sympathy with science or with a noble character will read it without pleasure. Few books indeed of that period are more full of casual information.

49. Peiresc travelled much in the early part of his life; he was at Rome in 1600, and came to England and Holland in 1606. The hard drinking, even of our learned men,[687] disconcerted his southern stomach; but he was repaid by the society of Camden, Savile, and Cotton. The king received Peiresc courteously, and he was present at the opening of parliament. On returning to his native province, he began to form his extensive collections of marbles and medals, but especially of natural history in every line. He was, perhaps, the first who observed the structure of zoophytes, though he seems not to have suspected their animal nature. Petrifactions occupied much of his time; and he framed a theory of them which Gassendi explains at length, but which, as might be expected, is not the truth.[688] Botany was among his favourite studies, and Europe owes to him, according to Gassendi, the Indian jessamine, the gourd of Mecca, the real Egyptian papyrus, which is not that described by Prosper Alpinus. He first planted ginger, as well as many other Oriental plants, in an European garden, and also the cocoa-nut, from which, however, he could not obtain fruit.

[687] Gassendi, Vita Peiresc, p. 51.

[688] P. 147.

50. Peiresc was not less devoted to astronomy; he had no sooner heard of the discoveries of Galileo than he set himself to procure a telescope, and had in the course of the same year, 1610, the pleasure of observing the moons of Jupiter. It even occurred to him that these might serve to ascertain the longitude, though he did not follow up the idea. Galileo indeed, with a still more inventive mind, and with more of mathematics, seems to have stood in the way of Peiresc. He took, as far as appears, no great pains to publish his researches, contenting himself with the intercourse of literary men, who passed near him, or with whom he could maintain correspondence. Several discoveries are ascribed to him by Gassendi; of their originality, I cannot venture to decide. “From his retreat,” says another biographer, “Peiresc gave more encouragement to letters than any prince, more even than the Cardinal de Richelieu, who sometime afterwards founded the French Academy. Worthy to have been called by Bayle the attorney-general of literature, he kept always on the level of progressive science, published manuscripts at his own expense, followed the labours of the learned throughout Europe, and gave them an active impulse by his own aid.” Scaliger, Salmasius, Holstenius, Kircher, Mersenne, Grotius, Valois, are but some of the great names of Europe whom he assisted by various kinds of liberality.[689] He published nothing himself, but some of his letters have been collected.

[689] Biogr. Universelle.

51. The character of Peiresc was amiable and unreserved among his friends; but he was too much absorbed in the love of knowledge for insipid conversation. For the same reason, his biographer informs us, he disliked the society of women, gaining nothing valuable from the trifles and scandal upon which alone they could converse.[690] Possibly the society of both sexes at Aix, in the age of Peiresc, was such as, with no excessive fastidiousness, he might avoid. In his eagerness for new truths, he became somewhat credulous; an error not perhaps easy to be avoided, while the accumulation of facts proceeded more rapidly than the ascertainment of natural laws. But for a genuine liberality of mind and extensive attainments in knowledge, very few can be compared to Peiresc; nor among those who have resembled him in this employment of wealth and leisure, do I know that any names have descended to posterity with equal lustre, except our two countrymen of the next generation, who approached so nearly to his character and course of life, Boyle and Evelyn.

[690] Gassendi, p. 219.

CHAPTER XXVII.

James Frederic Gronovius. 1. The death of Salmasius, about the beginning of this period, left a chasm in critical literature which no one was equal to fill. But the nearest to this giant of philology was James Frederic Gronovius, a native of Hamburg, but drawn, like several more of his countrymen, to the universities of Holland, the peculiarly learned state of Europe through the seventeenth century. The principal labours of Gronovius were those of correcting the text of Latin writers; in Greek we find very little due to him.[691] His notes form an useful and considerable part of those which are collected in what are generally styled the Variorum editions, published, chiefly after 1660, by the Dutch booksellers. These contain selections from the older critics, some of them, especially those first edited, indifferently made and often mutilated; others with more attention to preserve entire the original notes. These, however, are, for the most part, only critical, as if explanatory observations were below the notice of an editor; though, as Le Clerc says, those of Manutius on Cicero’s epistles cost him much more time than modern editors have given to their conjectures.[692] In general, the Variorum editions were not greatly prized, with the exception of those by the two Gronovii and Grævius.[693]

[691] Baillet. Critiques Grammairiens, n. 548. Blount. Biogr. Univ.

[692] Parrhasiana, i., 233.

[693] A list of the Variorum editions will be found in Baillet, Critiques Grammairiens, n. 604.

James Gronovius. 2. The place of the elder Gronovius, in the latter part of this present period, was filled by his son. James Gronovius, by indefatigable labour, and by a greater number of editions which bear his name, may be reckoned, if not a greater philologer, one not less celebrated than his father. He was, at least, a better Greek critic, and in this language, though far below those who were about to arise, and who did, in fact, eclipse him long before his death, Bentley and Burman, he kept a high place for several years.[694] |Grævius.| Grævius, another German whom the Dutch universities had attracted and retained, contributed to the Variorum editions, chiefly those of Latin authors, an erudition not less copious than that of any contemporary scholar.

[694] Baillet, n. 548. Niceron, ii., 177.

Isaac Vossius. 3. The philological character of Gerard Vossius himself, if we might believe some partial testimonies, fell short of that of his son Isaac; whose Observations on Pomponius Mela, and an edition of Catullus, did him extraordinary credit, and have placed him among the first philologers of this age. He was of a more lively genius, and perhaps hardly less erudition, than his father, but with a paradoxical judgment, and has certainly rendered much less service to letters.[695] Another son of a great father, Nicolas Heinsius, has by none been placed on a level with him; but his editions of Prudentius and Claudian are better than any that had preceded them.

[695] Niceron, vol. xiii.

Decline of German learning. 4. Germany fell lower and lower in classical literature. A writer, as late as 1714, complains, that only modern books of Latin were taught in the schools, and that the students in the universities despised all grammatical learning. The study, “not of our own language, which we entirely neglect, but of French,” he reckons among the causes of this decay in ancient learning; the French translations of the classics led many to imagine that the original could be dispensed with.[696] |Spanheim.| Ezekiel Spanheim, envoy from the court of Brandenburg to that of Louis XIV., was a distinguished exception; his edition of Julian, and his notes on several other writers, attest an extensive learning, which has still preserved his name in honour. As the century drew nigh to its close, Germany began to revive; a few men of real philological learning, especially Fabricius, appeared as heralds of those greater names which adorn her literary annals in the next age.

[696] Burckhardt, De Linguæ Latinæ hodie neglectæ Causis Oratio, p. 34.

Jesuit colleges in France. 5. The Jesuits had long been conspicuously the classical scholars of France; in their colleges the purest and most elegant Latinity was supposed to be found; they had early cultivated these graces of literature, while all polite writing was confined to the Latin language, and they still preserved them in its comparative disuse. “The Jesuits,” Huet says, “write and speak Latin well, but their style is almost always too rhetorical. This is owing to their keeping regencies (an usual phrase for academical exercises) from their early youth, which causes them to speak incessantly in public, and become accustomed to a sustained and polished style above the tone of common subjects.”[697] Jouvancy, whose Latin orations were published in 1700, has had no equal, if we may trust a panegyric, since Maffei and Muretus.[698]

[697] Huetiana, p. 71.

[698] Biogr. Univ.

Port-Royal writers. Lancelot. 6. The Jansenists appeared ready at one time to wrest this palm from their inveterate foes. Lancelot threw some additional lustre round Port-Royal by the Latin and Greek grammars, which are more frequently called by the name of that famous cloister than by his own. Both were received with great approbation in the French schools, except, I suppose, where the Jesuits predominated, and their reputation lasted for many years. They were never so popular though well known, in this country. “The public,” says Baillet of the Greek grammar, which is rather the more eminent of the two, “bears witness that nothing of its kind has been more finished. The order is clear and concise. We find in it many remarks, both judicious and important for the full knowledge of the language. Though Lancelot has chiefly followed Caninius, Sylburgius, Sanctius, and Vossius, his arrangement is new, and he has selected what is most valuable in their works.”[699] In fact, he professes to advance nothing of his own, being more indebted, he says, to Caninius than to anyone else. The method of Clenardus he disapproves, and thinks that of Ramus intricate. He adopts the division into three declensions. But his notions of the proper meaning of the tenses are strangely confused and erroneous: several other mistakes of an obvious nature, as we should now say, will occur in his syntax; and, upon the whole, the Port-Royal grammar does not give us a high idea of the critical knowledge of the seventeenth century, as to the more difficult language of antiquity.

[699] Baillet, n. 714.

Latin grammars. Perizonius. 7. The Latin, on the other hand, had been so minutely and laboriously studied, that little more than gleanings after a great harvest could be obtained. The Aristarchus of Vossius, and his other grammatical works, though partly not published till this period, have been mentioned in the last volume. Perizonius, a professor at Franeker, and in many respects one of the most learned of this age, published a good edition of the Minerva of Sanctius in 1687. This celebrated grammar had become very scarce, as well as that of Scioppius, which contained nothing but remarks upon Sanctius. Perizonius combined the two with notes more ample than those of Scioppius, and more bold in differing from the Spanish grammarian.

Delphin editions. 8. If other editions of the classical authors have been preferred by critics, none, at least of this period, have been more celebrated than those which Louis XIV., at the suggestion of the Duke de Montausier, caused to be prepared for the use of the Dauphin. The object in view was to elucidate the Latin writers, both by a continual gloss in the margin, and by such notes as should bring a copious mass of ancient learning to bear on the explanation, not of the more difficult passages alone, but of all those in which an ordinary reader might require some aid. The former of these is less useful, and less satisfactorily executed than the latter; for the notes, it must be owned that, with much that is superfluous even to tolerable scholars, they bring together a great deal of very serviceable illustration. The choice of authors as well as of editors was referred to Huet, who fixed the number of the former at forty. The idea of an index on a more extensive plan than in any earlier editions, was also due to Huet, who had designed to fuse those of each work into one more general, as a standing historical analysis of the Latin language.[700] These editions are of very unequal merit, as might be expected from the number of persons employed, a list of whom will be found in Baillet.[701]

[700] Huetiana, p. 92.

[701] Critiques Grammairiens, n. 605.

Le Fevre and the Daciers. 9. Tanaquil Faber, thus better known than by his real name, Tanneguy le Fevre, a man learned, animated, not fearing the reproach of paradox, acquired a considerable name among French critics by several editions, as well as by other writings in philology. But none of his literary productions were so celebrated as his daughter, Anne le Fevre, afterwards Madame Dacier. The knowledge of Greek though once not very uncommon in a woman, had become prodigious in the days of Louis XIV.; and when this distinguished lady taught Homer and Sappho to speak French prose, she appeared a phœnix in the eyes of her countrymen. She was undoubtedly a person of very rare talents and estimable character; her translations are numerous, and reputed to be correct, though Niceron has observed that she did not raise Homer in the eyes of those who were not prejudiced in his favour. Her husband was a scholar of kindred mind and the same pursuits. Their union was facetiously called the wedding of Latin and Greek. But each of this learned couple was skilled in both languages. Dacier was a great translator; his Horace is perhaps the best known of his versions; but the Poetics of Aristotle have done him most honour. The Daciers had to fight the battle of antiquity against a generation both ignorant and vain-glorious, yet keen-sighted in the detection of blemishes, and disposed to avenge the wrongs of their fathers who had been trampled upon by pedants with the help of a new pedantry, that of the court and the mode. With great learning they had a competent share of good sense, but not perhaps a sufficiently discerning taste, or liveliness enough of style, to maintain a cause that had so many prejudices of the world now enlisted against it.[702]

[702] Baillet. Niceron, vol. iii. Bibliothèque Universelle, x. 295, xxii. 176, xxiv. 241, 261, Biogr. Univers.

Henry Valois. Complaints of decay of learning. 10. Henry Valois might have been mentioned before for his edition of Ammianus Marcellinus in 1636, which established his philological reputation. Many other works in the same line of criticism followed; he is among the great ornaments of learning in this period. Nor was France destitute of others that did her honour. Cotelier, it is said, deserved by his knowledge of Greek to be placed on a level with the great scholars of former times. Yet there seems to have been some decline, at least toward the close of the century, in that prodigious erudition which had extinguished the preceding period. “For we know no one,” says Le Clerc, about 1699, “who equals in learning, in diligence and in the quantity of his works, the Scaligers, the Lipsii, the Casaubons, the Salmasii, the Meursii, the Vossii, the Seldens, the Gronovii, and many more of former times.”[703] Though perhaps in this reflection there was something of the customary bias against the present generation, we must own that the writings of scholars were less massive, and consequently gave less apparent evidence of industry than formerly. But in classical philology at least, a better day was about to arise, and the first omen of it came from a country not yet much known in that literature.

[703] Parrhasiana, vol. i., p. 225. Je viens d’apprendre, says Charles Patin in one of his letters, que M. Gronovius est mort à Leyden. Il restoit presque tout seul du nombre des savans d’Hollande. Il n’est plus dans ce pais-là des gens faits comme Jos. Scaliger, Baudius, Heinsius, Salmasius, et Grotius. (P. 582.)

English learning. Duport. 11. It has been observed in the last volume, that while England was very far from wanting men of extensive erudition, she had not been at all eminent in ancient or classical literature. The proof which the absence of critical writings, or even of any respectable editions, furnishes, appears weighty; nor can it be repelled by sufficient testimony. In the middle of the century James Duport, Greek professor at Cambridge, deserves honour by standing almost alone. “He appears,” says a late biographer, “to have been the main instrument by which literature was upheld in this university during the civil disturbances of the seventeenth century; and though little known at present, he enjoyed an almost transcendant reputation for a great length of time among his contemporaries as well as in the generation which immediately succeeded.”[704] Duport however has little claim to this reputation except by translations of the writings of Solomon, the book of Job, and the Psalms, into Greek hexameters, concerning which his biographer gently intimates that “his notions of versification were not formed in a severe or critical school,” and by what has certainly been more esteemed, his Homeri Gnomologia, which Le Clerc and bishop Monk agree to praise, as very useful to the student of Homer. Duport gave also some lectures on Theophrastus about 1656, which were afterwards published in Needham’s edition of that author. “In these,” says Le Clerc, “he explains words with much exactness, and so as to show that he understood the analogy of the language.”[705] “They are upon the whole calculated,” says the bishop of Gloucester, “to give no unfavourable opinion of the state of Greek learning in the university of that memorable crisis.”

[704] Museum Criticum, vol. ii., p. 672 (by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol).

[705] Bibliothèque Choisie, xxv., 18.

Greek not much studied. 12. It cannot be fairly said that our universities declined in general learning under the usurpation of Cromwell. They contained, on the contrary, more extraordinary men than in any earlier period, but not generally well affected to the predominant power. Greek, however, seems not much to have flourished, even immediately after the restoration. Barrow, who was chosen Greek professor in 1660, complains that no one attended his lectures. “I sit like an Attic owl,” he says, “driven out from the society of all other birds.”[706] According indeed to the scheme of study retained from a more barbarous age, no knowledge of the Greek language appears to have been required from the students, as necessary for their degrees. And if we may believe a satirical writer of the time of Charles II., but one whose satire had great circulation and was not taxed with falsehood the general state of education both in the schools and universities was as narrow, pedantic, and unprofitable, as can be conceived.[707]

[706] See a biographical memoir of Barrow prefixed to Hughe’s edition of his works. This contains a sketch of studies pursued in the university of Cambridge from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, brief indeed, but such as I should have been glad to have seen before, p. 62. No alteration in the statutes, so far as they related to study, was made after the time of Henry VIII. or Edward VI.

[707] Eachard’s Grounds and Occasions of the Contempt of the Clergy. This little tract was published in 1670, and went through ten editions by 1696.

Gataker’s Cinnus and Antonius. 13. We were not, nevertheless, destitute of men distinguished for critical skill, even from the commencement of this period. The first was a very learned divine, Thomas Gataker, one whom a foreign writer has placed among the six protestants most conspicuous, in his judgment, for depth of reading. His Cinnus, sive Adversaria Miscellanea, published in 1651, to which a longer work, entitled Adversaria Posthuma, is subjoined in later editions, may be introduced here; since, among a far greater number of scriptural explanations, both of these miscellanies contain many relating to profane antiquity. He claims a higher place for his edition of Marcus Antoninus the next year. This is the earliest edition, if I am not mistaken, of any classical writer published in England with original annotations. Those of Gataker evince a very copious learning, and the edition is still perhaps reckoned the best that has been given of this author.

Stanley’s Æschylus. 14. Thomas Stanley, author of the History of Ancient Philosophy, undertook a more difficult task, and gave in 1663 his celebrated edition of Æschylus. It was, as every one has admitted, by far superior to any that had preceded it; nor can Stanley’s real praise be effaced though it may be diminished, by an unfortunate charge that has been brought against him, of having appropriated to himself the conjectures, most of them unpublished, of Casaubon, Dorat, and Scaliger, to the number of at least three hundred emendations of the text. It will hardly be reckoned a proof of our nationality, that a living English scholar was the first to detect and announce this plagiarism of a critic, in whom we had been accustomed to take pride, from these foreigners.[708] After these plumes have been withdrawn, Stanley’s Æschylus will remain a great monument of critical learning.

[708] Edinburgh Review, xix., 494. Museum Criticum, ii., 498. (Both by the Bishop of London.)

Other English philologers. 15. Meric Casaubon by his notes on Persius, Antoninus, and Diogenes Laertius, Pearson by those on the last author, Gale on Iamblichus, Price on Apuleius, Hudson, by his editions of Thucydides and Josephus, Potter by that of Lycophron, Baxter of Anacreon, attested the progress of classical learning in a soil so well fitted to give it nourishment. The same William Baxter published the first grammar, not quite elementary, which had appeared in England, entitled, De Analogia, seu Arte Latinæ Linguæ Commentarius. It relates principally to etymology, and to the deduction of the different parts of the verb from a stem, which he conceives to be the imperative mood. Baxter was a man of some ability, but, in the style of critics, offensively contemptuous towards his brethren of the craft.

Bentley. 16. We must hasten to the greatest of English critics in this, or possibly any other age, Richard Bentley. |His epistle to Mill.| His first book was the Epistle to Mill, subjoined to the latter’s edition of the chronicle of John Malala, a Greek writer of the lower empire. In a desultory and almost garrulous strain, Bentley pours forth an immense store of novel learning and of acute criticism, especially on his favourite subject, which was destined to become his glory, the scattered relics of the ancient dramatists. The style of Bentley, always terse and lively, sometimes humorous and drily sarcastic, whether he wrote in Latin or in English, could not but augment the admiration which his learning challenged. Grævius and Spanheim pronounced him the rising star of British literature, and a correspondence with the former began in 1692, which continued in unbroken friendship till his death.

Dissertation on Phalaris. 17. But the rare qualities of Bentley were more abundantly displayed, and before the eyes of a more numerous tribunal, in his famous dissertation on the epistles ascribed to Phalaris. This was provoked, in the first instance, by a few lines of eulogy on these epistles by Sir William Temple, who pretended to find in them indubitable marks of authenticity. Bentley, in a dissertation subjoined to Wotton’s Reflections on Modern and Ancient Learning, gave tolerably conclusive proofs of the contrary. A young man of high family and respectable learning, Charles Boyle, had published an edition of the Epistles of Phalaris, with some reflection on Bentley for personal incivility; a charge which he seems to have satisfactorily disproved. Bentley animadverted on this in his dissertation. Boyle the next year, with the assistance of some leading men at Oxford, Aldrich, King, and Atterbury, published his Examination of Bentley’s Dissertation on Phalaris; a book generally called, in familiar brevity, Boyle against Bentley.[709] The Cambridge giant of criticism replied in an answer which goes by the name of Bentley against Boyle. It was the first great literary war that had been waged in England; and like that of Troy, it has still the prerogative of being remembered after the Epistles of Phalaris are almost as much buried as the walls of Troy itself. Both combatants were skillful in wielding the sword: the arms of Boyle, in Swift’s language, were given him by all the gods; but his antagonist stood forward in no such figurative strength, master of a learning to which nothing parallel had been known in England, and that directed by an understanding prompt, discriminating, not idly sceptical, but still farther removed from trust in authority, sagacious in perceiving corruptions of language, and ingenious, at the least, in removing them, with a style rapid, concise, amusing, and superior to Boyle in that which he had most to boast, a sarcastic wit.[710]

[709] “The principal share in the undertaking fell to the lot of Atterbury; this was suspected at the time, and has since been placed beyond all doubt by the publication of a letter of his to Boyle.” Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 69.

[710] In point of classical learning the joint stock of the confederacy bore no proportion to that of Bentley; their acquaintance with several of the books upon which they comment appears only to have begun upon that occasion, and sometimes they are indebted for their knowledge of them to their adversary; compared with his boundless erudition, their learning was that of school boys, and not always sufficient to preserve them from distressing mistakes. But profound literature was at that period confined to few, while wit and raillery found numerous and eager readers. It may be doubtful whether Busby himself, by whom every one of the confederated band had been educated, possessed knowledge which would have qualified him to enter the lists in such a controversy.” Monk’s Bentley, p. 69. Warburton has justly said, that Bentley by his wit foiled the Oxford men at their own weapons.

18. It may now seem extraordinary to us, even without looking at the anachronisms or similar errors which Bentley has exposed, that any one should be deceived by the Epistles of Phalaris. The rhetorical common-places, the cold declamation of the sophist, the care to please the reader, the absence of that simplicity, with which a man who has never known restraint in disguising his thoughts or choosing his words, is sure to express himself, strike us in the pretended letters of this buskined tyrant, the Icon Basilice of the ancient world. But this was doubtless thought evidence of their authenticity by many, who might say, as others have done in a happy vein of metaphor, that they seemed not written with a pen but with a sceptre. The argument from the use of the Attic dialect by a Sicilian tyrant, contemporary with Pythagoras, is of itself conclusive, and would leave no doubt in the present day.

Disadvantages of scholars in that age. 19. “It may be remarked,” says the Bishop of Gloucester, “that a scholar at that time possessed neither the aids nor the encouragements which are now presented to smooth the paths of literature. The grammars of the Latin and Greek languages were imperfectly and erroneously taught; and the critical scholar must have felt severely the absence of sufficient indices, particularly of the voluminous scholiasts, grammarians, and later writers of Greece, in the examination of which no inconsiderable portion of a life might be consumed. Bentley relying upon his own exertions and the resources of his own mind, pursued an original path of criticism, in which the intuitive quickness and subtlety of his genius qualified him to excel. In the faculty of memory so important for such pursuits, he has himself candidly declared that he was not particularly gifted. Consequently, he practised throughout life the precaution of noting in the margin of his books the suggestions and conjectures which rushed into his mind during their perusal. To this habit of laying up materials in store, we may partly attribute the surprising rapidity with which some of his most important works were completed. He was also at the trouble of constructing for his own use indices of authors quoted by the principal scholiasts, by Eustathius and other ancient commentators, of a nature similar to those afterwards published by Fabricius in his Bibliotheca Græca; which latter were the produce of the joint labour of various hands.”[711]

[711] Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 12.

Sect. II.

On Antiquities.

Grævius and Gronovius—Fabretti—Numismatic Writers—Chronology.

Thesauri of Grævius and of Gronovius. 20. The two most industrious scholars of their time, Grævius and Gronovius, collected into one body such of the numerous treatises on Roman and Greek antiquities, as they thought most worthy of preservation in an uniform and accessible work. These form the Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanarum by Grævius, in twelve volumes, the Thesaurus Antiquitatum Græcarum by Gronovius, in thirteen volumes; the former published in 1694, the first volumes of the latter in 1697. They comprehend many of the labours of the older antiquaries already commemorated from the middle of the sixteenth to that of the seventeenth century, and some also of a later date. Among these, in the collection of Grævius, are a treatise of Albert Rubens, son of the great painter, on the dress of the Romans, particularly the laticlave (Antwerp, 1665), the enlarged edition of Octavius Ferrarius on the same subject, several treatises by Spanheim and Ursatus, and the Roma Antica of Nardini, published in 1666. Gronovius gave a place in his twelfth volume (1702) to the very recent work of a young Englishman, Potter’s Antiquities, which the author, at the request of the veteran antiquary, had so much enlarged, that the Latin translation in Gronovius is nearly double in length the first edition of the English.[712] The warm eulogies of Gronovius attest the merit of this celebrated work. Potter was but twenty-three years of age; he had of course availed himself of the writings of Meursius, but he has also contributed to supercede them. It has been said that he is less exact in attending to the difference of times and places than our finer criticism requires.[713]

[712] The first edition of Potter’s Antiquities was published in 1697 and 1698.

[713] Biogr. Univ.

Fabretti. 21. Bellori, in a long list of antiquarian writings, Falconieri in several more, especially his Inscriptiones Athleticæ, maintained the honour of Italy in this province so justly claimed as her own.[714] But no one has been accounted equal to Raphael Fabretti, by judges so competent as Maffei, Gravina, Fabroni, and Visconti.[715] His diligence in collecting inscriptions was only surpassed by his sagacity in explaining them; and his authority has been preferred to that of any other antiquary.[716] His time was spent in delving among ruins and vaults to explore the subterranean treasures of Latium; no heat nor cold nor rain nor badness of road could deter him from these solitary peregrinations. Yet the glory of Fabretti must be partly shared with his horse. This wise and faithful animal, named Marco Polo, had acquired, it is said, the habit of standing still, and as it were pointing, when he came near an antiquity; his master candidly owning that several things which would have escaped him had been detected by the antiquarian quadruped.[717] Fabretti’s principal works are three dissertations on the Roman aqueducts, and on the Trajan column. Little, says Fabroni, was known before about the Roman galleys or their naval affairs in general.[718] Fabretti was the first who reduced lapidary remains into classes, and arranged them so as to illustrate each other; a method, says one of his most distinguished successors, which has laid the foundations of the science.[719] A profusion of collateral learning is mingled with the main stream of all his investigations.

[714] Salfi, vol. xi., 364.

[715] Fabretti’s life has been written by two very favourable biographers, Fabroni, in Vitæ Italorum, vol. vi., and Visconti, in the Biography Universelle.

[716] Fabroni, p. 187, Biogr. Univ.

[717] Fabroni, p. 192.

[718] P. 201.

[719] Biogr. Univ.

Numismatics. Spanheim—Vaillant. 22. No one had ever come to the study of medals with such stores of erudition as Ezekiel Spanheim. The earlier writers on the subject, Vico, Erizzo, Angeloni, were not comparable to him, and had rather dwelt on the genuineness or rarity of coins than on their usefulness in illustrating history. Spanheim’s Dissertations on the Use of Medals, the second improved edition of which appeared in 1671, first connected them with the most profound and critical research into antiquity.[720] Vaillant, travelling into the Levant, brought home great treasures of Greek coinage, especially those of the Seleucidæ, at once enriching the cabinets of the curious and establishing historical truth. Medallic evidence, in fact, may be reckoned among those checks upon the negligence of historians, which having been retrieved by industrious antiquaries, have created that caution, and discerning spirit which has been exercised in later times upon facts, and which, beginning in scepticism, passes onward to a more rational, and therefore more secure, conviction of what can fairly be proved. Jobert, in 1692, consolidated the researches of Spanheim, Vaillant, and other numismatic writers in his book, entitled La Science des Medailles, a better system of the science than had been published.[721]