sented to him. He had no taste-perhaps | tain that it was instinct, not accident, which he was too young-for the subtle and sophis- guided him to Homer. With the aid of a ticating Aristotelic speculations in which the Latin translation he went through it in onefather revelled. Joseph afterwards read up and-twenty days. From Homer he passed Greek philosophy as a matter of duty, but in order down the series of the Greek poets; never dwells upon it with pleasure. In his and four months sufficed to devour the whole. rare allusions to such topics we may even The same instinct, and the same spirit of think we trace a tone of positive distaste. determination, guided him here in not interDr. Bernays says there are only twenty quo- rupting his poetic reading by any deviation tations from Plato to be found in all his into prose; the difference of idiom being, books. These quotations, too, are chiefly he may have felt, distinct dialects, incapable from the lesser dialogues, occasionally only of being mastered at one effort. As he went from the Timæus and the Laws. In quoting along, he formed a grammar for himself by the latter on one occasion he adds, "that it his own observation of the analogies, the is a long time since he read that dialogue." only grammar he ever learnt. Huet, alludIt may excite our surprise that Julius ing to the Scaliger feat, thinks it incredible, should not have attempted more instruction but on no better ground than that he himwith a youth of the promising capacity he self had made an unsuccessful attempt to must have discerned in his son Joseph. We repeat the experiment. Gibbon, more modmust call to mind the distractions caused estly, declares that he was well satisfied with by the pestilence, which in 1555 reached himself when he got through the same task Agen, and drove the family into the country; in as many weeks as Scaliger took days. the father's age and infirmitiès, and his prob- We might quote against these authorities able expectation that his end was imminent, Wyttenbach despatching Athenæus in fourwhen his son would be free to return to Bor-teen days; or Milton's assertion that he had deaux. Besides this he had neither the in-read "all the Greek and Latin classics" in tention nor the wish to bring up any of his children to letters as a pursuit. It does not appear that Joseph had learned the rudiments of Greek at the time of his father's death, Oct. 21, 1558. He certainly had not learned more than the rudiments. He had seen enough, however, to understand that "not to know Greek was to know nothing." The death of his father affected him so deeply as for some time to disorder his health. As soon as he had recovered from the blow, he determined to make good this deficiency. Adrian Turnebus was at that time the most renowned Greek scholar in France and in Europe. For a youth of eighteen, who had yet to begin his grammar, less than the first Grecian of the day might have served. But this is a truth which only experiment can teach us. Joseph made his way to Paris, and enrolled himself in Turnebus' class, that he might imbibe Greek at the fountain-head. A trial of two months opened his eyes, and he understood that to begin one must begin at the beginning; a lesson, in learning which two months were well spent. He adopted the resolution-be it remembered he is nineteen-to shut himself up in his chamber, and become his own teacher. It is not said, but we may be cer five years, if it were not that parallel is mis- "Scaliger, merveille de notre age, These thirty years, during which Scaliger acquired his knowledge and his reputation, were by no means years of quiet and leisure. In reviewing the period himself, at its close, he says (1594) : "If in our editions of classical authors hitherto we have not given satisfaction to men of learning, and we know too well that we have not, my excuse is the desultory nature of my life, and the want of leisure, the indispensable condition of study. From the year 1563, when I first went to live with M. de La Roche-Pozay, up to the present moment, I have had no rest for mind or body, but have been harassed by incessant anxieties, or movement from place to place." Of the four years Scaliger spent at the through, though only Propertius and Statius university of Paris, nothing is known. In are named (Comm. in Propert, ii. 2, 12). 1563 he received an invitation from a nobleman of Poitou, Louis Chastaigner, Lord of La Roche-Pozay, to travel with him. The acquaintance, which may have been formed at the university, ripened into friendship. For thirty years Scaliger was domesticated in this family, and when he finally quitted France in 1694, one of the sons accompanied him to Holland in the character of pupil. A connection which might be useful to him as a young man became necessary to him in after-life; for in the course of the Civil Wars his little patrimony perished in the wreck of the paternal property at Agen, and the house of La Roche-Pozay became his asylum. That Scaliger felt this dependence is certain: "All complaint a little overcharged. But it cerHis biographer is inclined to think this my life," he says, "I have eaten the bread tainly agrees with all the notices contained of charity" (eleemosynis vixi). But it was in his correspondence relating to the period made as little galling to him as such a client-in question. And when we look at the disship can be. As long as Louis lived, he treated Scaliger as a brother; and the sons, Jéan, who succeeded his father as Lord of La Roche-Pozay in 1594, and Henri-Louis, afterwards Bishop of Poitiers, inherited their father's esteem for their illustrious guest. Of the period of thirty years, 1563-1594, not more than half was actually spent by Scaliger under his patron's roof. But it was always open to him, and his books and papers his only property-seem to have been deposited in one of his Poitevin chateaux. Such arrangements, where the great man took into his house a man of learning nominally as his secretary or tutor to his children, but really as companion to himself, were common enough at that time and long after. So D'Ossat, afterwards Cardinal, read Plato with Paul de Foix; so Locke lived with Shaftesbury; so Bentley, though only tutor to his sons, ruled Stillingfleet's household, as the bishop almost complainingly describes it. It does not appear that the elder La Roche-Pozay was a man of peculiarly classical tastes. Like all the seigneurs of that disturbed period, he led of necessity a semi-military life, in camps, and forays, and sieges. But even the military noblesse of that day read Greek; and Louis studied the theory of tactics in Polybius, which Scaliger expounded to him as they rode. We gather too that they had read, turbed state of the country-and especially We have said that of this period of thirty at least, the Latin poets systematically-Poemata, No. 44. tians were very jealous of their acquisition of the Veronese, and chose to give out that the family of the Della Scala was extinct; an assertion they would assuredly have made good upon all claimants of the name who might venture within reach of their police. years during which Scaliger was the inmate of the de La Roche-Pozay family, only half or thereabouts, was actually passed under their roof. The first four years, 1563-1567, were occupied in travelling with the young lord of Roche-Pozay, who was making his grand tour. Dr. Bernays makes him go as ambassador to the Holy See; but this must be an error. The Roman embassy of Louis de La Roche-Pozay was at a later period, in 1576. In 1564 he was not yet thirty: scarcely a ripe ambassadorial age, but the very best age for a tour of instruction. Italy was their first destination. They made a prolonged stay at Rome, went on to Naples, and returned to Rome. At Rome Scaliger found his countryman, Marc Antoine, commonly known by the surname of Muretus. Muretus, when a youth, had been a great favorite with Julius Scaliger; had visited at his house at Agen, and used to call him "Father." He had afterwards alienated Joseph by passing off upon him some Latin lines of his own composition as a "fragment of Attius;" and Joseph had retorted by an epigram which perhaps more than paid off the score. Muretus now handsomely sunk the quarrel, and remembered only the old intimacy. He undertook to show the strangers the lions of Rome. He very soon detected that in the son of his old friend he had to do with an extraordinary man, and as long as their stay in the Eternal City lasted, Muretus never quitted Scaliger's side. He was able to be especially useful, besides, in making him acquainted with all the literati of the place. For Muretus, though in his youth he had narrowly escaped being burnt at fanatical Toulouse for the laxity of his talk and his behavior, had quite recovered himself, enjoyed high consideration at the Court of Rome, and was in communication with all the Italian érudits. Leaving Rome, the travellers visited the north of Italy and Venice. As may be supposed, Scaliger did not neglect the opportunity of seeing the home and the graves of his ancestors. His address to Verona-choliambics in imitation of Catullus's lines to Sirmio-which was then under the rule of Venice, breathes a spirit of no feigned hatred against the "City of Pirates, the city of rapine and perjury, the poison-cup and the dagger," the ruiner and oppressor of the country of the Scaligers, the proscriber of their very name. It is strange now-when general sympathy is on the side of Venice, as fallen under strange masters to go back to a time when the republic was herself the oppressor and ravisher instead of the victim the arbiter of oth- There were, however, several exceptions ers' fate," instead of" suppliant for her own." to a dislike which was rooted in the very On Venetian territory he took the precau- foundations of character. Where his feeltion of concealing his name. For the Vene-ings were interested, Scaliger could like and Of Italy, or rather of the Italians as they then were, we shall not wonder that Scaliger carried away an unfavorable impression. It was the time of the Catholic and conservative reaction against the paganism and indifference of the Renaissance. Religious profession, and zeal for the Church, were now in vogue. But Scaliger's eye was not imposed upon by appearances :-" The Italians are a set of atheists," was the exaggerated phrase in which he utters the opinion he had been obliged to form. The phrase requires interpretation. It is aimed rather at the hypocrisy than at the professed scepticism of the time. Men did not disbelieve the truths of the Christian religion, but they affected a zeal for the interests of the Church beyond what they really felt. The free and ardent spirit of curiosity which had animated the Italian mind in the early part of the century was exhausted. In its place had come, not secret unbelief, but callous acquiescence. The soul, the heart, and the imagination were dormant or dead, and were replaced by a cold and superficial polish of the understanding. The zeal for the interests of the Church which animated the religious orders was not participated in by the literati, but they submitted to it. They were cowed, not converted. Literature had degenerated into style-a prolix and insipid effusion, which came not from the mind. They had no longer thought or knowledge to inspire their pen, yet their pen was more prolific than ever. To all this Scaliger's habit of mind was in antipathy. He could care for no knowledge but what was real. Truth, not amusement, was his aim. His verbal criticism, on his skill in which so much stress has at times been laid, was never to him more than the road to exact knowledge. The Italian scholar necessarily seemed to him a frivolous and emasculate being, who used the classics as playthings, ignorant of all that grand experience of life and the world which was wrapped up in them. The dislike was, of course, mutual. The simplicity and directness of Scaliger's character provoked the bitterest hatred on the part of these affected virtuosi; at least, the foundation was now laid of that rancorous hostility with which he was afterwards pursued by the whole clique of Catholic Latinists. love even where he did not esteem. It is torts respect was not yet developed. He difficult to think that he esteemed Muretus made, however, some acquaintances in Oxas a scholar. But this stylist without con- ford and Cambridge; though his most valued victions, who could write at least as well as English correspondents, William Camden and Cicero, only that unfortunately he had noth- Richard Thomson, were later introductions. ing to say, found his way to Scaliger's affec- For Rainolds, President of Corpus, the most tions. Scaliger never names him but with a learned theologian in the English Church of certain tenderness; grieves for his death (in that, perhaps of any time, Scaliger conceived 1586); and always holds up his style as a a profound respect, and lamented his death model of prose Latinity. He forgave him (1607) as a calamity to all the Protestant his panegyric on the massacre of St. Bar- churches. Rainolds and Whitaker were tholomew, evidently from the knowledge that known to him only by their writings. CamMuretus did not mean any thing by it, and den had never been out of England, and would have been as ready to write on the was not personally acquainted with Scalother side had he been retained on it. iger; but he introduced himself by letter at "There are not many Muretuses in the a later period, forwarding to Scaliger a copy world," he said; "if he only believed in the of his "Britannia" (1594). His only reguexistence of a God as well as he can talk lar English correspondent was Thomson, a about it, he would be an excellent Chris- person well known in the learned world of tian." On another occasion, in comparing his day, though now so wholly forgotten, Muretus with Lipsius, he is made to say, that Dr. Bernays calls him "one Thomson." "Lipsius is nothing to him"-a judgment He was an M.A. of Clare Hall, and one of which ought to have guided those compil- the translators of the Bible, being grouped ers of literary history who have pretended with Andrewes, Overall, and Saravia, for the to enter the narrow pedant Lipsius in a "tri- portion from Genesis to Kings. Having umvirate" with Scaliger and Casaubon. To been born in Holland, though of English the Italian friends of Scaliger must be added parents, he had been led to form foreign the laborious antiquary Onufrio Panvinio. connections. He had travelled in France As a native, and the historian, of Verona, he and Italy, sought out the acquaintance of had a double claim to a good reception from scholars wherever he went, and maintained Scaliger, who was introduced to him by Mu- correspondence with them afterwards. He retus. But the early death (in 1568) of this returned to England and to Cambridge in prolific compiler-at thirty-nine he had writ- 1599, and from that time made the univerten more volumes than he was years old-sity his residence, becoming proctor in 1612. interrupted an acquaintance to which Scal- In his youth he had played at emending the iger seems to look back with interest. With these exceptions, we find no traces of partiality for the Italians or their ways; for Rome and its pharisaical religion only the deepest aversion. The lines in which he bids farewell to Rome in 1565-he never returned there-are of such Archilochian bitterness that Dr. Bernays will not reprint them. They are given by Des Maizeaux in his notes on the " Scaligerana; " but the reader can dispense with them, as they only express the writer's intense feeling without either elegance or point. classics. Farnaby acknowledges his assistance in his preface to his "Martial," in the dilettante Italian style apparently. But in James' reign he was drawn in, like all the rest, to the growing theological polemics, in which all learning was wrecked. He became a strenuous champion of the Arminian side, and wrote pamphlets "by order" in support of Andrewes. The style of these productions is better than their matter, and bears marks of imitation of Scaliger's peculiar Latin. He does not venture to name Scaliger, whose name was unpopular with the From Italy the travellers passed to Eng- theological belligerents, owing to his known land. In the spring of 1566 we find Scal- contempt for their ignorant squabbles, but iger in Edinburgh, at that moment when the he quotes him once as "the Muses' nightpublic speech was of "the discord between ingale." The stock of knowledge he brings the queen and her husband." (Randolph to to the controversy is not more than respectCecil, 25 April, 1566). But he brought away able, and what may be measured by the fact from our island a not more favorable im- that he is found consulting Scaliger by letter pression of our countrymen than our neigh- as to whether S. Irenæus wrote in Latin or bors in general were used to do at that pe- Greek. When we find Prynne styling Thomriod. The barbarism of our manners, and son "a dissolute, ebrious, and luxurious Engthe want of those material accessories of civ- lish-Dutchman," we must remember that any ilization among the middle class which were license of abuse was considered justifiable in use on the continent, predisposed our against an "Arminian." visitors against us; while the energy and Next to seeing and learning to know each quick circulation of free life which now ex-other, the great object of the journeys of the JOSEPH JUSTUS SCALIGER. learned, then, was to see MSS. At the pres- printed till 1605, an edition for which the ent day, when the whereabouts of all MSS. Cambridge copy was not employed. The of the classics is ascertained, an editor may "Lexicon" of Photius, which was afterwards still have to undertake a journey to Rome borrowed by Scaliger from England, was or to Florence for the purpose of collation. not the famous "Codex Galeanus," which In the sixteenth century, when a scholar had had not yet found its way into Trinity Colread all the Greek that was in print, it was lege Library, but a transcript made by Richstill necessary that he should visit the great ard Thomson at Florence. His first interest was for books, but by no We have no notice of libraries, in order to complete his knowledge by reading what as yet existed only in MS. means his only one. Though, by the end of the century, the hopes his travels, and it is only from casual hints long entertained of recovering more of the in his later writings-a note here and there capital productions of classical antiquity had in Eusebius, or an allusion in his "Tablepretty well died away, there was still much Talk," that we see how various was his obof the lower empire, of the ecclesiastical servation. The change in the patois with writers, of the grammarians and lexicogra- each day's journey in Italy; the absence in phers, of great value for illustration and in- England of seignorial jurisdiction; the merit terpretation of the nobler remains. The of the Border ballads; the beauty of Mary harvest of fragments, too, scarcely yet after Stuart; our burning coal instead of wood in the lapse of three hundred years all gleaned, the north; the indolent lives of Fellows of had already begun. During his visit to Colleges; the universal prevalence among Italy, Scaliger's attention seems to have us of the sectarian point of view; these little been given chiefly to inscriptions. The la- memoranda of travel are dropped here and bor he bestowed on their transcription, a there quite casually, and belong to that habit task which the frivolous Italian literati, who of his mind already noticed, which sought to lived among them, were too supine to un- bring all the parts of common knowledge to dertake, is evidenced by the great collection bear upon the illustration of the ancients. of Gruter. In this "Corpus Inscriptionum," If in these matters of fact he is not always published by the Commelins at Heidelberg, accurate, the errors will be found chiefly in in 1601, a large, if not the largest, part, was the "Table-Talk," and are ascribable to supplied by Scaliger. Indeed, so great was his reporters. But he is often right where Scaliger's share in this work, commenced at his critics are wrong, e.g., he speaks of the his suggestion, continued by his encourage- rich endowments of the Church of England, ment, and deriving its chief value from his but qualifies this by saying, that the crown corrections, and the indexes, the labor of has invaded them, and extorted a moiety for ten months of his life, that Gruter is over- itself. Here the editor, Le Clerc, contrapowered by his ally, and driven to the un-dicts. But Le Clerc did not know that manly device of concealing the extent of his obligations. In Italy, Scaliger may have thought his time better employed upon this most perishable class of ancient relic. In England, where inscriptions were not to be had, his attention was turned to the libraries. He seems to have been disappointed at not finding here more Codexes. From this it may be inferred that the fact was not yet generally known, that no English monastic house had employed itself in the tranThe feeling with which Scaliger left Italy scription of Greek MSS. He soon perceived, however, that our strength lay in our na- was one of pity or contempt for the mental tional chronicles. Without any of the Re- and moral enervation of its educated men. naissance pedantry which contemned every That with which he regarded the English thing not written in Ciceronian Latin, Scal- was rather aversion for our manners. It iger admired the variety of our monkish was the repugnance of his French nature; chroniclers, in which, for the Anglo-Norman for in these things Scaliger was a genuine period, we yield neither to France nor Ger- Frenchman. Time and experience did not many. None of these were as yet in print-qualify this sentement. As late as 1603 he Archbishop Parker led the way, with Matthew of Westminster, in 1567-and Scaliger must have formed his opinion from the written copies. What Greek we had did not escape him. He notices the Cambridge MS. of" Origen against Celsus," which was not Scaliger was speaking of those scandalous writes to Casaubon, then meditating settlement in this country, to dissuade him :— "You would be going amongst a people who cherish a traditional hatred of the French, and exchanging a certainty for an uncertainty. Settlement in a foreign country is at best a haz |