The story of the Caliph Omar proclaiming throughout the kingdom, at the taking of Alexandria, that the Koran contained everything which was useful to believe and to know, and therefore he commanded that all the books in the Alexandrian library should be distributed to the masters of the baths, amounting to 4000, to be used in heating their stoves during a period of six months, modern paradox would attempt to deny. But the tale would not be singular even were it true: it perfectly suits the character of a bigot, a barbarian, and a blockhead. A similar event happened in Persia. When Abdoolah, who in the third century of the Mohammedan aera governed Khorassan, was presented at Nishapoor with a MS. which was shown as a literary curiosity, he asked the title of it—it was the tale of Wamick and Oozra, composed by the great poet Noshirwan. On this Abdoolah observed, that those of his country and faith had nothing to do with any other book than the Koran; and all Persian MSS. found within the circle of his government, as the works of idolaters, were to be burnt. Much of the most ancient poetry of the Persians perished by this fanatical edict.

When Buda was taken by the Turks, a Cardinal offered a vast sum to redeem the great library founded by Matthew Corvini, a literary monarch of Hungary: it was rich in Greek and Hebrew lore, and the classics of antiquity. Thirty amanuenses had been employed in copying MSS. and illuminating them by the finest art. The barbarians destroyed most of the books in tearing away their splendid covers and their silver bosses; an Hungarian soldier picked up a book as a prize: it proved to be the Ethiopics of Heliodorus, from which the first edition was printed in 1534.

Cardinal Ximenes seems to have retaliated a little on the Saracens; for at the taking of Granada, he condemned to the flames five thousand Korans.

The following anecdote respecting a Spanish missal, called St. Isidore's, is not incurious; hard fighting saved it from destruction. In the Moorish wars, all these missals had been destroyed, excepting those in the city of Toledo. There, in six churches, the Christians were allowed the free exercise of their religion. When the Moors were expelled several centuries afterwards from Toledo, Alphonsus the Sixth ordered the Roman missal to be used in those churches; but the people of Toledo insisted on having their own, as revised by St. Isidore. It seemed to them that Alphonsus was more tyrannical than the Turks. The contest between the Roman and the Toletan missals came to that height, that at length it was determined to decide their fate by single combat; the champion of the Toletan missal felled by one blow the knight of the Roman missal. Alphonsus still considered this battle as merely the effect of the heavy arm of the doughty Toletan, and ordered a fast to be proclaimed, and a great fire to be prepared, into which, after his majesty and the people had joined in prayer for heavenly assistance in this ordeal, both the rivals (not the men, but the missals) were thrown into the flames—again St. Isidore's missal triumphed, and this iron book was then allowed to be orthodox by Alphonsus, and the good people of Toledo were allowed to say their prayers as they had long been used to do. However, the copies of this missal at length became very scarce; for now, when no one opposed the reading of St. Isidore's missal, none cared to use it. Cardinal Ximenes found it so difficult to obtain a copy, that he printed a large impression, and built a chapel, consecrated to St. Isidore, that this service might be daily chaunted as it had been by the ancient Christians.

The works of the ancients were frequently destroyed at the instigation of the monks. They appear sometimes to have mutilated them, for passages have not come down to us, which once evidently existed; and occasionally their interpolations and other forgeries formed a destruction in a new shape, by additions to the originals. They were indefatigable in erasing the best works of the most eminent Greek and Latin authors, in order to transcribe their ridiculous lives of saints on the obliterated vellum. One of the books of Livy is in the Vatican most painfully defaced by some pious father for the purpose of writing on it some missal or psalter, and there have been recently others discovered in the same state. Inflamed with the blindest zeal against everything pagan, Pope Gregory VII. ordered that the library of the Palatine Apollo, a treasury of literature formed by successive emperors, should be committed to the flames! He issued this order under the notion of confining the attention of the clergy to the holy scriptures! From that time all ancient learning which was not sanctioned by the authority of the church, has been emphatically distinguished as profane in opposition to sacred. This pope is said to have burnt the works of Varro, the learned Roman, that Saint Austin should escape from the charge of plagiarism, being deeply indebted to Varro for much of his great work "the City of God."

The Jesuits, sent by the emperor Ferdinand to proscribe Lutheranism from Bohemia, converted that flourishing kingdom comparatively into a desert. Convinced that an enlightened people could never be long subservient to a tyrant, they struck one fatal blow at the national literature: every book they condemned was destroyed, even those of antiquity; the annals of the nation were forbidden to be read, and writers were not permitted even to compose on subjects of Bohemian literature. The mother-tongue was held out as a mark of vulgar obscurity, and domiciliary visits were made for the purpose of inspecting the libraries of the Bohemians. With their books and their language they lost their national character and their independence.

The destruction of libraries in the reign of Henry VIII. at the dissolution of the monasteries, is wept over by John Bale. Those who purchased the religious houses took the libraries as part of the booty, with which they scoured their furniture, or sold the books as waste paper, or sent them abroad in ship-loads to foreign bookbinders.[23]

The fear of destruction induced many to hide manuscripts under ground, and in old walls. At the Reformation popular rage exhausted itself on illuminated books, or MSS. that had red letters in the title page: any work that was decorated was sure to be thrown into the flames as a superstitious one. Red letters and embellished figures were sure marks of being papistical and diabolical. We still find such volumes mutilated of their gilt letters and elegant initials. Many have been found underground, having been forgotten; what escaped the flames were obliterated by the damp: such is the deplorable fate of books during a persecution!

The puritans burned everything they found which bore the vestige of popish origin. We have on record many curious accounts of their pious depredations, of their maiming images and erasing pictures. The heroic expeditions of one Dowsing are journalised by himself: a fanatical Quixote, to whose intrepid arm many of our noseless saints, sculptured on our Cathedrals, owe their misfortunes.

The following are some details from the diary of this redoubtable Goth, during his rage for reformation. His entries are expressed with a laconic conciseness, and it would seem with a little dry humour. "At Sunbury, we brake down ten mighty great angels in glass. At Barham, brake down the twelve apostles in the chancel, and six superstitious pictures more there; and eight in the church, one a lamb with a cross (+) on the back; and digged down the steps and took up four superstitious inscriptions in brass," &c. "Lady Bruce's house, the chapel, a picture of God the Father, of the Trinity, of Christ, the Holy Ghost, and the cloven tongues, which we gave orders to take down, and the lady promised to do it." At another place they "brake six hundred superstitious pictures, eight Holy Ghosts, and three of the Son." And in this manner he and his deputies scoured one hundred and fifty parishes! It has been humorously conjectured, that from this ruthless devastator originated the phrase to give a Dowsing. Bishop Hall saved the windows of his chapel at Norwich from destruction, by taking out the heads of the figures; and this accounts for the many faces in church windows which we see supplied by white glass.

In the various civil wars in our country, numerous libraries have suffered both in MSS. and printed books. "I dare maintain," says Fuller, "that the wars betwixt York and Lancaster, which lasted sixty years, were not so destructive as our modern wars in six years." He alludes to the parliamentary feuds in the reign of Charles I. "For during the former their differences agreed in the same religion, impressing them with reverence to all allowed muniments! whilst our civil wars, founded in faction and variety of pretended religions, exposed all naked church records a prey to armed violence; a sad vacuum, which will be sensible in our English historie."

When it was proposed to the great Gustavus of Sweden to destroy the palace of the Dukes of Bavaria, that hero nobly refused; observing, "Let us not copy the example of our unlettered ancestors, who, by waging war against every production of genius, have rendered the name of GOTH universally proverbial of the rudest state of barbarity."

Even the civilisation of the eighteenth century could not preserve from the destructive fury of an infuriated mob, in the most polished city of Europe, the valuable MSS. of the great Earl of Mansfield, which were madly consigned to the flames during the riots of 1780; as those of Dr. Priestley were consumed by the mob at Birmingham.

In the year 1599, the Hall of the Stationers underwent as great a purgation as was carried on in Don Quixote's library. Warton gives a list of the best writers who were ordered for immediate conflagration by the prelates Whitgift and Bancroft, urged by the Puritanical and Calvinistic factions. Like thieves and outlaws, they were ordered to be taken wheresoever they may be found.—"It was also decreed that no satires or epigrams should be printed for the future. No plays were to be printed without the inspection and permission of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London; nor any English historyes, I suppose novels and romances, without the sanction of the privy council. Any pieces of this nature, unlicensed, or now at large and wandering abroad, were to be diligently sought, recalled, and delivered over to the ecclesiastical arm at London-house."

At a later period, and by an opposite party, among other extravagant motions made in parliament, one was to destroy the Records in the Tower, and to settle the nation on a new foundation! The very same principle was attempted to be acted on in the French Revolution by the "true sans-culottes." With us Sir Matthew Hale showed the weakness of the project, and while he drew on his side "all sober persons, stopped even the mouths of the frantic people themselves."

To descend to the losses incurred by individuals, whose names ought to have served as an amulet to charm away the demons of literary destruction. One of the most interesting is the fate of Aristotle's library; he who by a Greek term was first saluted as a collector of books! His works have come down to us accidentally, but not without irreparable injuries, and with no slight suspicion respecting their authenticity. The story is told by Strabo, in his thirteenth book. The books of Aristotle came from his scholar Theophrastus to Neleus, whose posterity, an illiterate race, kept them locked up without using them, buried in the earth! Apellion, a curious collector, purchased them, but finding the MSS. injured by age and moisture, conjecturally supplied their deficiencies. It is impossible to know how far Apellion has corrupted and obscured the text. But the mischief did not end here; when Sylla at the taking of Athens brought them to Rome, he consigned them to the care of Tyrannio, a grammarian, who employed scribes to copy them; he suffered them to pass through his hands without correction, and took great freedoms with them; the words of Strabo are strong: "Ibique Tyrannionem grammaticum iis usum atque (ut fama est) intercidisse, aut invertisse." He gives it indeed as a report; but the fact seems confirmed by the state in which we find these works: Averroes declared that he read Aristotle forty times over before he succeeded in perfectly understanding him; he pretends he did at the one-and-fortieth time! And to prove this, has published five folios of commentary!

We have lost much valuable literature by the illiberal or malignant descendants of learned and ingenious persons. Many of Lady Mary Wortley Montague's letters have been destroyed, I am informed, by her daughter, who imagined that the family honours were lowered by the addition of those of literature: some of her best letters, recently published, were found buried in an old trunk. It would have mortified her ladyship's daughter to have heard, that her mother was the Sevigne of Britain.

At the death of the learned Peiresc, a chamber in his house filled with letters from the most eminent scholars of the age was discovered: the learned in Europe had addressed Peiresc in their difficulties, who was hence called "the attorney-general of the republic of letters." The niggardly niece, although repeatedly entreated to permit them to be published, preferred to use these learned epistles occasionally to light her fires![24]

The MSS. of Leonardo da Vinci have equally suffered from his relatives. When a curious collector discovered some, he generously brought them to a descendant of the great painter, who coldly observed, that "he had a great deal more in the garret, which had lain there for many years, if the rats had not destroyed them!" Nothing which this great artist wrote but showed an inventive genius.

Menage observes on a friend having had his library destroyed by fire, in which several valuable MSS. had perished, that such a loss is one of the greatest misfortunes that can happen to a man of letters. This gentleman afterwards consoled himself by composing a little treatise De Bibliothecae incendio. It must have been sufficiently curious. Even in the present day men of letters are subject to similar misfortunes; for though the fire-offices will insure books, they will not allow authors to value their own manuscripts.

A fire in the Cottonian library shrivelled and destroyed many Anglo-Saxon MSS.—a loss now irreparable. The antiquary is doomed to spell hard and hardly at the baked fragments that crumble in his hand.[25]

Meninsky's famous Persian dictionary met with a sad fate. Its excessive rarity is owing to the siege of Vienna by the Turks: a bomb fell on the author's house, and consumed the principal part of his indefatigable labours. There are few sets of this high-priced work which do not bear evident proofs of the bomb; while many parts are stained with the water sent to quench the flames.

The sufferings of an author for the loss of his manuscripts strongly appear in the case of Anthony Urceus, a great scholar of the fifteenth century. The loss of his papers seems immediately to have been followed by madness. At Forli, he had an apartment in the palace, and had prepared an important work for publication. His room was dark, and he generally wrote by lamp-light. Having gone out, he left the lamp burning; the papers soon kindled, and his library was reduced to ashes. As soon as he heard the news, he ran furiously to the palace, and knocking his head violently against the gate, uttered this blasphemous language: "Jesus Christ, what great crime have I done! who of those who believed in you have I ever treated so cruelly? Hear what I am saying, for I am in earnest, and am resolved. If by chance I should be so weak as to address myself to you at the point of death, don't hear me, for I will not be with you, but prefer hell and its eternity of torments." To which, by the by, he gave little credit. Those who heard these ravings, vainly tried to console him. He quitted the town, and lived franticly, wandering about the woods!

Ben Jonson's Execration on Vulcan was composed on a like occasion; the fruits of twenty years' study were consumed in one short hour; our literature suffered, for among some works of imagination there were many philosophical collections, a commentary on the poetics, a complete critical grammar, a life of Henry V., his journey into Scotland, with all his adventures in that poetical pilgrimage, and a poem on the ladies of Great Britain. What a catalogue of losses!

Castelvetro, the Italian commentator on Aristotle, having heard that his house was on fire, ran through the streets exclaiming to the people, alla Poetica! alla Poetica! To the Poetic! To the Poetic! He was then writing his commentary on the Poetics of Aristotle.

Several men of letters have been known to have risen from their death-bed to destroy their MSS. So solicitous have they been not to venture their posthumous reputation in the hands of undiscerning friends. Colardeau, the elegant versifier of Pope's epistle of Eliosa to Abelard, had not yet destroyed what he had written of a translation of Tasso. At the approach of death, he recollected his unfinished labour; he knew that his friends would not have the courage to annihilate one of his works; this was reserved for him. Dying, he raised himself, and as if animated by an honourable action, he dragged himself along, and with trembling hands seized his papers, and consumed them in one sacrifice.—I recollect another instance of a man of letters, of our own country, who acted the same part. He had passed his life in constant study, and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; and he seemed sometimes, with a glow on his countenance, to exult that they would not be unworthy of their acceptance. At his death his sensibility took the alarm; he had the folios brought to his bed; no one could open them, for they were closely locked. At the sight of his favourite and mysterious labours, he paused; he seemed disturbed in his mind, while he felt at every moment his strength decaying; suddenly he raised his feeble hands by an effort of firm resolve, burnt his papers, and smiled as the greedy Vulcan licked up every page. The task exhausted his remaining strength, and he soon afterwards expired. The late Mrs. Inchbald had written her life in several volumes; on her death-bed, from a motive perhaps of too much delicacy to admit of any argument, she requested a friend to cut them into pieces before her eyes—not having sufficient strength left herself to perform this funereal office. These are instances of what may be called the heroism of authors.

The republic of letters has suffered irreparable losses by shipwrecks. Guarino Veronese, one of those learned Italians who travelled through Greece for the recovery of MSS., had his perseverance repaid by the acquisition of many valuable works. On his return to Italy he was shipwrecked, and lost his treasures! So poignant was his grief on this occasion that, according to the relation of one of his countrymen, his hair turned suddenly white.

About the year 1700, Hudde, an opulent burgomaster of Middleburgh, animated solely by literary curiosity, went to China to instruct himself in the language, and in whatever was remarkable in this singular people. He acquired the skill of a mandarine in that difficult language; nor did the form of his Dutch face undeceive the physiognomists of China. He succeeded to the dignity of a mandarine; he travelled through the provinces under this character, and returned to Europe with a collection of observations, the cherished labour of thirty years, and all these were sunk in the bottomless sea.

The great Pinellian library, after the death of its illustrious possessor, filled three vessels to be conveyed to Naples. Pursued by corsairs, one of the vessels was taken; but the pirates finding nothing on board but books, they threw them all into the sea: such was the fate of a great portion of this famous library.[26] National libraries have often perished at sea, from the circumstance of conquerors transporting them into their own kingdoms.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: Henry gave a commission to the famous antiquary, John Leland, to examine the libraries of the suppressed religious houses, and preserve such as concerned history. Though Leland, after his search, told the king he had "conserved many good authors, the which otherwyse had bene lyke to have peryshed, to the no smal incommodite of good letters," he owns to the ruthless destruction of all such as were connected with the "doctryne of a rowt of Romayne bysshopps." Strype consequently notes with great sorrow that many "ancient manuscripts and writings of learned British and Saxon authors were lost. Libraries were sold by mercenary men for anything they could get, in that confusion and devastation of religious houses. Bale, the antiquary, makes mention of a merchant that bought two noble libraries about these times for forty shillings; the books whereof served him for no other use but for waste paper; and that he had been ten years consuming them, and yet there remained still store enough for as many years more. Vast quantities and numbers of these books vanished with the monks and friars from their monasteries, were conveyed away and carried beyond seas to booksellers there, by whole ship ladings; and a great many more were used in shops and kitchens."]

[Footnote 24: One of the most disastrous of these losses to the admirers of the old drama occurred through the neglect of a collector—John Warburton, Somerset herald-at-arms (who died 1759), and who had many of these early plays in manuscript. They were left carelessly in a corner, and during his absence his cook used them for culinary purposes as waste paper. The list published of his losses is, however, not quite accurate, as one or more escaped, or were mislaid by this careless man; for Massinger's tragedy, The Tyrant, stated to have been so destroyed, was found among his books, and sold at his sale in 1759; another play by the same author, Believe as You List, was discovered among some papers from Garrick's library in 1844, and was printed by the Percy Society, 1849. It appears to be the very manuscript copy seen and described by Cibber and Chetwood.]

[Footnote 25: One of these shrivelled volumes is preserved in a case in our British Museum. The leaves have been twisted and drawn almost into a solid ball by the action of fire. Some few of the charred manuscripts have been admirably restored of late years by judicious pressure, and inlaying the damaged leaves in solid margins. The fire occurred while the collection was temporarily placed in Ashburnham House, Little Dean's Yard, Westminster, in October, 1731. From the Report published by a Committee of the House of Commons soon after, it appears that the original number of volumes was 958—"of which are lost, burnt, or entirely spoiled, 114; and damaged so as to be defective, 98."]

[Footnote 26: Gianvincenzo Pinelli was descended from a noble Genoese family, and born at Naples in 1535. At the age of twenty-three he removed to Padua, then noted for its learning, and here he devoted his time and fortune to literary and scientific pursuits. There was scarcely a branch of knowledge that he did not cultivate; and at his death, in 1601, he left a noble library behind him. But the Senate of Venice, ever fearful that an undue knowledge of its proceedings should be made public, set their seal upon his collection of manuscripts, and took away more than two hundred volumes which related in some degree to its affairs. The rest of the books were packed to go to Naples, where his heirs resided. The printed books are stated to have filled one hundred and sixteen chests, and the manuscripts were contained in fourteen others. Three ships were freighted with them. One fell into the hands of corsairs, and the contents were destroyed, as stated in the text; some of the books, scattered on the beach at Fermo, were purchased by the Bishop there. The other ship-loads were ultimately obtained by Cardinal Borromeo, and added to his library.]



SOME NOTICES OF LOST WORKS.

Although it is the opinion of some critics that our literary losses do not amount to the extent which others imagine, they are however much greater than they allow. Our severest losses are felt in the historical province, and particularly in the earliest records, which might not have been the least interesting to philosophical curiosity.

The history of Phoenicia by Sanchoniathon, supposed to be a contemporary with Solomon, now consists of only a few valuable fragments preserved by Eusebius. The same ill fortune attends Manetho's history of Egypt, and Berosu's history of Chaldea. The histories of these most ancient nations, however veiled in fables, would have presented to the philosopher singular objects of contemplation.

Of the history of Polybios, which once contained forty books, we have now only five; of the historical library of Diodorus Siculus fifteen books only remain out of forty; and half of the Roman antiquities of Dionysius Helicarnassensis has perished. Of the eighty books of the history of Dion Cassius, twenty-five only remain. The present opening book of Ammianus Marcellinus is entitled the fourteenth. Livy's history consisted of one hundred and forty books, and we only possess thirty-five of that pleasing historian. What a treasure has been lost in the thirty books of Tacitus! little more than four remain. Murphy elegantly observes, that "the reign of Titus, the delight of human kind, is totally lost, and Domitian has escaped the vengeance of the historian's pen." Yet Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. Velleius Paterculas, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which has occasioned the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that Treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence, by Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in his "Institutes." Petrarch declares, that in his youth he had seen the works of Varro, and the second Decad of Livy; but all his endeavours to recover them were fruitless.

These are only some of the most known losses; but in reading contemporary writers we are perpetually discovering many important ones. We have lost two precious works in ancient biography: Varro wrote the lives of seven hundred illustrious Romans; and Atticus, the friend of Cicero, composed another, on the acts of the great men among the Romans. When we consider that these writers lived familiarly with the finest geniuses of their times, and were opulent, hospitable, and lovers of the fine arts, their biography and their portraits, which are said to have accompanied them, are felt as an irreparable loss to literature. I suspect likewise we have had great losses of which we are not always aware; for in that curious letter in which the younger Pliny describes in so interesting a manner the sublime industry, for it seems sublime by its magnitude, of his Uncle,[27] it appears that his Natural History, that vast register of the wisdom and the credulity of the ancients, was not his only great labour; for among his other works was a history in twenty books, which has entirely perished. We discover also the works of writers, which, by the accounts of them, appear to have equalled in genius those which have descended to us. Pliny has feelingly described a poet of whom he tells us, "his works are never out of my hands; and whether I sit down to write anything myself, or to revise what I have already wrote, or am in a disposition to amuse myself, I constantly take up this agreeable author; and as often as I do so, he is still new."[28] He had before compared this poet to Catullus; and in a critic of so fine a taste as Pliny, to have cherished so constant an intercourse with the writings of this author, indicates high powers. Instances of this kind frequently occur. Who does not regret the loss of the Anticato of Caesar?

The losses which the poetical world has sustained are sufficiently known by those who are conversant with the few invaluable fragments of Menander, who might have interested us perhaps more than Homer: for he was evidently the domestic poet, and the lyre he touched was formed of the strings of the human heart. He was the painter of passions, and the historian of the manners. The opinion of Quintilian is confirmed by the golden fragments preserved for the English reader in the elegant versions of Cumberland. Even of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who each wrote about one hundred dramas, seven only have been preserved of AEschylus and of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides. Of the one hundred and thirty comedies of Plautus, we only inherit twenty imperfect ones. The remainder of Ovid's Fasti has never been recovered.

I believe that a philosopher would consent to lose any poet to regain an historian; nor is this unjust, for some future poet may arise to supply the vacant place of a lost poet, but it is not so with the historian. Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: Book III. Letter V. Melmoth's translation.]

[Footnote 28: Book I. Letter XVI.]



QUODLIBETS, OR SCHOLASTIC DISQUISITIONS.

The scholastic questions were called Questiones Quodlibeticae; and they were generally so ridiculous that we have retained the word Quodlibet in our vernacular style, to express anything ridiculously subtile; something which comes at length to be distinguished into nothingness,

"With all the rash dexterity of wit."

The history of the scholastic philosophy furnishes an instructive theme; it enters into the history of the human mind, and fills a niche in our literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these Quodlibetarians, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean texture of brain which they exhausted in demolishing their aerial fabrics.

The following is a slight sketch of the school divinity.

The christian doctrines in the primitive ages of the gospel were adapted to the simple comprehension of the multitude; metaphysical subtilties were not even employed by the Fathers, of whom several are eloquent. The Homilies explained, by an obvious interpretation, some scriptural point, or inferred, by artless illustration, some moral doctrine. When the Arabians became the only learned people, and their empire extended over the greater part of the known world, they impressed their own genius on those nations with whom they were allied as friends, or reverenced as masters. The Arabian genius was fond of abstruse studies; it was highly metaphysical and mathematical, for the fine arts their religion did not permit them to cultivate; and the first knowledge which modern Europe obtained of Euclid and Aristotle was through the medium of Latin translations of Arabic versions. The Christians in the west received their first lessons from the Arabians in the east; and Aristotle, with his Arabic commentaries, was enthroned in the schools of Christendom.

Then burst into birth, from the dark cave of metaphysics, a numerous and ugly spawn of monstrous sects; unnatural children of the same foul mother, who never met but for mutual destruction. Religion became what is called the study of Theology; and they all attempted to reduce the worship of God into a system! and the creed into a thesis! Every point relating to religion was debated through an endless chain of infinite questions, incomprehensible distinctions, with differences mediate and immediate, the concrete and the abstract, a perpetual civil war carried on against common sense in all the Aristotelian severity. There existed a rage for Aristotle; and Melancthon complains that in sacred assemblies the ethics of Aristotle were read to the people instead of the gospel. Aristotle was placed a-head of St. Paul; and St. Thomas Aquinas in his works distinguishes him by the title of "The Philosopher;" inferring, doubtless, that no other man could possibly be a philosopher who disagreed with Aristotle. Of the blind rites paid to Aristotle, the anecdotes of the Nominalists and Realists are noticed in the article "Literary Controversy" in this work.

Had their subtile questions and perpetual wranglings only been addressed to the metaphysician in his closet, and had nothing but strokes of the pen occurred, the scholastic divinity would only have formed an episode in the calm narrative of literary history; but it has claims to be registered in political annals, from the numerous persecutions and tragical events with which they too long perplexed their followers, and disturbed the repose of Europe. The Thomists, and the Scotists, the Occamites, and many others, soared into the regions of mysticism.

Peter Lombard had laboriously compiled, after the celebrated Abelard's "Introduction to Divinity," his four books of "Sentences," from the writings of the Fathers; and for this he is called "The Master of Sentences." These Sentences, on which we have so many commentaries, are a collection of passages from the Fathers, the real or apparent contradictions of whom he endeavours to reconcile. But his successors were not satisfied to be mere commentators on these "sentences," which they now only made use of as a row of pegs to hang on their fine-spun metaphysical cobwebs. They at length collected all these quodlibetical questions into enormous volumes, under the terrifying form, for those who have seen them, of Summaries of Divinity! They contrived, by their chimerical speculations, to question the plainest truths; to wrest the simple meaning of the Holy Scriptures, and give some appearance of truth to the most ridiculous and monstrous opinions.

One of the subtile questions which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialectics, was concerning universals (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not this or that in particular, but all in general. They distinguished universals, or what we call abstract terms, by the genera and species rerum; and they never could decide whether these were substances—or names! That is, whether the abstract idea we form of a horse was not really a being as much as the horse we ride! All this, and some congenial points respecting the origin of our ideas, and what ideas were, and whether we really had an idea of a thing before we discovered the thing itself—in a word, what they called universals, and the essence of universals; of all this nonsense, on which they at length proceeded to accusations of heresy, and for which many learned men were excommunicated, stoned, and what not, the whole was derived from the reveries of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, about the nature of ideas, than which subject to the present day no discussion ever degenerated into such insanity. A modern metaphysician infers that we have no ideas at all!

Of the scholastic divines, the most illustrious was Saint THOMAS AQUINAS, styled the Angelical Doctor. Seventeen folio volumes not only testify his industry but even his genius. He was a great man, busied all his life with making the charades of metaphysics.

My learned friend Sharon Turner has favoured me with a notice of his greatest work—his "Sum of all Theology," Summa totius Theologiae, Paris, 1615. It is a metaphysicological treatise, or the most abstruse metaphysics of theology. It occupies above 1250 folio pages, of very small close print in double columns. It may be worth noticing that to this work are appended 19 folio pages of double columns of errata, and about 200 of additional index!

The whole is thrown into an Aristotelian form; the difficulties or questions are proposed first, and the answers are then appended. There are 168 articles on Love—358 on Angels—200 on the Soul—85 on Demons—151 on the Intellect—134 on Law—3 on the Catamenia—237 on Sins—17 on Virginity, and others on a variety of topics.

The scholastic tree is covered with prodigal foliage, but is barren of fruit; and when the scholastics employed themselves in solving the deepest mysteries, their philosophy became nothing more than an instrument in the hands of the Roman Pontiff. Aquinas has composed 358 articles on angels, of which a few of the heads have been culled for the reader.

He treats of angels, their substance, orders, offices, natures, habits, &c., as if he himself had been an old experienced angel!

Angels were not before the world!

Angels might have been before the world!

Angels were created by God—They were created immediately by Him—They were created in the Empyrean sky—They were created in grace—They were created in imperfect beatitude. After a severe chain of reasoning, he shows that angels are incorporeal compared to us, but corporeal compared to God.

An angel is composed of action and potentiality; the more superior he is, he has the less potentiality. They have not matter properly. Every angel differs from another angel in species. An angel is of the same species as a soul. Angels have not naturally a body united to them. They may assume bodies; but they do not want to assume bodies for themselves, but for us.

The bodies assumed by angels are of thick air.

The bodies they assume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life, but those which are common to inanimate things.

An angel may be the same with a body.

In the same body there are, the soul formally giving being, and operating natural operations; and the angel operating supernatural operations.

Angels administer and govern every corporeal creature.

God, an angel, and the soul, are not contained in space, but contain it.

Many angels cannot be in the same space.

The motion of an angel in space is nothing else than different contacts of different successive places.

The motion of an angel is a succession of his different operations.

His motion may be continuous and discontinuous as he will.

The continuous motion of an angel is necessary through every medium, but may be discontinuous without a medium.

The velocity of the motion of an angel is not according to the quantity of his strength, but according to his will.

The motion of the illumination of an angel is threefold, or circular, straight, and oblique.

In this account of the motion of an angel we are reminded of the beautiful description of Milton, who marks it by a continuous motion,

"Smooth-sliding without step."

The reader desirous of being merry with Aquinas's angels may find them in Martinus Scriblerus, in Ch. VII. who inquires if angels pass from one extreme to another without going through the middle? And if angels know things more clearly in a morning? How many angels can dance on the point of a very fine needle, without jostling one another?

All the questions in Aquinas are answered with a subtlety of distinction more difficult to comprehend and remember than many problems in Euclid; and perhaps a few of the best might still be selected for youth as curious exercises of the understanding. However, a great part of these peculiar productions are loaded with the most trifling, irreverent, and even scandalous discussions. Even Aquinas could gravely debate, Whether Christ was not an hermaphrodite? Whether there are excrements in Paradise? Whether the pious at the resurrection will rise with their bowels? Others again debated—Whether the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary in the shape of a serpent, of a dove, of a man, or of a woman? Did he seem to be young or old? In what dress was he? Was his garment white or of two colours? Was his linen clean or foul? Did he appear in the morning, noon, or evening? What was the colour of the Virgin Mary's hair? Was she acquainted with the mechanic and liberal arts? Had she a thorough knowledge of the Book of Sentences, and all it contains? that is, Peter Lombard's compilation from the works of the Fathers, written 1200 years after her death.—But these are only trifling matters: they also agitated, Whether when during her conception the Virgin was seated, Christ too was seated; and whether when she lay down, Christ also lay down? The following question was a favourite topic for discussion, and the acutest logicians never resolved it: "When a hog is carried to market with a rope tied about his neck, which is held at the other end by a man, whether is the hog carried to market by the rope or the man?"

In the tenth century[29], after long and ineffectual controversy about the real presence of Christ in the Sacrament, they at length universally agreed to sign a peace. This mutual forbearance must not, however, be ascribed to the prudence and virtue of those times. It was mere ignorance and incapacity of reasoning which kept the peace, and deterred them from entering into debates to which they at length found themselves unequal!

Lord Lyttleton, in his Life of Henry II., laments the unhappy effects of the scholastic philosophy on the progress of the human mind. The minds of men were turned from classical studies to the subtilties of school divinity, which Rome encouraged, as more profitable for the maintenance of her doctrines. It was a great misfortune to religion and to learning, that men of such acute understandings as Abelard and Lombard, who might have done much to reform the errors of the church, and to restore science in Europe, should have depraved both, by applying their admirable parts to weave those cobwebs of sophistry, and to confound the clear simplicity of evangelical truths, by a false philosophy and a captious logic.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 29: Jortin's Remarks on Ecclesiastical History, vol. v. p. 17.]



FAME CONTEMNED.

All men are fond of glory, and even those philosophers who write against that noble passion prefix their names to their own works. It is worthy of observation that the authors of two religious books, universally received, have concealed their names from the world. The "Imitation of Christ" is attributed, without any authority, to Thomas A'Kempis; and the author of the "Whole Duty of Man" still remains undiscovered. Millions of their books have been dispersed in the Christian world.

To have revealed their names would have given them as much worldly fame as any moralist has obtained—but they contemned it! Their religion was raised above all worldly passions! Some profane writers, indeed, have also concealed their names to great works, but their motives were of a very different cast.



THE SIX FOLLIES OF SCIENCE.

Nothing is so capable of disordering the intellects as an intense application to any one of these six things: the Quadrature of the Circle; the Multiplication of the Cube; the Perpetual Motion; the Philosophical Stone; Magic; and Judicial Astrology. "It is proper, however," Fontenelle remarks, "to apply one's self to these inquiries; because we find, as we proceed, many valuable discoveries of which we were before ignorant." The same thought Cowley has applied, in an address to his mistress, thus—

"Although I think thou never wilt be found, Yet I'm resolved to search for thee: The search itself rewards the pains. So though the chymist his great secret miss, (For neither it in art nor nature is) Yet things well worth his toil he gains; And does his charge and labour pay With good unsought experiments by the way."

The same thought is in Donne; perhaps Cowley did not suspect that he was an imitator; Fontenelle could not have read either; he struck out the thought by his own reflection, Glauber searched long and deeply for the philosopher's stone, which though he did not find, yet in his researches he discovered a very useful purging salt, which bears his name.

Maupertuis observes on the Philosophical Stone, that we cannot prove the impossibility of obtaining it, but we can easily see the folly of those who employ their time and money in seeking for it. This price is too great to counterbalance the little probability of succeeding in it. However, it is still a bantling of modern chemistry, who has nodded very affectionately on it!—Of the Perpetual Motion, he shows the impossibility, in the sense in which it is generally received. On the Quadrature of the Circle, he says he cannot decide if this problem be resolvable or not: but he observes, that it is very useless to search for it any more; since we have arrived by approximation to such a point of accuracy, that on a large circle, such as the orbit which the earth describes round the sun, the geometrician will not mistake by the thickness of a hair. The quadrature of the circle is still, however, a favourite game with some visionaries, and several are still imagining that they have discovered the perpetual motion; the Italians nickname them matto perpetuo: and Bekker tells us of the fate of one Hartmann, of Leipsic, who was in such despair at having passed his life so vainly, in studying the perpetual motion, that at length he hanged himself!



IMITATORS.

Some writers, usually pedants, imagine that they can supply, by the labours of industry, the deficiencies of nature. Paulus Manutius frequently spent a month in writing a single letter. He affected to imitate Cicero. But although he painfully attained to something of the elegance of his style, destitute of the native graces of unaffected composition, he was one of those whom Erasmus bantered in his Ciceronianus, as so slavishly devoted to Cicero's style, that they ridiculously employed the utmost precautions when they were seized by a Ciceronian fit. The Nosoponus of Erasmus tells of his devotion to Cicero; of his three indexes to all his words, and his never writing but in the dead of night, employing months upon a few lines; and his religious veneration for words, with his total indifference about the sense.

Le Brun, a Jesuit, was a singular instance of such unhappy imitation. He was a Latin poet, and his themes were religious. He formed the extravagant project of substituting a religious Virgil and Ovid merely by adapting his works to their titles. His Christian Virgil consists, like the Pagan Virgil, of Eclogues, Georgics, and of an Epic of twelve books; with this difference, that devotional subjects are substituted for fabulous ones. His epic is the Ignaciad, or the pilgrimage of Saint Ignatius. His Christian Ovid, is in the same taste; everything wears a new face. His Epistles are pious ones; the Fasti are the six days of the Creation; the Elegies are the six Lamentations of Jeremiah; a poem on the Love of God is substituted for the Art of Love; and the history of some Conversions supplies the place of the Metamorphoses! This Jesuit would, no doubt, have approved of a family Shakspeare!

A poet of a far different character, the elegant Sannazarius, has done much the same thing in his poem De Partu Virginis. The same servile imitation of ancient taste appears. It professes to celebrate the birth of Christ, yet his name is not once mentioned in it! The Virgin herself is styled spes deorum! "The hope of the gods!" The Incarnation is predicted by Proteus! The Virgin, instead of consulting the sacred writings, reads the Sibylline oracles! Her attendants are dryads, nereids, &c. This monstrous mixture of polytheism with the mysteries of Christianity, appears in everything he had about him. In a chapel at one of his country seats he had two statues placed at his tomb, Apollo and Minerva; catholic piety found no difficulty in the present case, as well as in innumerable others of the same kind, to inscribe the statue of Apollo with the name of David, and that of Minerva with the female one of Judith!

Seneca, in his 114th Epistle, gives a curious literary anecdote of the sort of imitation by which an inferior mind becomes the monkey of an original writer. At Rome, when Sallust was the fashionable writer, short sentences, uncommon words, and an obscure brevity, were affected as so many elegances. Arruntius, who wrote the history of the Punic Wars, painfully laboured to imitate Sallust. Expressions which are rare in Sallust are frequent in Arruntius, and, of course, without the motive that induced Sallust to adopt them. What rose naturally under the pen of the great historian, the minor one must have run after with ridiculous anxiety. Seneca adds several instances of the servile affectation of Arruntius, which seem much like those we once had of Johnson, by the undiscerning herd of his apes.

One cannot but smile at these imitators; we have abounded with them. In the days of Churchill, every month produced an effusion which tolerably imitated his slovenly versification, his coarse invective, and his careless mediocrity,—but the genius remained with the English Juvenal. Sterne had his countless multitude; and in Fielding's time, Tom Jones produced more bastards in wit than the author could ever suspect. To such literary echoes, the reply of Philip of Macedon to one who prided himself on imitating the notes of the nightingale may be applied: "I prefer the nightingale herself!" Even the most successful of this imitating tribe must be doomed to share the fate of Silius Italicus, in his cold imitation of Virgil, and Cawthorne in his empty harmony of Pope.

To all these imitators I must apply an Arabian anecdote. Ebn Saad, one of Mahomet's amanuenses, when writing what the prophet dictated, cried out by way of admiration—"Blessed be God, the best Creator!" Mahomet approved of the expression, and desired him to write those words down as part of the inspired passage.—The consequence was, that Ebn Saad began to think himself as great a prophet as his master, and took upon himself to imitate the Koran according to his fancy; but the imitator got himself into trouble, and only escaped with life by falling on his knees, and solemnly swearing he would never again imitate the Koran, for which he was sensible God had never created him.



CICERO'S PUNS.

"I should," says Menage, "have received great pleasure to have conversed with Cicero, had I lived in his time. He must have been a man very agreeable in conversation, since even Caesar carefully collected his bons mots. Cicero has boasted of the great actions he has done for his country, because there is no vanity in exulting in the performance of our duties; but he has not boasted that he was the most eloquent orator of his age, though he certainly was; because nothing is more disgusting than to exult in our intellectual powers."

Whatever were the bons mots of Cicero, of which few have come down to us, it is certain that Cicero was an inveterate punster; and he seems to have been more ready with them than with repartees. He said to a senator, who was the son of a tailor, "Rem acu tetigisti." You have touched it sharply; acu means sharpness as well as the point of a needle. To the son of a cook, "ego quoque tibi jure favebo." The ancients pronounced coce and quoque like co-ke, which alludes to the Latin cocus, cook, besides the ambiguity of jure, which applies to broth or law—jus. A Sicilian suspected of being a Jew, attempted to get the cause of Verres into his own hands; Cicero, who knew that he was a creature of the great culprit, opposed him, observing "What has a Jew to do with swine's flesh?" The Romans called a boar pig Verres. I regret to afford a respectable authority for forensic puns; however, to have degraded his adversaries by such petty personalities, only proves that Cicero's taste was not exquisite.

There is something very original in Montaigne's censure of Cicero. Cotton's translation is admirable.

"Boldly to confess the truth, his way of writing, and that of all other long-winded authors, appears to me very tedious; for his preface, definitions, divisions, and etymologies, take up the greatest part of his work; whatever there is of life and marrow, is smothered and lost in the preparation. When I have spent an hour in reading him, which is a great deal for me, and recollect what I have thence extracted of juice and substance, for the most part I find nothing but wind: for he is not yet come to the arguments that serve to his purpose, and the reasons that should properly help to loose the knot I would untie. For me, who only desired to become more wise, not more learned or eloquent, these logical or Aristotelian disquisitions of poets are of no use. I look for good and solid reasons at the first dash. I am for discourses that give the first charge into the heart of the doubt; his languish about the subject, and delay our expectation. Those are proper for the schools, for the bar, and for the pulpit, where we have leisure to nod, and may awake a quarter of an hour after, time enough to find again the thread of the discourse. It is necessary to speak after this manner to judges, whom a man has a design, right or wrong, to incline to favour his cause; to children and common people, to whom a man must say all he can. I would not have an author make it his business to render me attentive; or that he should cry out fifty times O yes! as the clerks and heralds do.

"As to Cicero, I am of the common opinion that, learning excepted, he had no great natural parts. He was a good citizen, of an affable nature, as all fat heavy men—(gras et gausseurs are the words in the original, meaning perhaps broad jokers, for Cicero was not fat)—such as he was, usually are; but given to ease, and had a mighty share of vanity and ambition. Neither do I know how to excuse him for thinking his poetry fit to be published. 'Tis no great imperfection to write ill verses; but it is an imperfection not to be able to judge how unworthy bad verses were of the glory of his name. For what concerns his eloquence, that is totally out of comparison, and I believe will never be equalled."



PREFACES.

A preface, being the entrance to a book, should invite by its beauty. An elegant porch announces the splendour of the interior. I have observed that ordinary readers skip over these little elaborate compositions. The ladies consider them as so many pages lost, which might better be employed in the addition of a picturesque scene, or a tender letter to their novels. For my part I always gather amusement from a preface, be it awkwardly or skilfully written; for dulness, or impertinence, may raise a laugh for a page or two. A preface is frequently a superior composition to the work itself: for, long before the days of Johnson, it had been a custom for many authors to solicit for this department of their work the ornamental contribution of a man of genius. Cicero tells his friend Atticus, that he had a volume of prefaces or introductions always ready by him to be used as circumstances required. These must have been like our periodical essays. A good preface is as essential to put the reader into good humour, as a good prologue is to a play, or a fine symphony to an opera, containing something analogous to the work itself; so that we may feel its want as a desire not elsewhere to be gratified. The Italians call the preface La salsa del libra, the sauce of the book, and if well seasoned it creates an appetite in the reader to devour the book itself. A preface badly composed prejudices the reader against the work. Authors are not equally fortunate in these little introductions; some can compose volumes more skilfully than prefaces, and others can finish a preface who could never be capable of finishing a book.

On a very elegant preface prefixed to an ill-written book, it was observed that they ought never to have come together; but a sarcastic wit remarked that he considered such marriages were allowable, for they were not of kin.

In prefaces an affected haughtiness or an affected humility are alike despicable. There is a deficient dignity in Robertson's; but the haughtiness is now to our purpose. This is called by the French, "la morgue litteraire," the surly pomposity of literature. It is sometimes used by writers who have succeeded in their first work, while the failure of their subsequent productions appears to have given them a literary hypochondriasm. Dr. Armstrong, after his classical poem, never shook hands cordially with the public for not relishing his barren labours. In the preface to his lively "Sketches" he tells us, "he could give them much bolder strokes as well as more delicate touches, but that he dreads the danger of writing too well, and feels the value of his own labour too sensibly to bestow it upon the mobility." This is pure milk compared to the gall in the preface to his poems. There he tells us, "that at last he has taken the trouble to collect them! What he has destroyed would, probably enough, have been better received by the great majority of readers. But he has always most heartily despised their opinion." These prefaces remind one of the prologi galeati, prefaces with a helmet! as St. Jerome entitles the one to his Version of the Scriptures. These armed prefaces were formerly very common in the age of literary controversy; for half the business of an author consisted then, either in replying, or anticipating a reply, to the attacks of his opponent.

Prefaces ought to be dated; as these become, after a series of editions, leading and useful circumstances in literary history.

Fuller with quaint humour observes on INDEXES—"An INDEX is a necessary implement, and no impediment of a book, except in the same sense wherein the carriages of an army are termed Impedimenta. Without this, a large author is but a labyrinth without a clue to direct the reader therein. I confess there is a lazy kind of learning which is only Indical; when scholars (like adders which only bite the horse's heels) nibble but at the tables, which are calces librorum, neglecting the body of the book. But though the idle deserve no crutches (let not a staff be used by them, but on them), pity it is the weary should be denied the benefit thereof, and industrious scholars prohibited the accommodation of an index, most used by those who most pretend to contemn it."



EARLY PRINTING.

There is some probability that this art originated in China, where it was practised long before it was known in Europe. Some European traveller might have imported the hint.[30] That the Romans did not practise the art of printing cannot but excite our astonishment, since they actually used it, unconscious of their rich possession. I have seen Roman stereotypes, or immoveable printing types, with which they stamped their pottery.[31] How in daily practising the art, though confined to this object, it did not occur to so ingenious a people to print their literary works, is not easily to be accounted for. Did the wise and grave senate dread those inconveniences which attend its indiscriminate use? Or perhaps they did not care to deprive so large a body of scribes of their business. Not a hint of the art itself appears in their writings.

When first the art of printing was discovered, they only made use of one side of a leaf; they had not yet found out the expedient of impressing the other. Afterwards they thought of pasting the blank sides, which made them appear like one leaf. Their blocks were made of soft woods, and their letters were carved; but frequently breaking, the expense and trouble of carving and gluing new letters suggested our moveable types which, have produced an almost miraculous celerity in this art. The modern stereotype, consisting of entire pages in solid blocks of metal, and, not being liable to break like the soft wood at first used, has been profitably employed for works which require to be frequently reprinted. Printing in carved blocks of wood must have greatly retarded the progress of universal knowledge: for one set of types could only have produced one work, whereas it now serves for hundreds.

When their editions were intended to be curious, they omitted to print the initial letter of a chapter: they left that blank space to be painted or illuminated, to the fancy of the purchaser. Several ancient volumes of these early times have been found where these letters are wanting, as they neglected to have them painted.

The initial carved letter, which is generally a fine wood-cut, among our printed books, is evidently a remains or imitation of these ornaments.[32] Among the very earliest books printed, which were religious, the Poor Man's Bible has wooden cuts in a coarse style, without the least shadowing or crossing of strokes, and these they inelegantly daubed over with broad colours, which they termed illuminating, and sold at a cheap rate to those who could not afford to purchase costly missals elegantly written and painted on vellum. Specimens of these rude efforts of illuminated prints may be seen in Strutt's Dictionary of Engravers. The Bodleian library possesses the originals.[33]

In the productions of early printing may be distinguished the various splendid editions of Primers, or Prayer-books. These were embellished with cuts finished in a most elegant taste: many of them were grotesque or obscene. In one of them an angel is represented crowning the Virgin Mary, and God the Father himself assisting at the ceremony. Sometimes St. Michael is overcoming Satan; and sometimes St. Anthony is attacked by various devils of most clumsy forms—not of the grotesque and limber family of Callot!

Printing was gradually practised throughout Europe from the year 1440 to 1500. Caxton and his successor Wynkyn de Worde were our own earliest printers. Caxton was a wealthy merchant, who, in 1464, being sent by Edward IV. to negotiate a commercial treaty with the Duke of Burgundy, returned to his country with this invaluable art. Notwithstanding his mercantile habits, he possessed a literary taste, and his first work was a translation from a French historical miscellany.[34]

The tradition of the Devil and Dr. Faustus was said to have been derived from the odd circumstance in which the Bibles of the first printer, Fust, appeared to the world; but if Dr. Faustus and Faustus the printer are two different persons, the tradition becomes suspicious, though, in some respects, it has a foundation in truth. When Fust had discovered this new art, and printed off a considerable number of copies of the Bible to imitate those which were commonly sold as MSS., he undertook the sale of them at Paris. It was his interest to conceal this discovery, and to pass off his printed copies for MSS. But, enabled to sell his Bibles at sixty crowns, while the other scribes demanded five hundred, this raised universal astonishment; and still more when he produced copies as fast as they were wanted, and even lowered his price. The uniformity of the copies increased the wonder. Informations were given in to the magistrates against him as a magician; and in searching his lodgings a great number of copies were found. The red ink, and Fust's red ink is peculiarly brilliant, which embellished his copies, was said to be his blood; and it was solemnly adjudged that he was in league with the Infernals. Fust at length was obliged, to save himself from a bonfire, to reveal his art to the Parliament of Paris, who discharged him from all prosecution in consideration of the wonderful invention.

When the art of printing was established, it became the glory of the learned to be correctors of the press to eminent printers. Physicians, lawyers, and bishops themselves occupied this department. The printers then added frequently to their names those of the correctors of the press; and editions were then valued according to the abilities of the corrector.

The prices of books in these times were considered as an object worthy of the animadversions of the highest powers. This anxiety in favour of the studious appears from a privilege of Pope Leo X. to Aldus Manutius for printing Varro, dated 1553, signed Cardinal Bembo. Aldus is exhorted to put a moderate price on the work, lest the Pope should withdraw his privilege, and accord it to others.

Robert Stephens, one of the early printers, surpassed in correctness those who exercised the same profession.[35]

To render his editions immaculate, he hung up the proofs in public places, and generously recompensed those who were so fortunate as to detect any errata.

Plantin, though a learned man, is more famous as a printer. His printing-office was one of the wonders of Europe. This grand building was the chief ornament of the city of Antwerp. Magnificent in its structure, it presented to the spectator a countless number of presses, characters of all figures and all sizes, matrixes to cast letters, and all other printing materials; which Baillet assures us amounted to immense sums.[36]

In Italy, the three Manutii were more solicitous of correctness and illustrations than of the beauty of their printing. They were ambitious of the character of the scholar, not of the printer.

It is much to be regretted that our publishers are not literary men, able to form their own critical decisions. Among the learned printers formerly, a book was valued because it came from the presses of an Aldus or a Stephens; and even in our own time the names of Bowyer and Dodsley sanctioned a work. Pelisson, in his history of the French Academy, mentions that Camusat was selected as their bookseller, from his reputation for publishing only valuable works. "He was a man of some literature and good sense, and rarely printed an indifferent work; and when we were young I recollect that we always made it a rule to purchase his publications. His name was a test of the goodness of the work." A publisher of this character would be of the greatest utility to the literary world: at home he would induce a number of ingenious men to become authors, for it would be honourable to be inscribed in his catalogue; and it would be a direction for the continental reader.

So valuable a union of learning and printing did not, unfortunately, last. The printers of the seventeenth century became less charmed with glory than with gain. Their correctors and their letters evinced as little delicacy of choice.

The invention of what is now called the Italic letter in printing was made by Aldus Manutius, to whom learning owes much. He observed the many inconveniences resulting from the vast number of abbreviations, which were then so frequent among the printers, that a book was difficult to understand; a treatise was actually written on the art of reading a printed book, and this addressed to the learned! He contrived an expedient, by which these abbreviations might be entirely got rid of, and yet books suffer little increase in bulk. This he effected by introducing what is now called the Italic letter, though it formerly was distinguished by the name of the inventor, and called the Aldine.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 30: China is the stronghold where antiquarian controversy rests. Beaten in affixing the origin of any art elsewhere, the controversialist enshrines himself within the Great Wall, and is allowed to repose in peace. Opponents, like Arabs, give up the chase when these gates close, though possibly with as little reason as the children of the desert evince when they quietly succumb to any slight defence.]

[Footnote 31: They are small square blocks of metal, with the name in raised letters within a border, precisely similar to those used by the modern printer. Sometimes the stamp was round, or in the shape of a foot or hand, with the potter's name in the centre. They were in constant use for impressing the clay-works which supplied the wants of a Roman household. The list of potters' marks found upon fragments discovered in London alone amounts to several hundreds.]

[Footnote 32: Another reason for the omission of a great initial is given. There was difficulty in obtaining such enriched letters by engraving as were used in manuscripts; and there was at this time a large number of professional scribes, whose interests were in some degree considered by the printer. Hence we find in early books a large space left to be filled in by the hand of the scribe with the proper letter indicated by a small type letter placed in the midst. The famous Psalter printed by Faust and Scheffer, at Mentz, in 1497, is the first book having large initial letters printed in red and blue inks, in imitation of the handwork of the old caligraphers.]

[Footnote 33: The British Museum now possesses a remarkably fine series of these early works. They originated in the large sheet woodcuts, or "broadsides," representing saints, or scenes from saintly legends, used by the clergy as presents to the peasantry or pilgrims to certain shrines—a custom retained upon the Continent to the present time; such cuts exhibiting little advance in art since the days of their origin, being almost as rude, and daubed in a similar way with coarse colour. One ancient cut of this kind in the British Museum, representing the Saviour brought before Pilate, resembles in style the pen-drawings in manuscripts of the fourteenth century. Another exhibits the seven stages of human life, with the wheel of fortune in the centre. Another is an emblematic representation of the Tower of Sapience, each stone formed of some mental qualification. When books were formed, a large series of such cuts included pictures and type in each page, and in one piece. The so-called Poor Man's Bible (an evidently erroneous term for it, the invention of a bibliographer of the last century) was one of these, and consists of a series of pictures from Scripture history, with brief explanations. It was most probably preceded by the block books known as the Apocalypse of St. John, the Cantico Canticorum, and the Ars Memorandi.]

[Footnote 34: This was Raoul le Fevre's Recueil des Histoires de Troye, a fanciful compilation of adventures, in which the heroes of antiquity perform the parts of the preux chevaliers of the middle ages. It was "ended in the Holy City of Colen," in September, 1471. The first book printed by him in England was The Game and Playe of the Chesse, in March, 1474. It is a fanciful moralization of the game, abounding with quaint old legends and stories.]

[Footnote 35: Robert Stephens was the most celebrated of a family renowned through several generations in the history of printing. The first of the dynasty, Henry Estienne, who, in the spirit of the age, latinized his name, was born in Paris, in 1470, and commenced printing there at the beginning of the sixteenth century. His three sons—Francis, Robert, and Charles—were all renowned printers and scholars; Robert the most celebrated for the correctness and beauty of his work. His Latin Bible of 1532 made for him a great reputation; and he was appointed printer to Francis I. A new edition of his Bible, in 1545, brought him into trouble with the formidable doctors of the Sorbonne, and he ultimately left Paris for Geneva, where he set up a printing-office, which soon became famous. He died in 1559. He was the author of some learned works, and a printer whose labours in the "noble art" have never been excelled. He left two sons—Henry and Robert—also remarkable as learned printers; and they both had sons who followed the same pursuits. There is not one of this large family without honourable recognition for labour and knowledge, and in their wives and daughters they found learned assistants. Chalmers says—"They were at once the ornament and reproach of the age in which they lived. They were all men of great learning, all extensive benefactors to literature, and all persecuted or unfortunate."]

[Footnote 36: Plantin's office is still existing in Antwerp, and is one of the most interesting places in that interesting city. It is so carefully preserved, that its quadrangle was assigned to the soldiery in the last great revolution, to prevent any hostile incursion and damage. It is a lonely building, in which the old office, with its presses and printing material, still remains as when deserted by the last workman. The sheets of the last books printed there are still lying on the tables; and in the presses and drawers are hundreds of the woodcuts and copperplates used by Plantin for the books that made his office renowned throughout Europe. In the quadrangle are busts of himself and his successors, the Morels, and the scholars who were connected with them. Plantin's own room seems to want only his presence to perfect the scene. The furniture and fittings, the quaint decoration, leads the imagination insensibly back to the days of Charles V.]



ERRATA.

Besides the ordinary errata, which happen in printing a work, others have been purposely committed, that the errata may contain what is not permitted to appear in the body of the work. Wherever the Inquisition had any power, particularly at Rome, it was not allowed to employ the word fatum, or fata, in any book. An author, desirous of using the latter word, adroitly invented this scheme; he had printed in his book facta, and, in the errata, he put, "For facta, read fata."

Scarron has done the same thing on another occasion. He had composed some verses, at the head of which he placed this dedication—A Guillemette, Chienne de ma Soeur; but having a quarrel with his sister, he maliciously put into the errata, "Instead of Chienne de ma Soeur, read ma Chienne de Soeur."

Lully, at the close of a bad prologue said, the word fin du prologue was an erratum, it should have been fi du prologue!

In a book, there was printed, le docte Morel. A wag put into the errata, "For le docte Morel, read le Docteur Morel." This Morel was not the first docteur not docte.

When a fanatic published a mystical work full of unintelligible raptures, and which he entitled Les Delices de l'Esprit, it was proposed to print in his errata, "For Delices read Delires."

The author of an idle and imperfect book ended with the usual phrase of cetera desiderantur, one altered it, Non desiderantur sed desunt; "The rest is wanting, but not wanted."

At the close of a silly book, the author as usual printed the word FINIS.—A wit put this among the errata, with this pointed couplet:—

FINIS!—an error, or a lie, my friend! In writing foolish books—there is no End!

In the year 1561 was printed a work, entitled "the Anatomy of the Mass." It is a thin octavo, of 172 pages, and it is accompanied by an Errata of 15 pages! The editor, a pious monk, informs us that a very serious reason induced him to undertake this task: for it is, says he, to forestal the artifices of Satan. He supposes that the Devil, to ruin the fruit of this work, employed two very malicious frauds: the first before it was printed, by drenching the MS. in a kennel, and having reduced it to a most pitiable state, rendered several parts illegible: the second, in obliging the printers to commit such numerous blunders, never yet equalled in so small a work. To combat this double machination of Satan he was obliged carefully to re-peruse the work, and to form this singular list of the blunders of printers under the influence of Satan. All this he relates in an advertisement prefixed to the Errata.

A furious controversy raged between two famous scholars from a very laughable but accidental Erratum, and threatened serious consequences to one of the parties. Flavigny wrote two letters, criticising rather freely a polyglot Bible edited by Abraham Ecchellensis. As this learned editor had sometimes censured the labours of a friend of Flavigny, this latter applied to him the third and fifth verses of the seventh chapter of St. Matthew, which he printed in Latin. Ver 3. Quid vides festucam in OCULO fratris tui, et trabem in OCULO tuo non vides? Ver. 5. Ejice primum trabem de OCULO tuo, et tunc videbis ejicere festucam de OCULO fratris tui. Ecchellensis opens his reply by accusing Flavigny of an enormous crime committed in this passage; attempting to correct the sacred text of the Evangelist, and daring to reject a word, while he supplied its place by another as impious as obscene! This crime, exaggerated with all the virulence of an angry declaimer, closes with a dreadful accusation. Flavigny's morals are attacked, and his reputation overturned by a horrid imputation. Yet all this terrible reproach is only founded on an Erratum! The whole arose from the printer having negligently suffered the first letter of the word Oculo to have dropped from the form, when he happened to touch a line with his finger, which did not stand straight! He published another letter to do away the imputation of Ecchellensis; but thirty years afterwards his rage against the negligent printer was not extinguished; the wits were always reminding him of it.

Of all literary blunders none equalled that of the edition of the Vulgate, by Sixtus V. His Holiness carefully superintended every sheet as it passed through the press; and, to the amazement of the world, the work remained without a rival—it swarmed with errata! A multitude of scraps were printed to paste over the erroneous passages, in order to give the true text. The book makes a whimsical appearance with these patches; and the heretics exulted in this demonstration of papal infallibility! The copies were called in, and violent attempts made to suppress it; a few still remain for the raptures of the biblical collectors; not long ago the bible of Sixtus V. fetched above sixty guineas—not too much for a mere book of blunders! The world was highly amused at the bull of the editorial Pope prefixed to the first volume, which excommunicates all printers who in reprinting the work should make any alteration in the text!

In the version of the Epistles of St. Paul into the Ethiopic language, which proved to be full of errors, the editors allege a good-humoured reason—"They who printed the work could not read, and we could not print; they helped us, and we helped them, as the blind helps the blind."

A printer's widow in Germany, while a new edition of the Bible was printing at her house, one night took an opportunity of stealing into the office, to alter that sentence of subjection to her husband, pronounced upon Eve in Genesis, chap. 3, v. 16. She took out the two first letters of the word HERR, and substituted NA in their place, thus altering the sentence from "and he shall be thy LORD" (Herr), to "and he shall be thy FOOL" (Narr). It is said her life paid for this intentional erratum; and that some secreted copies of this edition have been bought up at enormous prices.

We have an edition of the Bible, known by the name of The Vinegar Bible; from the erratum in the title to the 20th chap. of St. Luke, in which "Parable of the Vineyard," is printed, "Parable of the Vinegar." It was printed in 1717, at the Clarendon press.

We have had another, where "Thou shalt commit adultery" was printed, omitting the negation; which occasioned the archbishop to lay one of the heaviest penalties on the Company of Stationers that was ever recorded in the annals of literary history.[37]

Herbert Croft used to complain of the incorrectness of our English classics, as reprinted by the booksellers. It is evident some stupid printer often changes a whole text intentionally. The fine description by Akenside of the Pantheon, "SEVERELY great," not being understood by the blockhead, was printed serenely great. Swift's own edition of "The City Shower," has "old ACHES throb." Aches is two syllables, but modern printers, who had lost the right pronunciation, have aches as one syllable; and then, to complete the metre, have foisted in "aches will throb." Thus what the poet and the linguist wish to preserve is altered, and finally lost.[38]

It appears by a calculation made by the printer of Steevens's edition of Shakspeare, that every octavo page of that work, text and notes, contains 2680 distinct pieces of metal; which in a sheet amount to 42,880—the misplacing of any one of which would inevitably cause a blunder! With this curious fact before us, the accurate state of our printing, in general, is to be admired, and errata ought more freely to be pardoned than the fastidious minuteness of the insect eye of certain critics has allowed.

Whether such a miracle as an immaculate edition of a classical author does exist, I have never learnt; but an attempt has been made to obtain this glorious singularity—and was as nearly realised as is perhaps possible in the magnificent edition of Os Lusiadas of Camoens, by Dom Joze Souza, in 1817. This amateur spared no prodigality of cost and labour, and flattered himself, that by the assistance of Didot, not a single typographical error should be found in that splendid volume. But an error was afterwards discovered in some of the copies, occasioned by one of the letters in the word Lusitano having got misplaced during the working of one of the sheets. It must be confessed that this was an accident or misfortune—rather than an Erratum!

One of the most remarkable complaints on ERRATA is that of Edw. Leigh, appended to his curious treatise on "Religion and Learning." It consists of two folio pages, in a very minute character, and exhibits an incalculable number of printers' blunders. "We have not," he says, "Plantin nor Stephens amongst us; and it is no easy task to specify the chiefest errata; false interpunctions there are too many; here a letter wanting, there a letter too much; a syllable too much, one letter for another; words parted where they should be joined; words joined which should be severed; words misplaced; chronological mistakes," &c. This unfortunate folio was printed in 1656. Are we to infer, by such frequent complaints of the authors of that day, that either they did not receive proofs from the printers, or that the printers never attended to the corrected proofs? Each single erratum seems to have been felt as a stab to the literary feelings of the poor author!

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 37: It abounded with other errors, and was so rigidly suppressed, that a well-known collector was thirty years endeavouring ineffectually to obtain a copy. One has recently been added to the British Museum collection.]

[Footnote 38: A good example occurs in Hudibras (Part iii. canto 2, line 407), where persons are mentioned who

"Can by their pangs and aches find All turns and changes of the wind."

The rhythm here demands the dissyllable a-ches, as used by the older writers, Shakspeare particularly, who, in his Tempest, makes Prospero threaten Caliban—

"If thou neglect'st, or dost unwillingly What I command, I'll rack thee with old cramps; Fill all thy bones with aches; make thee roar That beasts shall tremble at thy din."

John Kemble was aware of the necessity of using this word in this instance as a dissyllable, but it was so unusual to his audiences that it excited ridicule; and during the O.P. row, a medal was struck, representing him as manager, enduring the din of cat-calls, trumpets, and rattles, and exclaiming, "Oh! my head aitches!"]



PATRONS.

Authors have too frequently received ill treatment even from those to whom they dedicated their works.

Some who felt hurt at the shameless treatment of such mock Maecenases have observed that no writer should dedicate his works but to his FRIENDS, as was practised by the ancients, who usually addressed those who had solicited their labours, or animated their progress. Theodosius Gaza had no other recompense for having inscribed to Sixtus IV. his translation of the book of Aristotle on the Nature of Animals, than the price of the binding, which this charitable father of the church munificently bestowed upon him.

Theocritus fills his Idylliums with loud complaints of the neglect of his patrons; and Tasso was as little successful in his dedications.

Ariosto, in presenting his Orlando Furioso to the Cardinal d'Este, was gratified with the bitter sarcasm of—"Dove diavolo avete pigliato tante coglionerie?" Where the devil have you found all this nonsense?

When the French historian Dupleix, whose pen was indeed fertile, presented his book to the Duke d'Epernon, this Maecenas, turning to the Pope's Nuncio, who was present, very coarsely exclaimed—"Cadedids! ce monsieur a un flux enrage, il chie un livre toutes les lunes!"

Thomson, the ardent author of the Seasons, having extravagantly praised a person of rank, who afterwards appeared to be undeserving of eulogiums, properly employed his pen in a solemn recantation of his error. A very different conduct from that of Dupleix, who always spoke highly of Queen Margaret of France for a little place he held in her household: but after her death, when the place became extinct, spoke of her with all the freedom of satire. Such is too often the character of some of the literati, who only dare to reveal the truth, when they have no interest to conceal it.

Poor Mickle, to whom we are indebted for so beautiful a version of Camoens' Lusiad, having dedicated this work, the continued labour of five years, to the Duke of Buccleugh, had the mortification to find, by the discovery of a friend, that he had kept it in his possession three weeks before he could collect sufficient intellectual desire to cut open the pages! The neglect of this nobleman reduced the poet to a state of despondency. This patron was a political economist, the pupil of Adam Smith! It is pleasing to add, in contrast with this frigid Scotch patron, that when Mickle went to Lisbon, where his translation had long preceded his visit, he found the Prince of Portugal waiting on the quay to be the first to receive the translator of his great national poem; and during a residence of six months, Mickle was warmly regarded by every Portuguese nobleman.

"Every man believes," writes Dr. Johnson to Baretti, "that mistresses are unfaithful, and patrons are capricious. But he excepts his own mistress, and his own patron."

A patron is sometimes oddly obtained. Benserade attached himself to Cardinal Mazarin; but his friendship produced nothing but civility. The poet every day indulged his easy and charming vein of amatory and panegyrical poetry, while all the world read and admired his verses. One evening the cardinal, in conversation with the king, described his mode of life when at the papal court. He loved the sciences; but his chief occupation was the belles lettres, composing little pieces of poetry; he said that he was then in the court of Rome what Benserade was now in that of France. Some hours afterwards, the friends of the poet related to him the conversation of the cardinal. He quitted them abruptly, and ran to the apartment of his eminence, knocking with all his force, that he might be certain of being heard. The cardinal had just gone to bed; but he incessantly clamoured, demanding entrance; they were compelled to open the door. He ran to his eminence, fell upon his knees, almost pulled off the sheets of the bed in rapture, imploring a thousand pardons for thus disturbing him; but such was his joy in what he had just heard, which he repeated, that he could not refrain from immediately giving vent to his gratitude and his pride, to have been compared with his eminence for his poetical talents! Had the door not been immediately opened, he should have expired; he was not rich, it was true, but he should now die contented! The cardinal was pleased with his ardour, and probably never suspected his flattery; and the next week our new actor was pensioned.

On Cardinal Richelieu, another of his patrons, he gratefully made this epitaph:—

Cy gist, ouy gist, par la mort bleu, Le Cardinal de Richelieu, Et ce qui cause mon ennuy Ma PENSION avec lui.

Here lies, egad, 'tis very true, The illustrious Cardinal Richelieu: My grief is genuine—void of whim! Alas! my pension lies with him!

Le Brun, the great French artist, painted himself holding in his hand the portrait of his earliest patron. In this accompaniment the Artist may be said to have portrayed the features of his soul. If genius has too often complained of its patrons, has it not also often over-valued their protection?



POETS, PHILOSOPHERS, AND ARTISTS, MADE BY ACCIDENT.

Accident has frequently occasioned the most eminent geniuses to display their powers. "It was at Rome," says Gibbon, "on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the City first started to my mind."

Father Malebranche having completed his studies in philosophy and theology without any other intention than devoting himself to some religious order, little expected the celebrity his works acquired for him. Loitering in an idle hour in the shop of a bookseller, and turning over a parcel of books, L'Homme de Descartes fell into his hands. Having dipt into parts, he read with such delight that the palpitations of his heart compelled him to lay the volume down. It was this circumstance that produced those profound contemplations which made him the Plato of his age.

Cowley became a poet by accident. In his mother's apartment he found, when very young, Spenser's Fairy Queen; and, by a continual study of poetry, he became so enchanted by the Muse, that he grew irrecoverably a poet.