Chapter XXVI…

Chapter XXVI

HISTORY OF SOME OTHER PROVINCES OF LITERATURE FROM 1600 TO 1650.

SECT. I.

ON NATURAL HISTORY.

Zoology--Fabricius on Language of Brutes--Botany.

|Aldrovandus.|

1. The vast collections of Aldrovandus on zoology, though they may be considered as representing to us the knowledge of the sixteenth century, were, as has been seen before, only published in a small part before its close. The fourth and concluding part of his Ornithology appeared in 1603; the History of Insects in 1604. Aldrovandus himself died in 1605. The posthumous volumes appeared in considerable intervals: that on molluscous animals and zoophytes in 1606; on fishes and cetacea in 1613; on whole-hoofed quadrupeds in 1616; on digitate quadrupeds, both viviparous and oviparous, in 1637; on serpents in 1640; and on cloven-hoofed quadrupeds in 1642. There are also volumes on plants and minerals. These were all printed at Bologna, and most of them afterwards at Frankfort; but a complete collection is very rare.

|Clusius.|

2. In the Exotica of Clusius, 1605, a miscellaneous volume on natural history, chiefly, but not wholly, consisting of translations or extracts from older works, we find several new species of simiæ, the manis, or scaly ant-eater of the old world, the three-toed sloth, and one or two armadillos. We may add also the since extinguished race, that phœnix of ornithologists, the much-lamented dodo. This portly bird is delineated by Clusius, such as it then existed in the Mauritius.

|Rio and Marcgraf.|

3. In 1648, Piso on the Materia Medica of Brazil, together with Marcgraf’s Natural History of the same country, was published at Leyden, with notes by De Laet. The descriptions of Marcgraf are good, and enable us to identify the animals. They correct the imperfect notions of Gesner, and add several species which do not appear in his work, or perhaps in that of Aldrovandus: such as the tamandua, or Brasilian ant-eater; several of the family of cavies; the coati-mondi, which Gesner had perhaps meant in a defective description; the lama, the pacos, the jaguar, and some smaller feline animals; the prehensile porcupine, and several ruminants. But some, at least, of these had been already described in the histories of the West Indies, by Hernandez d’Oviedo, Acosta, and Herrera.

|Jonston.|

4. Jonston, a Pole of Scots origin, collected the information of his predecessors in a Natural History of Animals, published in successive parts from 1648 to 1652. The History of Quadrupeds appeared in the latter year. “The text,” says Cuvier, “is extracted, with some taste, from Gesner, Aldrovandus, Marcgraf, and Mouffet; and it answered its purpose as an elementary work in natural history, till Linnæus taught a more accurate method of classifying, naming, and describing animals. Even Linnæus cites him continually.”[640] I find in Jonston a pretty good account of the chimpanzee (Orang-otang Indorum, ab Angola delatus), taken perhaps from the Observationes Medicæ of Tulpius.[641] The delineations in Jonston being from copper-plates, are superior to the coarse wood-cuts of Gesner, but fails sometimes very greatly in exactness. In his notions of classification, being little else than a compiler, it may be supposed that he did not advance a step beyond his predecessors. The Theatrum Insectorum by Mouffet, an English physician of the preceding century, was published in 1634; it seems to be compiled in a considerable degree from the unpublished papers of Gesner and foreign naturalists, whom the author has rather too servilely copied. Haller, however, is said to have placed Mouffet above all entomologists before the age of Swammerdam.[642]

[640] Biogr. Univ.

[641] Grotius; Epist. ad Gallos, p. 21., gives an account of a chimpanzee, monstrum hominis dicam an bestiæ? and refers to Tulpius. The doubt of Grotius as to the possible humanity of this quam similis turpissima bestia nobis, is not so strange as the much graver language of Linnæus.

[642] Biogr. Univ. Chalmers. I am no judge of the merits of the book; but if the following sentence of the English translation does it no injustice, Mouffet must have taken little pains to do more than transcribe. “In Germany and England I do not hear that there are any grasshoppers at all; but if there be, they are in both countries called Bow-krickets, or Baulm-krickets,” p. 989. This translation is subjoined to Topsell’s History of Four-footed Beasts, collected out of Gesner and others, in an edition of 1658. The first edition of Topsell’s very ordinary composition was in 1608.

|Fabricius on the language of brutes.|

5. We may place under the head of zoology a short essay by Fabricius de Aquapendente on the language of brutes; a subject very curious in itself, and which has by no means sufficiently attracted notice even in this experimental age. It cannot be said that Fabricius enters thoroughly into the problem, much less exhausts it. He divides the subject into six questions:--1. Whether brutes have a language, and of what kind: 2. How far it differs from that of man, and whether the languages of different species differ from one another: 3. What is its use: 4. In what modes animals express their affections: 5. What means we have of understanding their language: 6. What is their organ of speech. The affirmative of the first question he proves by authority of several writers, confirmed by experience, especially of hunters, shepherds, and cowherds, who know by the difference of sounds what animals mean to express. It may be objected that brutes utter sounds, but do not speak. But this is merely as we define speech; and he attempts to show that brutes by varying their utterance do all that we do by literal sounds. This leads to the solution of the second question. Men agree with brutes in having speech, and in forming elementary sounds of determinate time; but ours is more complex; these elementary sounds, which he calls articulos, or joints of the voice, being quicker and more numerous. Man, again, forms his sounds more by means of the lips and tongue, which are softer in him than they are in brutes. Hence, his speech runs into great variety and complication, which we call language, while that of animals within the same species is much more uniform.

6. The question as to the use of speech to brutes is not difficult. But he seems to confine this utility to the expression of particular emotions, and does not meddle with the more curious inquiry, whether they have a capacity of communicating specific facts to one another; and if they have, whether this is done through the organs of the voice. The fourth question is, in how many modes animals express their feelings. These are by look, by gesture, by sound, by voice, by language. Fabricius tells us that he had seen a dog, meaning to expel another dog from the place he wished himself to occupy, begin by looking fierce, then use meaning gestures, then growl, and finally bark. Inferior animals, such as worms, have only the two former sorts of communication. Fishes, at least some kinds, have a power of emitting a sound, though not properly a voice; this may be by the fins or gills. To insects also he seems to deny voice, much more language, though they declare their feelings by sound. Even of oxen, stags, and some other quadrupeds, he would rather say that they have no voice than language. But cats, dogs, and birds, have a proper language. All, however, are excelled by man, who is truly called μεροψ [meropsi], from his more clear and distinct articulations.

7. In the fifth place, however difficult it may appear to understand the language of brutes, we know that they understand what is said to them; how much more, therefore, ought we, superior in reason, to understand them. He proceeds from hence to an analysis of the passions, which he reduces to four: joy, desire, grief, and fear. Having thus drawn our map of the passions, we must ascertain by observation what are the articulations of which any species of animals is capable, which cannot be done by description. His own experiments were made on the dog and the hen. Their articulations are sometimes complex; as, when a dog wants to come into his master’s chamber, he begins by a shrill small yelp, expressive of desire, which becomes deeper, so as to denote a mingled desire and annoyance, and ends in a lamentable howl of the latter feeling alone. Fabricius gives several other rules deduced from observation of dogs, but ends by confessing that he has not fully attained his object, which was to furnish everyone with a compendious method of understanding the language of animals: the inquirer must therefore proceed upon these rudiments, and make out more by observation and good canine society. He shows finally, from the different structure of the organs of speech, that no brute can ever rival man; their chief instrument being the throat, which we use only for vowel sounds. Two important questions are hardly touched in this little treatise: first, as has been said, whether brutes can communicate specific facts to each other; and secondly, to what extent they can associate ideas with the language of man. These ought to occupy our excellent naturalists.

|Botany--Columna.|

8. Columna, belonging to the Colonna family, and one of the greatest botanists of the sixteenth century, maintained the honour of that science during the present period, which his long life embraced. In the academy of the Lincei, founded by Prince Fredric Cesi about 1606, and to which the revival of natural philosophy is greatly due Columna took a conspicuous share. His Ecphrasis, a history of rare plants, was published in two parts at Rome, in 1606 and 1616. In this he laid down the true basis of the science, by establishing the distinction of genera, which Gesner, Cæsalpin, and Camerarius had already conceived, but which it was left for Columna to confirm and employ. He alone, of all the contemporary botanists, seems to have appreciated the luminous ideas which Cæsalpin had bequeathed to posterity.[643] In his posthumous observations on the natural history of Mexico by Hernandez, he still farther developed the philosophy of botanical arrangements. Columna is the first who used copper instead of wood to delineate plants; an improvement which soon became general. This was in the Φυτοβασανος, [Phytobasanos], sive Plantarum aliquot Historia, 1594. There are errors in this work; but it is remarkable for the accuracy of the descriptions, and for the correctness and beauty of the figures.[644]

[643] Biogr. Univ.

[644] Id. Sprengel.

|John and Gaspar Bauhin.|

9. Two brothers, John and Gaspar Bauhin, inferior in philosophy to Columna, made more copious additions to the nomenclature and description of plants. The elder, who was born in 1541, and had acquired some celebrity as a botanist in the last century, lived to complete, but not to publish, an Historia Plantarum Universalis, which did not appear till 1650. It contains the descriptions of 5,000 species, and the figures of 3,577, but small and ill executed. His brother, though much younger, had preceded him, not only by the Phytopinax in 1596, but by his chief work, the Pinax Theatri Botanici, in 1623. “Gaspar Bauhin,” says a modern botanist, “is inferior to his brother in his descriptions and in sagacity; but his delineations are better, and his synonyms more complete. They are both below Clusius in description, and below several older botanists in their figures. In their arrangement they follow Lobel, and have neglected the lights which Cæsalpin and Columna had held out. Their chief praise is to have brought together a great deal of knowledge acquired by their predecessors, but the merit of both has been exaggerated.”[645]

[645] Biog. Univ. Pulteney speaks more highly of John Bauhin. “That which Gesner performed for zoology, John Bauhin effected in botany. It is, in reality, a repository of all that was valuable in the ancients, in his immediate predecessors, and in the discoveries of his own time, relating to the history of vegetables, and is executed with that accuracy and critical judgment which can only be exhibited by superior talents.” Hist. of Botany in England, i. 190.

|Parkinson.|

10. Johnson, in 1636, published an edition of Gerard’s Herbal. But the Theatrum Botanicum of Parkinson, in 1640, is a work, says Pulteney, of much more originality than Gerard’s and it contains abundantly more matter. We find in it near 3,800 plants; but many descriptions recur more than once. The arrangement is in seventeen classes, partly according to the known or supposed qualities of the plant, and partly according to their external character.[646] “This heterogeneous classification, which seems to be founded on that of Dodoens, shows the small advances that had been made towards any truly scientific distribution; on the contrary, Gerard, Johnson, and Parkinson, had rather gone back, by not sufficiently pursuing the example of Lobel.”

[646] P. 146.

SECT. II.

ON ANATOMY AND MEDICINE.

Claims of early Writers to the Discovery of the Circulation of the Blood--Harvey--Lacteal Vessels discovered by Asellius--Medicine.

|Valves of the veins discovered.|

11. The first important discovery that was made public in this century was that of the valves of the veins; which is justly ascribed to Fabricius de Aquapendente, a professor at Padua; because, though some of these valves are described even by Berenger, and further observations were made on the subject by Sylvius, Vesalius, and other anatomists, yet Fallopius himself had in this instance thrown back the science by denying their existence, and no one before Fabricius had generalised the discovery. This he did in his public lectures as early as 1524; but his tract De Venarum Ostiolis appeared in 1603. This discovery, as well as that of Harvey, has been attributed to Father Paul Sarpi, whose immense reputation in the north of Italy accredited every tale favourable to his glory. But there seems to be no sort of ground for either supposition.

|Theory of the blood’s circulation.|

12. The discovery of a general circulation in the blood has done such honour to Harvey’s name, and has been claimed for so many others, that it deserves more consideration than we can usually give to anatomical science. According to Galen, and the general theory of anatomists formed by his writings, the arterial blood flows from the heart to the extremities, and returns again by the same channels, the venous blood being propelled, in like manner, to and from the liver. The discovery attributed to Harvey was, that the arteries communicate with the veins, and that all the blood returns to the heart by the latter vessels. Besides this general or systemic circulation, there is one called the pulmonary, in which the blood is carried by certain arteries through the lungs, and returned again by corresponding veins, preparatory to its being sent into the general sanguineous system; so that its course is through a double series of ramified vessels, each beginning and terminating at the heart, but not at the same side of the heart; the left side, which from a cavity called its ventricle throws out the arterial blood by the aorta, and by another called its auricle receives that which has passed through the lungs by the pulmonary vein, being separated by a solid septum from the right side, which, by means of similar cavities, receives the blood of all the veins, excepting those of the lungs, and throws it out into the pulmonary artery. It is thus evident, that the word pulmonary circulation is not strictly proper, there being only one for the whole body.

|Sometimes ascribed to Servetus.|

13. The famous work of Servetus, Christianismi Restitutio, has excited the attention of the literary part of the world, only by the unhappy fate it brought upon the author, and its extreme scarcity, but by a remarkable passage wherein he has been supposed to describe the circulation of the blood. That Servetus had a just idea of the pulmonary circulation and the aeration of the blood in the lungs, is manifest by this passage, and is denied by no one; but it has been the opinion of anatomists that he did not apprehend the return of the mass of the blood through the veins to the right auricle of the heart.[647]

[647] In the first volume of this work, p. 643, I have observed that Levasseur had come much nearer to the theory of a general circulation than Servetus. But the passage in Levasseur, which I knew only from the quotation in Portal, Hist. de l’Anatomie, i., 373, does not, on consulting the book itself, bear out the inference which Portal seems to deduce; and he has, not quite rightly, omitted all expressions which he thought erroneous. Thus Levasseur precedes the first sentence of Portal’s quotation by the following: Intus (in corde) sunt sinus seu ventriculi duo tantum, septo quodam medio discreti, per cujus foramina sanguis et spiritus communicatur. In utroque duo vasa habentur. For this he quotes Galen; and the perforation of the septum of the heart is known to be one of Galen’s errors. Upon the whole, there seems no ground for believing that Levasseur was acquainted with the general circulation; and though his language may at first lead us to believe that he speaks of that through the lungs, even this is not distinctly made out. Sprengel, in his History of Medicine, does not mention the name of Levasseur (or Vassæus, as he was called in Latin) among those who anticipated, in any degree, the discovery of circulation. The book quoted by Portal is Vassæus in Anatomen Corporis Humani Tabulæ Quatuor, several times printed between 1540 and 1560.

Andrès (Origine e Progressio d’Ogni Litteratura, vol. xiv., p. 37) has put in a claim for a Spanish farrier, by name Reina, who, in a book printed in 1552, but of which there seems to have been an earlier edition (Libro di Maniscalcheria hecho y ordenado por Francisco de la Reyna), asserts, in few and plain words, as Andrès quotes them in Italian, that the blood goes in a circle through all the limbs. I do not know that the book has been seen by anyone else; and it would be desirable to examine the context, since other writers have seemed to know the truth without really apprehending it.

That Servetus was only acquainted with the pulmonary circulation, has been the general opinion. Portal, though in one place he speaks with less precision, repeatedly limits the discovery to this; and Sprengel does not entertain the least suspicion that it went farther. Andrès (xiv. 38), not certainly a medical authority, but conversant with such, and very partial to Spanish claimants, asserts the same. If a more general language may be found in some writers, it may be ascribed to their want of distinguishing the two circulations. A medical friend who, at my request, perused and considered the passage in Servetus, as it is quoted in Allwoerden’s life, says in a letter, “All that this passage implies which has any reference to the greater circulation, may be comprised in the following points:--1. That the heart transmits a vivifying principle along the arteries and the blood which they contain to the anastomosing veins; 2. That this living principle vivifies the liver and the venous system generally; 3. That the liver produces the blood itself, and transmits it through the vena cava to the heart, in order to obtain the vital principle, by performing the lesser circulation, which Servetus seems perfectly to comprehend.

“Now, according to this view of the passage, all the movement of the blood implied is that which takes place from the liver, through the vena cava to the heart, and that of the lesser circulation. It would appear to me that Servetus is on the brink of the discovery of the circulation; but that his notions respecting the transmission of his ‘vitalis spiritus,’ diverted his attention from that great movement of the blood itself, which Harvey discovered.... It is clear, that the quantity of blood sent to the heart for the elaboration of the vital spiritus, is, according to Servetus, only that furnished by the liver to the vena cava inferior. But the blood thus introduced is represented by him as performing the circulation through the lungs very regularly.”

It appears singular that, while Servetus distinctly knew that the septum of the heart, paries ille medius, as he calls it, is closed, which Berenger had discovered, and Vesalius confirmed (though the bulk of anatomists long afterwards adhered to Galen’s notion of perforation), and consequently, that some other means must exist for restoring the blood from the left division of the heart to the right, he should not have seen the necessity of a system of vessels to carry forward this communication.

|To Columbus.|

14. Columbus is acknowledged to have been acquainted with the pulmonary circulation. He says of his own discovery, that no one had observed or consigned it to writing before. Arantius, according to Portal, has described the pulmonary circulation still better than Columbus, while Sprengel denies that he has described it all. It is perfectly certain, and is admitted on all sides, that Columbus did not know the systemic circulation: in what manner he disposed of the blood does not very clearly appear; but, as he conceived a passage to exist between the ventricles of the heart, it is probable, though his words do not lead to this inference, that he supposed the aerated blood to be transmitted back in this course.[648]

[648] The leading passage in Columbus (De Re Anatomica, lib. vii., p. 177, edit. 1559), which I have not found quoted by Portal or Sprengel, is as follows: Inter hos ventriculos septum adest, per quod fere omnes existimant sanguini a dextro ventriculo ad sinistrum aditum patefieri; id ut fieret facilius, in transitu ob vitalium spirituum generationem demum reddi; sed longa errant via; nam sanguis per arteriosam venam ad pulmonem fertur; ibique attenuatur; deinde cum aere una per arteriam venalem ad sinistrum cordis ventriculum defertur; quod nemo hactenus aut animadvertit aut scriptum reliquit; licet maximè et ab omnibus animadvertendum. He afterwards makes a remark, in which Servetus had preceded him, that the size of the pulmonary artery (vena arteriosa) is greater than would be required for the nutrition of the lungs alone. Whether he knew of the passages in Servetus or no, notwithstanding his claim of originality is not perhaps manifest: the coincidence as to the function of the lungs in aerating the blood is remarkable; but, if Columbus had any direct knowledge of the Christianismi Restitutio, he did not choose to follow it in the remarkable discovery that there is no perforation in the septum between the ventricles.

|And to Cæsalpin.|

15. Cæsalpin, whose versatile genius entered upon every field of research, has, in more than one of his treatises relating to very different topics, and especially in that upon plants, some remarkable passages on the same subject, which approach more nearly than any we have seen to a just notion of the general circulation, and have led several writers to insist on his claim as a prior discoverer to Harvey. Portal admits that this might be regarded as a fair pretension, if he were to judge from such passages; but there are others which contradict this supposition, and show Cæsalpin to have had a confused and imperfect idea of the office of the veins. Sprengel, though at first he seems to incline more towards the pretensions of Cæsalpin, comes ultimately almost to the same conclusion; and giving the reader the words of most importance, leaves him to form his own judgment. The Italians are more confident: Tiraboschi and Corniani, neither of whom are medical authorities, put in an unhesitating claim for Cæsalpin as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood not without unfair reflections on Harvey.[649]

[649] Tiraboschi, x., 49. Corniani, vi., 8. He quotes, on the authority of another Italian writer, il giudizio di que illustri Inglesi, i fratelli Hunter, i quali, esaminato bene il processo di questa causa, si maravigliano della sentenza data in favore del loro concittadino. I must doubt, till more evidence is produced, whether this be true.

The passage in Cæsalpin’s Quæstiones Peripateticæ is certainly the most resembling a statement of the entire truth that can be found in any writer before Harvey. I transcribe it from Dutens’s Origine des Découvertes, vol. ii., p. 23. Idcirco pulmo per venam arteriis similem ex dextro cordis ventriculo fervidum hauriens sanguinem, eumque per anastomosin arteriæ venali reddens, quæ in sinistrum cordis ventriculum tendit, transmisso interim aere frigido per asperæ arteriæ canales, qui juxta arteriam venalem protenduntur, non tamen osculis communicantes, ut putavit Galenus solo, tactu temperat. Huic sanguinis circulationi ex dextro cordis ventriculo per pulmones in sinistrum ejusdem ventriculum optimè respondent ea quæ ex dissectione apparent. Nam duo sunt vasa in dextrum ventriculum desinentia, duo etiam in sinistrum: duorum autem unum intromittit tantum, alterum educit, membranis eo ingenio constitutis. Vas igitur intromittens vena et magna quidem in dextro, quæ cava appellatur; parva autem in sinistro ex pulmone introducens, cujus unica est tunica, ut cæterarum venarum. Vas autem educens arteria est magna quidem in sinistro, quæ aorta appellatur; parva autem in dextro, ad pulmones derivans, cujus similiter duæ sunt tunicæ, ut in cæteris arteriis.

In the treatise De Plantis we have a similar, but shorter passage. Nam in animalibus videmus alimentum per venas duci ad cor tanquam ad officinam caloris insiti, et adepta inibi ultima perfectione, per arterias in universum corpus distribui agente spiritu, qui ex eodem alimento in corde gignitur. I have taken this from the article of Cæsalpin in the Biographie Universelle.

|Generally unknown before Harvey.|

16. It is thus manifest that several anatomists of the sixteenth century were on the verge of completely detecting the law by which the motion of the blood is governed; and the language of one is so strong, that we must have recourse, in order to exclude his claim, to the irresistible fact that he did not confirm by proof his own theory, nor announce it in such a manner as to attract the attention of the world. Certainly, when the doctrine of a general circulation was advanced by Harvey, he both announced it as a paradox, and was not deceived in expecting that it would be so accounted. Those again who strove to depreciate his originality, sought intimations in the writings of the ancients, and even spread a rumour that he had stolen the papers of Father Paul; but it does not appear that they talked, like some moderns, of plagiarism from Levasseur or Cæsalpin.

|His discovery.|

17. William Harvey first taught the circulation of the blood in London, in 1619; but his Exercitatio de Motu Cordis was not published till 1628. He was induced, as is said, to conceive the probability of this great truth, by reflecting on the final cause of those valves, which his master, Fabricius de Aquapendente, had demonstrated in the veins; valves whose structure was such as to prevent the reflux of the blood towards the extremities. Fabricius himself seems to have been ignorant of this structure, and certainly of the circulation; for he presumes that they serve to prevent the blood from flowing like a river towards the feet and hands, and from collecting in one part. Harvey followed his own happy conjecture by a long inductive process of experiments on the effects of ligatures, and on the observed motion of the blood in living animals.

|Unjustly doubted to be original.|

18. Portal has imputed to Harvey an unfair silence as to Servetus, Columbus, Levasseur, and Cæsalpin, who had all preceded him in the same track. Tiraboschi copies Portal, and Corniani speaks of the appropriation of Cæsalpin’s discovery by Harvey. It may be replied, that no one can reasonably suppose Harvey to have been acquainted with the passage in Servetus. But the imputation of suppressing the merits of Columbus is grossly unjust, and founded upon ignorance or forgetfulness of Harvey’s celebrated Exercitation. In the proœmium to this treatise he observes, that almost all anatomists have hitherto supposed with Galen, that the mechanism of the pulse is the same as that of respiration. But he not less than three times makes an exception for Columbus, to whom he most expressly refers the theory of a pulmonary circulation.[650] Of Cæsalpin he certainly says nothing; but there seems to be no presumption that he was acquainted with that author’s writings. Were it even true that he had been guided in his researches by the obscure passages we have quoted, could this set aside the merit of that patient induction by which he established his own theory? Cæsalpin asserts at best, what we may say he divined, but did not know to be true; Harvey asserts what he had demonstrated. The one is an empiric in a philosophical sense, the other a legitimate minister of truth. It has been justly said, that he alone discovers who proves; nor is there a more odious office, or a more sophistical course of reasoning, than to impair the credit of great men, as Dutens wasted his erudition in doing, by hunting out equivocal and insulated passages from older writers, in order to depreciate the originality of the real teachers of mankind.[651] It may indeed be thought wonderful that Servetus, Columbus, or Cæsalpin should not have more distinctly apprehended the consequences of what they maintained, since it seems difficult to conceive the lesser circulation without the greater; but the defectiveness of their views is not to be alledged as a counterbalance to the more steady sagacity of Harvey. The solution of their falling so short is that they were right, not indeed quite by guess, but upon insufficient proof; and that the consciousness of this embarrassing their minds, prevented them from deducing inferences which now appear irresistible. In every department of philosophy, the researches of the first inquirers have often been arrested by similar causes.[652]

[650] Pæne omnes huc usque anatomici medici et philosophi supponunt cum Galeno eundem usum esse pulsus, quam respirationis. But though he certainly claims the doctrine of a general circulation as wholly his own, and counts it a paradox which will startle everyone, he as expressly refers (p. 38 and 41 of the Exercitatio) that of a pulmonary transmission of the blood to Columbus, peritissimo, doctissimoque anatomico; and observes, in his proœmium, as an objection to the received theory, quomodo probabile est (uti notavit Rualdus Columbus) tanto sanguine opus esse ad nutritionem pulmonum, cum hoc vas, vena videlicet arteriosa (hoc est, uti tum loquebantur, arteria pulmonalis) exsuperet magnitudine utrumque ramum distributionis venæ cavæ descendentis cruralem, p. 16.

[651] This is the general character of a really learned and interesting work by Dutens Origine des Découvertes attribuées aux Modernes. Justice is due to those who have first struck out, even without following up, original ideas in any science; but not at the expense of those who, generally without knowledge of what had been said before, have deduced the same principles from reasoning or from observation, and carried them out to important consequences. Pascal quotes Montaigne for the shrewd remark, that we should try a man who says a wise thing, for we may often find that he does not understand it. Those who entertain a morbid jealousy of modern philosophy, are glad to avail themselves of such hunters into obscure antiquity as Dutens, and they are seconded by all the envious, the uncandid, and by many of the unreflecting among mankind. With respect to the immediate question, the passages which Dutens has quoted from Hippocrates and Plato, have certainly an appearance of expressing a real circulation of the blood by the words περιοδος [periodos] and περιφερομενου αἱματος [peripheromenou ahimatos]; but others, and especially one from Nemesius, on which some reliance has been placed, mean nothing more than the flux and reflux of the blood, which the contraction and dilatation of the heart was supposed to produce. See Dutens, vol. ii., p. 8-13. Mr. Coleridge has been deceived in the same manner by some lines of Jordano Bruno, which he takes to describe the circulation of the blood: whereas, they merely express its movement to and fro, meat et remeat, which might be by the same system of vessels.

[652] The biographer of Harvey in the Biographie Universelle strongly vindicates his claim. Tous les hommes instruits conviennent aujourd’hui que Harvey est la véritable auteur de cette belle découverte.... Césalpin pressentoit la circulation artérielle, en supposant que le sang rétourne des extrémités au cœur; mais ces assertions ne furent point prouvées; elles ne se trouvèrent étayées par aucune expérience, par aucun fait; et l’on peut dire de Césalpin qu’il divina presque la grande circulation dont les lois lui furent totalement inconnues; la découverte en était réservée a Guillaume Harvey.

|Harvey’s treatise on Generation.|

19. Harvey is the author of a treatise on generation, wherein he maintains that all animals, including men, are derived from an egg. In this book, we first find an argument maintained against spontaneous generation, which, in the case of the lower animals, had been generally received. Sprengel thinks this treatise prolix, and not equal to the author’s reputation.[653] It was first published in 1651.

[653] Hist. de la Médecine, iv., 299. Portal, ii., 477.

|Lacteals discovered by Assellius.|

20. Next in importance to the discovery of Harvey, is that of Assellius as to the lacteal vessels. Eustachius had observed the thoracic duct in a horse. But Asellius, more by chance, as he owns, than by reflection, perceived the lacteals in a fat dog whom he opened soon after it had eaten. This was in 1622, and his treatise, De Lacteis Venis, was published in 1627.[654] Harvey did not assent to this discovery, and endeavoured to dispute the use of the vessels; nor is it to his honour that even to the end of his life he disregarded the subsequent confirmation that Pecquet and Bartholin had furnished.[655] The former detected the common origin of the lacteal and lymphatic vessels in 1647, though his work on the subject was not published till 1651. But Olaus Rudbeck was the first who clearly distinguished these two kinds of vessels.

[654] Portal, ii., 461. Sprengel, iv., 201. Peiresc soon after this got the body of a man fresh hanged after a good supper, and had the pleasure of confirming the discovery of Asellius by his own eyes. Gassendi, Vita Peirescii, p. 177.

[655] Sprengel, iv., 203.

|Optical discoveries of Scheiner.|

21. Scheiner, the Jesuit, proved that the retina is the organ of sight, and that the humours serve only to refract the rays which paint the object on the optic nerve. This was in a treatise entitled, Oculus, hoc est, Fundamentum Opticum, 1619.[656] The writings of several anatomists of this period, such as Riolan, Vesling, Bartholin, contain partial accessions to the science; but it seems to have been less enriched by great discoveries, after those already named, than in the preceding century.

[656] Sprengel, iv., 270.

|Medicine--Van Helmont.|

22. The mystical medicine of Paracelsus continued to have many advocates in Germany. A new class of enthusiasts sprung from the same school, and calling themselves Rosicrucians, pretended to cure diseases by faith and imagination. A true Rosicrucian, they held, had only to look on a patient to cure him. The analogy of magnetism, revived in the last and present age, was commonly employed.[657] Of this school the most eminent was Van Helmont, who combined the Paracelsian superstitions with some original ideas of his own. His general idea of medicine was that its business was to regulate the archæus, an immaterial principle of life and health; to which, like Paracelsus, he attributed a mysterious being and efficacy. The seat of the archæus is in the stomach; and it is to be effected either by a scheme of diet or through the imagination. Sprengel praises Van Helmont for overthrowing many current errors, and for announcing principles since pursued.[658] The French physicians adhered to the Hippocratic school, in opposition to what Sprengel calls the Chemiatric, which, more or less, may be reckoned that of Paracelsus. The Italians were still renowned in medicine. Sanctorius, De Medicina Statica, 1614, seems the only work to which we need allude. It is loaded with eulogy by Portal, Tiraboschi, and other writers.[659]

[657] All in nature, says Croll of Hesse, one of the principal theosophists in medicine, is living; all that lives has its vital force, or astrum, which cannot act without a body, but passes from one to another. All things in the macrocosm are found also in the microcosm. The inward or astral man is Gabalis, from which the science is named. This Gabalis or imagination, is as a magnet to external objects, which it thus attracts. Medicines act by a magnetic force. Sprengel, iii., 362.

[658] Vol. v., p. 22.

[659] Portal, ii., 391. Tiraboschi, xi., 270. Biog. Univ.

SECT. III.

On Oriental Literature--Hebrew Learning--Arabic and other Eastern Languages.

|Diffusion of Hebrew.|

23. During no period of equal length, since the revival of letters, has the knowledge of the Hebrew language been, apparently, so much diffused among the literary world as in that before us. The frequent sprinkling of its characters in works of the most miscellaneous erudition, will strike the eye of every one who habitually consults them. Nor was this learning by any means so much confined to the clergy as it has been in later times, though their order naturally furnished the greater portion of those who laboured in that field. Some of the chief Hebraists of this age were laymen. The study of this language prevailed most in the protestant countries of Europe, and it was cultivated with much zeal in England. The period between the last years of Elizabeth and the Restoration, may be reckoned that in which a knowledge of Hebrew has been most usual among our divines.

|Language not studied in the best method.|

24. Upon this subject, I can only assert what I collect to be the verdict of judicious critics.[660] It seems that the Hebrew language was not yet sufficiently studied in the method most likely to give an insight into its principles, by comparing it with all the cognate tongues, latterly called Semitic, spoken in the neighbouring parts of Asia, and manifestly springing from a common source. Postel, indeed, had made some attempts at this in the last century, but his learning was very slight; and Schindler published in 1612 a Lexicon Pentaglottum, in which the Arabic, as well as Syriac and Chaldaic, were placed in apposition with the Hebrew text. Louis De Dieu, whose “Remarks on all the Books of the Old Testament,” were published at Leyden in 1648, has frequently recourse to some of the kindred languages, in order to explain the Hebrew.[661] But the first instructors in the latter had been Jewish rabbis; and the Hebraists of the sixteenth age had imbibed a prejudice, not unnatural though unfounded, that their teachers were best conversant with the language of their forefathers.[662] They had derived from the same source an extravagant notion of the beauty, antiquity, and capacity of the Hebrew; and, combining this with still more chimerical dreams of a mystical philosophy, lost sight of all real principles of criticism.

[660] The fifth volume of Eichhorn’s Geschichte der Cultur is devoted to the progress of Oriental literature in Europe, not very full in characterising the various productions it mentions, but analytically arranged, and highly useful for reference. Jenisch, in his preface to Meninski’s Thesaurus (Vienna, 1780), has traced a sketch of the same subject. We may have trusted in some respects to Simon, Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament. The biographical dictionaries, English and French, have, of course, been resorted to.

[661] Simon, Hist. Critique du Vieux Testament, p. 494.

[662] This was not the case with Luther, who rejected the authority of the rabbis, and thought none but Christians could understand the Old Testament. Simon, p. 375. But Munster, Fagius, and several others, who are found in the Critici Sacri, gave way to the prejudice in favour of rabbinical opinions, and their commentaries are consequently too Judaical, p. 496.

|The Buxtorfs.|

25. The most eminent Hebrew scholars of this age were the two Buxtorfs of Basle, father and son, both devoted to the rabbinical school. The elder, who had become distinguished before the end of the preceding century, published a grammar in 1609, which long continued to be reckoned the best, and a lexicon of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac, in 1623, which was not superseded for more than a hundred years. Many other works relating to these three dialects, as well as to that of the later Jews, do honour to the erudition of the elder Buxtorf; but he is considered as representing a class of Hebraists which, in the more comprehensive Orientalism of the eighteenth century, has lost much of its credit. The son trod closely in his father’s footsteps, whom he succeeded as professor of Hebrew at Basle. They held this chair between them more than seventy years. The younger Buxtorf was engaged in controversies which had not begun in his father’s lifetime. Morin, one of those learned protestants who had gone over to the church of Rome, systematically laboured to establish the authority of those versions which the church had approved, by weakening that of the text which passed for original.[663] Hence, he endeavoured to show, though this could not logically do much for his object, that the Samaritan Pentateuch, lately brought to Europe, which is not in a different language, but merely the Hebrew written in Samaritan characters, is deserving of preference above what is called the Masoretic text, from which the protestant versions are taken. The variations between these are sufficiently numerous to affect a favourite hypothesis, borrowed from the rabbis, but strenuously maintained by the generality of protestants, that the Hebrew text of the Masoretic recension is perfectly incorrupt.[664] Morin’s opinion was opposed by Buxtorf and Hottinger, and by other writers even of the Romish church. It has, however, been countenanced by Simon and Kennicott. The integrity, at least, of the Hebrew copyist, was gradually given up, and it has since been shown that they differ greatly among themselves. The Samaritan Pentateuch was first published in 1645, several years after this controversy began, by Sionita, editor of the Parisian Polyglott. This edition, sometimes called by the name of Le Jay, contains most that is in the Polyglott of Antwerp, with the addition of the Syriac and Arabic versions of the Old Testament.

[663] Simon, p. 522.

[664] Id. p. 522. Eichhorn, v., 464.

|Vowel points rejected by Cappel.|

26. An epoch was made in Hebrew criticism by a work of Louis Cappel, professor of that language at Saumur, the Arcanum Punctuationis Revelatum, in 1624. He maintained in this an opinion promulgated by Elias Levita, and held by the first reformers and many other protestants of the highest authority, though contrary to that vulgar orthodoxy which is always omnivorous, that the vowel points of Hebrew were invented by certain Jews of Tiberias in the sixth century. They had been generally deemed coeval with the language, or at least brought in by Esdras through divine inspiration. It is not surprising that such an hypothesis clashed with the prejudices of mankind, and Cappel was obliged to publish his work in Holland. The protestants looked upon it as too great a concession in favour of the Vulgate; which having been translated before the Masoretic punctuation, on Cappel’s hypothesis, had been applied to the text, might now claim to stand on higher ground, and was not to be judged by these innovations. After twenty years, the younger Buxtorf endeavoured to vindicate the antiquity of vowel-points; but it is now confessed that the victory remained with Cappel, who has been styled the father of Hebrew criticism. His principal work is the Critica Sacra, published at Paris in 1650, wherein he still farther discredits the existing manuscripts of the Hebrew scriptures, as well as the Masoretic punctuation.[665]

[665] Simon, Eichhorn, &c. A detailed account of this controversy about vowel-points between Cappel and the Buxtorfs will be found in the 12th volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle; and a shorter précis in Eichhorn’s Einleitung in das alte Testament, vol. i., p. 242.

|Hebrew scholars.|

27. The rabbinical literature, meaning as well the Talmud and other ancient books, as those of the later ages since the revival of intellectual pursuits among the Jews of Spain and the East, gave occupation to a considerable class of scholars. Several of these belong to England, such as Ainsworth, Godwin, Lightfoot, Selden, and Pococke. The antiquities of Judaism were illustrated by Cunæus in Jus Regium Hebræorum, 1623, and especially by Selden, both in the Uxor Hebraica, and in the treatise De Jure Naturali et Gentium juxta Hebræos. But no one has left a more durable reputation in this literature than Bochart, a protestant minister at Caen. His Geographia Sacra, published in 1646, is not the most famous of his works, but the only one which falls within this period. It displays great learning and sagacity; but it was impossible, as has been justly observed, that he could thoroughly elucidate this subject at a time when we knew comparatively little of modern Asia, and had few good books of travels. A similar observation might of course be applied to his Hierozoicon, on the animals mentioned in Scripture. Both these works, however, were much extolled in the seventeenth century.

|Chaldee and Syriac.|

28. In the Chaldee and Syriac languages, which approach so closely to Hebrew, that the best scholars in the latter are rarely unacquainted with them, besides the Buxtorfs, we find Ferrari, author of a Syriac lexicon, published at Rome in 1622; Louis de Dieu of Leyden, whose Syriac grammar appeared in 1626; and the Syriac translation of the Old Testament in the Parisian Polyglott, edited by Gabriel Sionita, in 1642. A Syriac college for the Maronites of Libanus, was founded at Rome by Gregory XIII.; but it did not as yet produce anything of importance.

|Arabic.|

|Erpenius.|

|Golius.|

29. But a language incomparably more rich in literary treasures, and long neglected by Europe, began now to take a conspicuous place in the annals of learning. Scaliger deserves the glory of being the first real Arabic scholar; for Postel, Christman, and a very few more of the sixteenth century, are hardly worth notice. His friend, Casaubon, who extols his acquirements, as usual, very highly, devoted himself some time to this study. But Scaliger made use of the language chiefly to enlarge his own vast sphere of erudition. He published nothing on the subject; but his collections became the base of Rapheling’s Arabic lexicon; and it is said that they were far more extensive than what appears in that work. He who properly added this language to the domain of learning was Erpenius, a native of Gorcum, who, at an early age, had gained so unrivalled an acquaintance with the Oriental languages as to be appointed professor of them at Leyden in 1613. He edited the same year the above-mentioned lexicon of Rapheling, and published a grammar, which might not only be accounted the first composed in Europe that deserved the name, but became the guide to most later scholars. Erpenius gave several other works to the world, chiefly connected with the Arabic version of the Scriptures.[666] Golius, his successor in the Oriental chair at Leyden, besides publishing a lexicon of the language, which is said to be still the most copious, elaborate, and complete that has appeared,[667] and several editions of Arabic writings, poetical and historical, contributed still more extensively to bring the range of Arabian literature before the world. He enriched with a hundred and fifty manuscripts, collected in his travels, the library of Leyden, to which Scaliger had bequeathed forty.[668] The manuscripts belonging to Erpenius found their way to Cambridge; while, partly by the munificence of Laud, partly by later accessions, the Bodleian Library at Oxford became extremely rich in this line. The much larger collection in the Escurial seems to have been chiefly formed under Philip III. England was now as conspicuous in Arabian as in Hebrew learning. Selden, Greaves, and Pococke, especially the last, who was probably equal to any Oriental scholar whom Europe had hitherto produced, by translations of the historical and philosophical writings of the Saracenic period, gave a larger compass to general erudition.[669]

[666] Biogr. Univ.

[667] Jenisch, præfatio in Meninski Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium, p. 110.

[668] Biogr. Univ.

[669] Jenisch, Eichhorn, Biogr. Universelle, Biogr. Britannica.

|Other Eastern languages.|

30. The remaining languages of the East are of less importance. The Turkish had attracted some degree of attention in the sixteenth century; but the first grammar was published by Megiser, in 1612, a very slight performance; and a better at Paris, by Du Ryer, in 1630.[670] The Persic grammar was given at Rome by Raymondi, in 1614; by De Dieu, at Leyden, in 1639; by Greaves, at London, in 1641 and 1649.[671] An Armenian dictionary, by Rivoli, in 1621, seems the only accession to our knowledge of that ancient language during this period.[672] Athanasius Kircher, a man of immense erudition, restored the Coptic, of which Europe had been wholly ignorant. Those farther eastward had not yet begun to enter much into the studies of Europe. Nothing was known of the Indian; but some Chinese manuscripts had been brought to Rome and Madrid as early as 1580; and not long afterwards, two Jesuits, Roger and Ricci, both missionaries in China, were the first who acquired a sufficient knowledge of the language to translate from it.[673] But scarcely any farther advance took place before the middle of the century.

[670] Eichhorn, v., 367.

[671] Id. 320.

[672] Eichhorn, 351.

[673] Id. 64.

SECT. IV.

On Geography and History.

|Purchas’s Pilgrim.|

31. Purchas, an English clergyman, imbued by nature, like Hakluyt, with a strong bias towards geographical studies, after having formed an extensive library in that department, and consulted, as he professes, above 1,200 authors, published the first volume of his Pilgrim, a collection of voyages in all parts of the world, in 1613; four more followed in 1625. The accuracy of this useful compiler has been denied by those who have had better means of knowledge, and probably is inferior to that of Hakluyt; but his labour was far more comprehensive. The Pilgrim was at all events a great source of knowledge to the contemporaries of Purchas.[674]

[674] Biogr. Univ. Pinkerton’s Collection of Voyages and Travels. The latter does not value Purchas highly for correctness.

|Olearius and Pietro della Valle.|

32. Olearius was ambassador from the Duke of Holstein to Moscovy and Persia from 1633 to 1639. His travels, in German, were published in 1647, and have been several times reprinted and translated. He has well described the barbarism of Russia and the despotism of Persia; he is diffuse and episodical, but not wearisome; he observes well and relates faithfully: all who have known the countries he has visited are said to speak well of him.[675] Pietro della Valle is a far more amusing writer. He has thrown his travels over Syria and Persia into the form of letters written from time to time, and which he professes to have recovered from his correspondents. This perhaps is not a very probable story, both on account of the length of the letters, and the want of that reference to the present time and to small passing events which authentic letters commonly exhibit. His observations, however, on all the countries he visited, especially Persia, are apparently such as consist with the knowledge we have obtained from later travellers. Gibbon says that none have better observed Persia, but his vanity and prolixity are insufferable. Yet I think that Della Valle can hardly be reckoned tedious; and if he is a little egotistical, the usual and almost laudable characteristic of travellers, this gives a liveliness and racy air to his narrative. What his wife, the Lady Maani, an Assyrian Christian, whom he met with at Bagdad, and who accompanied him through his long wanderings, may really have been, we can only judge from his eulogies on her beauty, her fidelity, and her courage; but she throws an air of romance over his adventures, not unpleasing to the reader. The travels of Pietro della Valle took place from 1614 to 1626; but the book was first published at Rome in 1650, and has been translated into different languages.

[675] Biogr. Univ.

|Lexicon of Ferrari.|

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

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

|Maps of Blaew.|

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

|Davila and Bentivoglio.|

35. Two histories of general reputation were published in the Italian language during these fifty years; one of the civil wars in France by Davila, in 1630, and another of those in Flanders by Cardinal Bentivoglio. Both of these had the advantage of interesting subjects; they had been sufficiently conversant with the actors to know much and to judge well, without that particular responsibility which tempts an historian to prevarication. They were both men of cool and sedate tempers, accustomed to think policy a game in which the strong play with the weak, obtuse, especially the former, in moral sentiment, but on this account not inclined to calumniate an opposite party, or to withhold admiration from intellectual power. Both these histories may be read over and over with pleasure; if Davila is too refined, if he is not altogether faithful, if his style wants the elegance of some older Italians, he more than redeems all this by the importance of his subject, the variety and picturesqueness of his narration, and the acuteness of his reflections. Bentivoglio is reckoned, as a writer, among the very first of his age.

|Mendoza’s Wars of Granada.|

|Mezeray.|

|English historians.|

|English histories.|

36. The History of the War of Granada, that is, the rebellion of the Moriscos in 1565, by the famous Diego de Mendoza, was published posthumously in 1610. It is placed by the Spaniards themselves on a level with the most renowned of the ancients. The French have now their first general historian, Mezeray, a writer esteemed for his lively style and bold sense, but little read, of course, in an age like the last or our own, which have demanded an exactness in matter of fact, and an extent of historical erudition, which was formerly unknown. We now began, in England, to cultivate historical composition, and with so much success, that the present period was far more productive of such works as deserve remembrance than a whole century that next followed. But the most considerable of these have already been mentioned. Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s History of Henry VIII. ought here to be added to the list, as a book of good authority, relatively at least to any that preceded, and written in a manly and judicious spirit. Camden’s Life of Elizabeth is also a solid and valuable history. Bacon’s Life of Henry VII. is something more; it is the first instance in our language of the application of philosophy to reasoning on public events in the manner of the ancients and the Italians. Praise upon Henry is too largely bestowed; but it was in the nature of Bacon to admire too much a crafty and selfish policy; and he thought also, no doubt, that so near an ancestor of his own sovereign should not be treated with severe impartiality.

SECT. V.

On general State of Literature.

|Universities.|

37. Of the Italian and other continental universities, we have little to say beyond what may be collected from the general tenor of this literary history, that they contributed little to those departments of knowledge to which we have paid most attention, and adhering pertinaciously to their ancient studies, were left behind in the advance of the human mind. They were, indeed, not less crowded with scholars than before, being the necessary and prescribed road to lucrative professions. In theology, law, and medicine, sciences, the two former of which, at least, did not claim to be progressive, they might sustain a respectable posture; in philosophy, and even in polite letters, they were less prominent.

|Bodleian library founded.|

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

|Casaubon’s account of Oxford.|

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

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

[678] Casaub. Epist., 899.

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

|Catalogue of Bodleian library.|

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

[679] In Museo Britannico.

|Continental libraries.|

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

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

[681] Id. ibid.

|Italian academies.|

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

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

[683] Salfi, vol. xii.

|The Lincei.|

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

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

|Prejudice for antiquity diminished.|

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

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

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

[686] Salfi, xi., 381.

|Browne’s Vulgar Errors.|

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

|Life and character of Peiresc.|

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

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

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

[688] P. 147.

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

[689] Biogr. Universelle.

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

[690] Gassendi, p. 219.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXVII. HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE IN EUROPE FROM 1650 TO 1700

SECT. I.

Dutch Scholars--Jesuit and Jansenist Philologers--Delphin Editions-- French Scholars--English Scholars--Bentley.

|James Frederic Gronovius.|

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

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

[692] Parrhasiana, i., 233.

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

|James Gronovius.|

|Grævius.|

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

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

|Isaac Vossius.|

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

[695] Niceron, vol. xiii.

|Decline of German learning.|

|Spanheim.|

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

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

|Jesuit colleges in France.|

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

[697] Huetiana, p. 71.

[698] Biogr. Univ.

|Port-Royal writers. Lancelot.|

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

[699] Baillet, n. 714.

|Latin grammars. Perizonius.|

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

|Delphin editions.|

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

[700] Huetiana, p. 92.

[701] Critiques Grammairiens, n. 605.

|Le Fevre and the Daciers.|

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

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

|Henry Valois. Complaints of decay of learning.|

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

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

|English learning. Duport.|

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

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

[705] Bibliothèque Choisie, xxv., 18.

|Greek not much studied.|

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

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

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

|Gataker’s Cinnus and Antonius.|

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

|Stanley’s Æschylus.|

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

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

|Other English philologers.|

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

|Bentley.|

|His epistle to Mill.|

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

|Dissertation on Phalaris.|

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

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

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

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

|Disadvantages of scholars in that age.|

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

[711] Monk’s Life of Bentley, p. 12.

SECT. II.

ON ANTIQUITIES.

Grævius and Gronovius--Fabretti--Numismatic Writers--Chronology.

|Thesauri of Grævius and of Gronovius.|

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

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

[713] Biogr. Univ.

|Fabretti.|

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

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

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

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

[717] Fabroni, p. 192.

[718] P. 201.

[719] Biogr. Univ.

|Numismatics. Spanheim--Vaillant.|

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

[720] Bibl. Choisie, vol. xxii.

[721] Biogr. Univ.

|Chronology. Usher.|

23. It would, of course, not be difficult to fill these pages with brief notices of other books that fall within the extensive range of classical antiquity. But we have no space for more than a mere enumeration, which would give little satisfaction. Chronology has received some attention in former volumes. Our learned archbishop Usher might there have been named, since the first part of his Annals of the Old Testament, which goes down to the year of the world 3828, was published in 1650. The second part followed in 1654. This has been the chronology generally adopted by English historians, as well as by Bossuet, Calmet, and Rollin, so that for many years it might be called the orthodox scheme of Europe. No former annals of the world had been so exact in marking dates and collating sacred history with profane. It was, therefore, exceedingly convenient for those who, possessing no sufficient leisure or learning for these inquiries, might very reasonably confide in such authority.

|Pezron.|

24. Usher, like Scaliger and Petavius, had strictly conformed to the Hebrew chronology in all scriptural dates. But it is well known that the Septuagint version, and also the Samaritan Pentateuch, differ greatly from the Hebrew and from each other, so that the age of the world has nearly 2,000 years more antiquity in the Greek than in the original text. Jerome had followed the latter in the Vulgate; and in the seventeenth century it was usual to maintain the incorrupt purity of the Hebrew manuscripts, so that when Pezron, in his Antiquité des Temps Devoilée, 1687, attempted to establish the Septuagint chronology, it excited a clamour in some of his church, as derogatory to the Vulgate translation. Martianay defended the received chronology, and the system of Pezron gained little favour in that age.[722] It has since become more popular, chiefly, perhaps, on account of the greater latitude it gives to speculations on the origin of kingdoms and other events of the early world, which are certainly somewhat cramped in the common reckoning. But the Septuagint chronology is not free from its own difficulties, and the internal evidence seems rather against its having been the original. Where two must be wrong, it is possible that all three may be so; and the most judicious inquirers into ancient history have of late been coming to the opinion, that, with some few exceptions, there are no means of establishing accurate dates before the Olympiads. While the more ancient history itself, even in leading and important events, is so precarious as must be acknowledged, there can be little confidence in chronological schemes. They seem, however, to be very seducing, so that those who enter upon the subject as sceptics become believers in their own theory.

[722] Biogr. Univ. arts. Pezron and Martianay. Bibliothèque Univ., xxiv., 103.

|Marsham.|

25. Among those who addressed their attention to particular portions of chronology, Sir John Marsham ought to be mentioned. In his Canon Chronicus Ægyptiacus, he attempted, as the learned were still more prone than they are now, to reconcile conflicting authorities without rejecting any. He is said to have first started the ingenious idea that the Egyptian dynasties, stretching to such immense antiquity, were not successive but collateral.[723] Marsham fell, like many others after him, into the unfortunate mistake of confounding Sesostris with Sesac. But in times when discoveries that Marsham could not have anticipated, were yet at a distance, he is extolled by most of those who had laboured, by help of the Greek and Hebrew writers alone, to fix ancient history on a stable foundation, as the restorer of the Egyptian annals.

[723] Biograph. Britannica. I have some suspicion that this will be found in Lydiat.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXVIII. HISTORY OF THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE FROM 1650 TO 1700

SECT. I.

Papal Power limited by the Gallican Church--Dupin--Fleury--Protestant Controversy--Bossuet--His Assaults on Protestantism--Jansenism-- Progress of Arminianism in England--Trinitarian Controversy--Defences of Christianity--Pascal’s Thoughts--Toleration--Boyle--Locke--French Sermons--And English--Other Theological Works.

|Decline of papal influence.|

1. It has been observed in the last volume that while little or no decline could be perceived in the general church of Rome at the conclusion of that period which we then had before us, yet the papal authority itself had lost a part of that formidable character, which, through the Jesuits, and especially Bellarmin, it had some years before assumed. This was now still more decidedly manifest; the temporal power over kings was not, certainly, renounced, for Rome never retracts anything; nor was it, perhaps, without Italian Jesuits to write in its behalf; but the common consent of nations rejected it so strenuously, that on no occasion has it been brought forward by any accredited or eminent advocate. There was also a growing disposition to control the court of Rome; the treaty of Westphalia was concluded in utter disregard of her protest. But such matters of history do not belong to us, when they do not bear a close relation to the warfare of the pen. Some events there were which have had a remarkable influence on the theological literature of France, and indirectly of the rest of Europe.

|Dispute of Louis XIV. with Innocent XI.|

2. Louis XIV., more arrogant, in his earlier life, than bigoted, became involved in a contest with Innocent XI., by a piece of his usual despotism and contempt of his subjects’ rights. He extended in 1673 the ancient prerogative, called the regale, by which the king enjoyed the revenues of vacant bishoprics, to all the kingdom, though many Sees had been legally exempt from it. Two bishops appealed to the pope, who interfered in their favour more peremptorily than the times would permit. Innocent, it is but just to say, was maintaining the fair rights of the church, rather than any claim of his own. But the dispute took at length a different form. France was rich in prelates of eminent worth, and among such, as is evident, the Cisalpine theories had never lain dormant since the councils of Constance and Basle. Louis convened the famous assembly of the Gallican clergy in 1682. Bossuet, who is said to have felt some apprehensions lest the spirit of resistance should become one of rebellion, was appointed to open this assembly; and his sermon on that occasion is among his most splendid works. His posture was, indeed, magnificent: he stands forward, not so much the minister of religion as her arbitrator; we see him poise in his hands earth and heaven, and draw that boundary line which neither was to transgress; he speaks the language of reverential love towards the mother church, that of St. Peter, and the fairest of her daughters to which he belongs, conciliating their transient feud; yet, in this majestic tone which he assumes, no arrogance betrays itself, no thought of himself as one endowed with transcendant influence; he speaks for the church, and yet we feel that he raises himself above those for whom he speaks.[724]

[724] This sermon will be found in Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. ix.

|Four articles of 1682.|

3. Bossuet was finally entrusted with drawing up the four articles, which the assembly, rather at the instigation, perhaps, of Colbert than of its own accord, promulgated as the Gallican creed on the limitations of papal authority. These declare: 1. That kings are subject to no ecclesiastical power in temporals, nor can be deposed directly or indirectly by the chiefs of the church; 2. That the decrees of the council of Constance as to the papal authority are in full force and ought to be observed; 3. That this authority can only be exerted in conformity with the canons received in the Gallican church; 4. That, though the pope has the principal share in determining controversies of faith, and his decrees extend to all churches, they are not absolutely final, unless the consent of the catholic church be superadded. It appears that some bishops would have willingly used stronger language, but Bossuet foresaw the risk of an absolute schism. Even thus the Gallican church approached so nearly to it that, the pope refusing the usual bulls to bishops nominated by the king, according to the concordat, between thirty and forty Sees, at last, were left vacant. No reconciliation was effected till 1693, in the pontificate of Innocent XII. It is to be observed, whether the French writers slur this over or not, that the pope gained the honours of war; the bishops who had sat in the assembly of 1682, writing separately letters which have the appearance of regretting, if not retracting, what they had done. These were, however, worded with intentional equivocation; and as the court of Rome yields to none in suspecting the subterfuges of words, it is plain that it contented itself with an exterior humiliation of its adversaries. The old question of the regale was tacitly abandoned; Louis enjoyed all he had desired, and Rome might justly think herself not bound to fight for the privileges of those who had made her so bad a return.[725]

[725] I have derived most of this account from Bausset’s life of Bossuet, vol. ii. Both the bishop and his biographer shuffle a good deal about the letter of the Gallican prelates in 1693. But when the Roman legions had passed under the yoke at the Caudine forks, they were ready to take up arms again.

|Dupin on the ancient discipline.|

5. The doctrine of the four articles gained ground perhaps in the church of France through a work of great boldness, and deriving authority from the learning and judgment of its author, Dupin. In the height of the contest, while many were considering how far the Gallican church might dispense with the institution of bishops at Rome, that point in the established system which evidently secured the victory to their antagonist, in the year 1686, he published a treatise on the ancient discipline of the church. It is written in Latin, which he probably chose as less obnoxious than his own language. It may be true, which I cannot affirm or deny, that each position in this work had been advanced before; but the general tone seems undoubtedly more adverse to the papal supremacy than any book which could have come from a man of reputed orthodoxy. It tends, notwithstanding a few necessary admissions, to represent almost all that can be called power or jurisdiction in the see of Rome as acquired, if not abusive, and would leave, in a practical sense, no real pope at all; mere primacy being a trifle, and even the right of interfering by admonition being of no great value, when there was no definite obligation to obey. The principle of Dupin is that the church having reached her perfection in the fourth century, we should endeavour, as far as circumstances will admit, to restore the discipline of that age. But, even in the Gallican church, it has generally been held that he has urged his argument farther than is consistent with a necessary subordination to Rome.[726]

[726] Bibliothèque Universelle, vi., 109. The book is very clear, concise, and learned, so that it is worth reading through by those who would understand such matters. I have not observed that it is much quoted by English writers.

|Dupin’s Ecclesiastical Library.|

6. In the same year, Dupin published the first volume of a more celebrated work, his Nouvelle Bibliothèque des Auteurs Ecclesiastiques, a complete history of theological literature, at least within the limits of the church, which, in a long series of volumes, he finally brought down to the close of the seventeenth century. It is unquestionably the most standard work of that kind extant, whatever deficiencies may have been found in its execution. The immense erudition requisite for such an undertaking may have rendered it inevitable to take some things at second hand, or to fall into some errors; and we may add other causes less necessary, the youth of the writer in the first volumes, and the rapidity with which they appeared. Integrity, love of truth, and moderation, distinguish this ecclesiastical history, perhaps beyond any other. Dupin is often near the frontier of orthodoxy, but he is careful, even in the eyes of jealous catholics, not quite to overstep it. This work was soon translated into English, and furnished a large part of such knowledge on the subject as our own divines possessed. His free way of speaking, however, on the Roman supremacy and some other points, excited the animadversion of more rigid persons, and among others of Bossuet, who stood on his own vantage-ground, ready to strike on every side. The most impartial critics have been of Dupin’s mind; but Bossuet, like all dogmatic champions Of orthodoxy, never sought truth by an analytical process of investigation, assuming his own possession of it as an axiom in the controversy.[727]

[727] Bibliothèque Universelle, iii. 39, vii. 335, xxii. 120. Biogr. Universelle. Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. xxx. Dupin seems not to have held the superiority of bishops to priests jure divino, which nettles our man of Meaux. Ces grands critiques sont peu favorables aux supériorités ecclésiastiques, et n’aiment guère plus celles des evêques que celle du pape, p. 491.

|Fleury’s Ecclesiastical History.|

7. Dupin was followed a few years afterwards by one not his superior in learning and candour (though deficient in neither), but in skill of narration and beauty of style, Claude Fleury. The first volume of his Ecclesiastical History came forth in 1691; but a part only of the long series falls within this century. The learning of Fleury has been said to be frequently not original; and his prolixity to be too great for an elementary historian. The former is only blameable when he has concealed his immediate authorities; few works of great magnitude have been written wholly from the prime sources; with regard to his diffuseness, it is very convenient to those who want access to the original writers, or leisure to collate them. Fleury has been called by some credulous and uncritical; but he is esteemed faithful, moderate, and more respectful or cautious than Dupin. Yet many of his volumes are a continual protest against the vices and ambition of the mediæval popes, and his Ecclesiastical History must be reckoned among the causes of that estrangement, in spirit and affection, from the court of Rome which leavens the literature of France in the eighteenth century.

|His Dissertations.|

8. The dissertations of Fleury, interspersed with his history, were more generally read and more conspicuously excellent. Concise, but neither dry nor superficial; luminous, yet appearing simple; philosophical without the affectation of profundity, seizing all that is most essential in their subject without the tediousness of detail or the pedantry of quotation; written, above all, with that clearness, that ease, that unaffected purity of taste, which belong to the French style of that best age, they present a contrast not only to the inferior writings on philosophical history with which our age abounds, but, in some respects, even to the best. It cannot be a crime that these dissertations contain a good deal which, after more than a century’s labour in historical inquiry, has become more familiar than it was.

|Protestant Controversy in France.|

9. The French protestants, notwithstanding their disarmed condition, were not, I apprehend, much oppressed under Richelieu and Mazarin. But soon afterwards an eagerness to accelerate what was taking place through natural causes, their return into the church, brought on a series of harassing edicts, which ended in the revocation of that of Nantes. During this time, they were assailed by less terrible weapons, yet such as required no ordinary strength to resist, the polemical writings of the three greatest men in the church of France, Nicole, Arnauld, and Bossuet. The two former were desirous to efface the reproaches of an approximation to Calvinism, and of a disobedience to the Catholic church, under which their Jansenist party was labouring. Nicole began with a small treatise, entitled La Perpétuité de la Foi de l’Eglise Catholique, touchant l’Eucharistie, in 1664. This aimed to prove that the tenet of transubstantiation had been constant in the church. Claude, the most able controvertist among the French protestants, replied in the next year. This led to a much more considerable work by Nicole and Arnauld conjointly, with the same title as the former; nor was Claude slow in combating his double-headed adversary. Nicole is said to have written the greater portion of this second treatise, though it commonly bears the name of his more illustrious colleague.[728]

[728] Biogr. Univ.

|Bossuet’s exposition of Catholic faith.|

10. Both Arnauld and Nicole were eclipsed by the most distinguished and successful advocate of the Catholic church, Bossuet. His Exposition de la Foi Catholique was written in 1668, for the use of two brothers of the Dangeau family; but having been communicated to Turenne, the most eminent protestant that remained in France, it contributed much to his conversion. It was published in 1671; and though enlarged from the first sketch, does not exceed eighty pages in octavo. Nothing can be more precise, more clear, or more free from all circuity and detail than this little book; everything is put in the most specious light; the authority of the ancient church, recognised by the majority of protestants, is alone kept in sight. Bossuet limits himself to doctrines established by the Council of Trent, leaving out of the discussion not only all questionable points, but, what is perhaps less fair, all rites and usages, however general, or sanctioned by the regular discipline of the church, except so far as formally approved by that council. Hence, he glides with a transient step over the invocation of saints and the worship of images, but presses with his usual dexterity on the inconsistencies and weak concessions of his antagonists. The Calvinists, or some of them, had employed a jargon of words about real presence, which he exposes with admirable brevity and vigour.[729] Nor does he gain less advantage in favour of tradition and church authority from the assumption of somewhat similar claims by the same party. It has often been alledged that the Exposition of Bossuet was not well received by many on his own side. And for this there seems to be some foundation, though the Protestant controvertists have made too much of the facts. It was published at Rome in 1678, and approved in the most formal manner by Innocent XI. the next year. But it must have been perceived to separate the faith of the church, as it rested on dry propositions, from the same faith living and embodied in the every-day worship of the people.[730]

[729] Bossuet observes that most other controversies are found to depend more on words than substance, and the difference becomes less the more they are examined; but in that of the eucharist the contrary is the case, since the Calvinists endeavour to accommodate their phraseology to the Catholics, while essentially they differ. Vol. xviii., p. 135.

[730] The writings of Bossuet against the Protestants occupy nine volumes, xviii.-xxvi., in the great edition of his works. Versailles, 1816. The Exposition de la Foi is in the eighteenth. Bausset, in his life of Bossuet, appears to have refuted the exaggerations of many Protestants as to the ill reception of this little book at Rome. Yet there was a certain foundation for it. See Bibliothèque Universelle, vol. xi., p. 455.

|His conference with Claude.|

11. Bossuet was now the acknowledged champion of the Roman church in France; Claude was in equal pre-eminence on the other side. These great adversaries had a regular conference in 1678. Mademoiselle de Duras, a protestant lady, like most others of her rank at that time, was wavering about religion, and in her presence the dispute was carried on. It entirely turned on church authority. The arguments of Bossuet differed only from those which have often been adduced by the spirit and conciseness with which he presses them. We have his own account which of course gives himself the victory. It was almost as much of course that the lady was converted; for it is seldom that a woman can withstand the popular argument on that side, when she has once gone far enough to admit the possibility of its truth by giving it a hearing. Yet Bossuet deals in sophisms which, though always in the mouths of those who call themselves orthodox, are contemptible to such as know facts as well as logic. “I urged,” he says, “in a few words what presumption it was to believe that we can better understand the word of God than all the rest of the church, and that nothing would thus prevent there being as many religions as persons.”[731] But there can be no presumption in supposing that we may understand anything better than one who has never examined it at all; and if this rest of the church, so magnificently brought forward, have commonly acted on Bossuet’s principle, and thought it presumptuous to judge for themselves; if out of many millions of persons a few only have deliberately reasoned on religion, and the rest have been, like true zeros, nothing in themselves, but much in sequence; if also, as is most frequently the case, this presumptuousness is not the assertion of a paradox or novelty, but the preference of one denomination of Christians, or of one tenet maintained by respectable authority to another, we can only scorn the emptiness, as well as resent the effrontery of this common-place that rings so often in our ears. Certainly, reason is so far from condemning a deference to the judgment of the wise and good, that nothing is more irrational than to neglect it; but when this is claimed for those whom we need not believe to have been wiser and better than ourselves, nay, sometimes whom without vain-glory we may esteem less, and that so as to set aside the real authority of the most philosophical, unbiassed, and judicious of mankind, it is not pride or presumption, but a sober use of our faculties that rejects the jurisdiction.

[731] Œuvres de Bossuet, xxiii., 290.

|Correspondence with Molanus and Leibnitz.|

12. Bossuet once more engaged in a similar discussion about 1691. Among the German Lutherans there seems to have been for a long time a lurking notion that on some terms or other a reconciliation with the church of Rome could be effected; and this was most countenanced in the dominions of Brunswick, and above all in the university of Helmstadt. Leibnitz himself and Molanus, a Lutheran divine, were the negotiators on that side with Bossuet. Their treaty, for such it was apparently understood to be, was conducted by writing; and when we read their papers on both sides, nothing is more remarkable than the tone of superiority which the catholic plenipotentiary, if such he could be deemed without powers from anyone but himself, has thought fit to assume. No concession is offered, no tenet explained away; the sacramental cup to the laity, and a permission to the Lutheran clergy already married to retain their wives after their re-ordination, is all that he holds forth; and in this, doubtless, he could have had no authority from Rome. Bossuet could not veil his haughty countenance, and his language is that of asperity and contemptuousness instead of moderation. He dictates terms of surrender as to a besieged city when the breach is already practicable, and hardly deigns to show his clemency by granting the smallest favour to the garrison. It is curious to see the strained constructions, the artifices of silence, to which Molanus has recourse in order to make out some pretence for his ignominious surrender. Leibnitz, with whom the correspondence broke off in 1693, and was renewed again in 1699, seems not quite so yielding as the other; and the last biographer of Bossuet suspects that the German philosopher was insincere or tortuous in the negotiation. If this were so, he must have entered upon it less of his own accord, than to satisfy the princess Sophia, who, like many of her family, had been a little wavering, till our act of settlement became a true settlement to their faith. This bias of the court of Hanover is intimated in several passages. The success of this treaty of union, or rather of subjection, was as little to be expected as it was desirable; the old spirit of Lutheranism was much worn out, yet there must surely have been a determination to resist so unequal a compromise. Rome negotiated as a conqueror with these beaten Carthaginians; yet no one had beaten them but themselves.[732]

[732] Œuvres de Bossuet, vols. xxv. and xxvi.

|His Variations of Protestant Churches.|

13. The warfare of the Roman church may be carried on either in a series of conflicts on the various doctrines wherein the reformers separated from her, or by one pitched battle on the main question of a conclusive authority somewhere in the church. Bossuet’s temper, as well as his inferiority in original learning, led him in preference to the latter scheme of theological strategy. It was also manifestly that course of argument which was most likely to persuade the unlearned. He followed up the blow which he had already struck against Claude in his famous work on the Variations of Protestant Churches. Never did his genius find a subject more fit to display its characteristic impetuosity, its arrogance, or its cutting and merciless spirit of sarcasm. The weaknesses, the inconsistent evasions, the extravagances of Luther, Zuingle, Calvin, and Beza pass, one after another, before us, till these great reformers seem like victim prisoners to be hewn down by the indignant prophet. That Bossuet is candid in statement, or even faithful in quotation, I should much doubt; he gives the words of his adversaries in his own French, and the references are not made to any specified edition of their voluminous writings. The main point, as he contends it to be, that the protestant churches (for he does not confine this to persons), fluctuated much in the sixteenth century, is sufficiently proved; but it remained to show that this was a reproach. Those who have taken a different view from Bossuet may perhaps think that a little more of this censure would have been well incurred; that they have varied too little rather than too much; and that it is far more difficult, even in controversy with the church of Rome, to withstand the inference which their long creeds and confessions, as well as the language too common with their theologians, have furnished to her more ancient and catholic claim of infallibility, than to vindicate those successive variations which are analogous to the necessary course of human reason on all other subjects. The essential fallacy of Romanism, that truth must ever exist visibly on earth, is implied in the whole strain of Bossuet’s attack on the variances of protestantism: it is evident that variance of opinion proves error somewhere; but unless it can be shown that we have any certain method of excluding it, this should only lead us to be more indulgent towards the judgment of others, and less confident of our own. The notion of an intrinsic moral criminality in religious error is at the root of the whole argument; and till protestants are well rid of this, there seems no secure mode of withstanding the effect which the vast weight of authority asserted by the Latin church, even where it has not the aid of the Eastern, must produce on timid and scrupulous minds.

|Anglican writings against Popery.|

14. In no period has the Anglican church stood up so powerfully in defence of the protestant cause as in that before us. From the era of the restoration to the close of the century the war was unremitting and vigorous. And it is particularly to be remarked, that the principal champions of the church of England threw off that ambiguous syncretism which had displayed itself under the first Stuarts, and, comparatively at least with their immediate predecessors, avoided every admission which might facilitate a deceitful compromise. We can only mention a few of the writers who signalised themselves in this controversy.

|Taylor’s Dissuasive.|

15. Taylor’s Dissuasive from Popery was published in 1664; and in this, his latest work, we find the same general strain of protestant reasoning, the same rejection of all but scriptural authority, the same free exposure of the inconsistencies and fallacies of tradition, the same tendency to excite a sceptical feeling as to all except the primary doctrines of religion, which had characterised the Liberty of Prophesying. These are mixed, indeed, in Taylor’s manner, with a few passages (they are, I think, but few), which singly taken might seem to breathe not quite this spirit; but the tide flows for the most part the same way, and it is evident that his mind had undergone no change. The learning, in all his writings is profuse; but Taylor never leaves me with the impression that he is exact and scrupulous in its application. In one part of this Dissuasive from Popery, having been reproached with some inconsistency, he has no scruple to avow that in a former work he had employed weak arguments for a laudable purpose.[733]

[733] Taylor’s Works, x., 304. This is not surprising, as in his Ductor Dubitantium, xi., 484, he maintains the right of using arguments and authorities in controversy, which we do not believe to be valid.

|Barrow.--Stillingfleet.|

16. Barrow, not so extensively learned as Taylor, who had read rather too much, but inferior, perhaps, even in that respect to hardly any one else, and above him in closeness and strength of reasoning, combated against Rome in many of his sermons, and especially in a long treatise on the papal supremacy. Stillingfleet followed, a man deeply versed in ecclesiastical antiquity, of an argumentative mind, excellently fitted for polemical dispute, but perhaps by those habits of his life rendered too much of an advocate to satisfy an impartial reader. In the critical reign of James II., he may be considered as the leader on the protestant side; but Wake, Tillotson, and several more would deserve mention in a fuller history of ecclesiastical literature.

|Jansenius.|

17. The controversies always smouldering in the Church of Rome, sometimes breaking into flame, to which the Anti-Pelagian writings of Augustin had originally given birth, have been slightly touched in our former volumes. It has been seen that the rigidly predestinarian theories had been condemned by the court of Rome in Baius, that the opposite doctrine of Molina had narrowly escaped censure, that it was safest to abstain from any language not verbally that of the church, or of Augustin whom the church held incontrovertible. But now a more serious and celebrated controversy, that of the Jansenists, pierced, as it were, to the heart of the church. It arose before the middle of the century. Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, in his Augustinus, published, after his death, in 1640, gave, as he professed, a faithful statement of the tenets of that father. “We do not inquire,” he says, “what men ought to believe on the powers of human nature, or on the grace and predestination of God, but what Augustin once preached with the approbation of the church, and has consigned to writing in many of his works.” This book is in three parts: the first containing a history of the Pelagian controversy, the second and third an exposition of the tenets of Augustin. Jansenius does not, however, confine himself so much to mere analysis, but that he attacks the Jesuits Lessius and Molina, and even reflects on the bull of Pius V. condemning Baius, which he cannot wholly approve.[734]

[734] A very copious history of Jansenism, taking it up from the council of Trent, will be found in the fourteenth volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle, p. 139-398, from which Mosheim has derived most of what we read in his Ecclesiastical History. And the History of Port-Royal was written by Racine, in so perspicuous and neat a style, that, though we may hardly think with Olivet that it places him as high in prose writing as his tragedies do in verse, it entitles him to rank in the list, not a very long one, of those who have succeeded in both. Is it not probable, that in some scenes of Athalie he had Port-Royal before his eyes? The history and the tragedy were written about the same time. Racine, it is rather remarkable, had entered the field against Nicole in 1666, chiefly indeed to defend theatrical representations, but not without many sarcasms against Jansenism.

|Condemnation of his Augustinus in France.|

18. Richelieu, who is said to have retained some animosity against Jansenius on account of a book called Mars Gallicus, which he had written on the side of his sovereign the king of Spain, designed to obtain the condemnation of the Augustinus by the French clergy. The Jesuits, therefore, had gained ground so far that the doctrines of Augustin were out of fashion, though few besides themselves ventured to reject his nominal authority. It is certainly clear that Jansenius offended the greater part of the church. But he had some powerful advocates, and especially Antony Arnauld, the most renowned of a family long conspicuous for eloquence, for piety, and for opposition to the Jesuits. In 1649, after several years of obscure dispute, Cornet, syndic of the faculty of Theology in the University of Paris, brought forward for censure seven propositions, five of which became afterwards so famous, without saying that they were found in the work of Jansenius. The faculty condemned them, though it had never been reckoned favourable to the Jesuits; a presumption that they were at least expressed in a manner repugnant to the prevalent doctrine. Yet Le Clerc, to whose excellent account of this controversy in the fourteenth volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle we are chiefly indebted, declares his own opinion that there may be some ambiguity in the style of the first, but that the other four are decidedly conformable to the theology of Augustin.

|And at Rome.|

19. The Jesuits now took the course of calling in the authority of Rome. They pressed Innocent X. to condemn the five propositions, which were maintained by some doctors in France. It is not the policy of that court to compromise so delicate a possession as infallibility by bringing it to the test of that personal judgment, which is of necessity the arbiter of each man’s own obedience. The popes have in fact rarely taken a part, independently of councils, in these school debates. The bull of Pius V., a man too zealous by character to regard prudence, in which he condemned many tenets of Baius, had not, nor could it, give satisfaction to those who saw with their own eyes that it swerved from the Augustinian theory. Innocent was, at first, unwilling to meddle with a subject which, as he owned to a friend, he did not understand. But after hearing some discussions, he grew more confident of his knowledge, which he ascribed, as in duty bound, to the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, and went so heartily along with the Anti-Jansenists, that he refused to hear the deputies of the other party. On the 31st of May, 1653, he condemned the five propositions, four as erroneous, and the fifth in stronger language; declaring, however, not in the bull, but orally, that he did not condemn the tenet of efficacious grace (which all the Dominicans held), nor the doctrine of Saint Augustin, which was, and ever would be that of the church.

|The Jansenists take a distinction.|

20. The Jansenists were not bold enough to hint that they did not acknowledge the infallibility of the pope in an express and positive declaration. Even if they had done so, they had an evident recognition of this censure of the five propositions by their own church, and might dread its being so generally received as to give the sanction which no catholic can withstand. They had recourse, unfortunately, to a subterfuge which put them in the wrong. They admitted that the propositions were false, but denied that they could be found in the book of Jansenius. Thus, each party was at issue on a matter of fact, and each erroneously, according at least to the judgment of the most learned and impartial protestants. The five propositions express the doctrine of Augustin himself; and if they do this, we can hardly doubt that they express that of Jansenius. In a short time, this ground of evasion was taken from their party. An Assembly of French prelates in the first place, and afterwards Alexander VII., successor of Innocent X., condemned the propositions, as in Jansenius, and in the sense intended by Jansenius.

|And are persecuted.|

21. The Jansenists were now driven to the wall: the Sorbonne in 1655, in consequence of some propositions of Arnauld, expelled him from the theological faculty; a formulary was drawn up to be signed by the clergy, condemning the propositions of Jansenius, which was finally established in 1661; and those who refused, even nuns, underwent a harassing persecution. The most striking instance of this, which still retains an historical character, was the dissolution of the famous convent of Port-Royal, over which Angelica Arnauld, sister of the great advocate of Jansenism, had long presided with signal reputation. This nunnery was at Paris, having been removed in 1644 from an ancient Cistertian convent of the same name, about six leagues distant, and called for distinction Port-Royal des Champs. To this now unfrequented building some of the most eminent men repaired for study, whose writings being anonymously published, have been usually known by the name of their residence. Arnauld, Pascal, Nicole, Lancelot, De Sacy, are among the Messieurs de Port-Royal, an appellation so glorious in the seventeenth century. The Jansenists now took a distinction, very reasonable, as it seems, in its nature, between the authority which asserts or denies a proposition, and that which does the like as to a fact. They refused to the pope, that is, in this instance, to the church, the latter infallibility. We cannot prosecute this part of ecclesiastical history farther; if writings of any literary importance had been produced by the controversy, they would demand our attention; but this does not appear to have been the case. The controversy between Arnauld and Malebranche may perhaps be an exception. The latter, carried forward by his original genius, attempted to deal with the doctrines of theology as with metaphysical problems, in his Traité de la Nature et de la Grace. Arnauld animadverted on this in his Réflexions Philosophiques et Théologiques. Malebranche replied in Lettres du Père Malebranche à un de ses Amis. This was published in 1686, and the controversy between such eminent masters of abstruse reasoning began to excite attention. Malebranche seems to have retired first from the field. His antagonist had great advantages in the dispute, according to received systems of theology, with which he was much more conversant, and perhaps on the whole in the philosophical part of the question. This however cannot be reckoned entirely a Jansenistic controversy, though it involved those perilous difficulties which had raised that flame.[735]

[735] An account of this controversy will be found at length in the second volume of the Bibliothèque Universelle.

|Progress of Arminianism.|

|Courcelles.|

22. The credit of Augustin was now as much shaken in the protestant, as in the catholic regions of Europe. Episcopius had given to the Remonstrant party a reputation which no sect so inconsiderable in its separate character has ever possessed. The Dutch Arminians were at no time numerous; they took no hold of the people; they had few churches, and though not persecuted by the lenient policy of Holland, were still under the ban of an orthodox clergy, as exclusive and bigoted as before. But their writings circulated over Europe, and made a silent impression on the adverse party. It became less usual to bring forward the Augustinian hypothesis in prominent or unequivocal language. Courcelles, born at Geneva, and the successor of Episcopius in the Remonstrant congregation at Amsterdam, with less genius than his predecessor, had, perhaps, a more extensive knowledge of ecclesiastical antiquity. His works were much in esteem with the theologians of that way of thinking; but they have not fallen in my way.

|Limborch.|

23. Limborch, great-nephew of Episcopius, seems more than any other Arminian divine to have inherited his mantle. His most important work is the Theologia Christiana, containing a system of divinity and morals, in seven books and more than 900 pages, published in 1686. It is the fullest delineation of the Arminian scheme; but as the Arminians were by their principle free inquirers, and not, like other churches, bondsmen of symbolical formularies, no one book can strictly be taken as their representative. The tenets of Limborch, are, in the majority of disputable points, such as impartial men have generally found in the primitive or Ante-Nicene fathers; but in some he probably deviates from them, steering far away from all that the protestants of the Swiss reform had abandoned as superstitious or unintelligible.

|Le Clerc.|

24. John Le Clerc, in the same relationship to Courcelles that Limborch was to Episcopius, and like him transplanted from Geneva to the more liberal air, at that time, of the United Provinces, claims a high place among the Dutch Arminians; for though he did not maintain their cause either in systematic or polemical writings, his commentary on the Old Testament, and still more his excellent and celebrated reviews, the Bibliothèques Universelle, Choisie, and Ancienne et Moderne, must be reckoned a perpetual combat on that side. These journals enjoyed an extraordinary influence over Europe, and deserved to enjoy it. Le Clerc is generally temperate, judicious, appeals to no passion, displays a very extensive, though not perhaps a very deep erudition, lies in wait for the weakness and temerity of those he reviews, thus sometimes gaining the advantage over more learned men than himself. He would have been a perfect master of that sort of criticism, then newly current in literature, if he could have repressed an irritability in matters personal to himself, and a degree of prejudice against the Romish writers, or perhaps those styled orthodox in general, which sometimes disturbs the phlegmatic steadiness with which a good reviewer, like a practised sportsman, brings down his game.[736]

[736] Bishop Monk observes that Le Clerc “seems to have been the first person who understood the power which may be exercised over literature by a reviewer.” Life of Bentley, p. 209. This may be true, especially as he was nearly the first reviewer, and certainly better than his predecessors. But this remark is followed by a sarcastic animadversion upon Le Clerc’s ignorance of Greek metres, and by the severe assertion, that “by an absolute system of terror, he made himself a despot in the republic of letters.” The former is so far true, that he neither understood the Greek metres as well as Bentley and Porson, or those who have trod in their steps, nor supposed that all learning was concentred in that knowledge, as we seemed in danger of supposing within my memory. The latter is not warranted by the general character of Le Clerc’s criticisms, which, where he has no personal quarrel, is temperate and moderate, neither traducing men, nor imputing motives; and consequently unlike certain periodical criticism of a later date.

|Sancroft’s Fur Prædestinatus.|

25. The most remarkable progress made by the Arminian theology was in England. This had begun under James and Charles; but it was then taken up in conjunction with that patristic learning, which adopted the fourth and fifth centuries as the standard of orthodox faith. Perhaps the first very bold and unambiguous attack on the Calvinistic system which we shall mention came from this quarter. This was an anonymous Latin pamphlet, entitled Fur Prædestinatus, published in 1651, and generally ascribed to Sancroft, at that time a young man. It is a dialogue between a thief under sentence of death and his attendant minister, wherein the former insists upon his assurance of being predestinated to salvation. In this idea there is nothing but what is sufficiently obvious; but the dialogue is conducted with some spirit and vivacity. Every position in the thief’s mouth is taken from eminent Calvinistic writers, and what is chiefly worth notice, is that Sancroft, for the first time, has ventured to arraign the greatest heroes of the Reformation; not only Calvin, Beza, and Zanchius, but who had been hitherto spared, Luther and Zuingle. It was in the nature of a manifesto from the Arminian party, that they would not defer in future to any modern authority.[737]

[737] The Fur Prædestinatus is reprinted in D’Oyly’s Life of Sancroft. It is much the best proof of ability that the worthy archbishop ever gave.

|Arminianism in England.|

26. The loyal Anglican clergy, suffering persecution at the hands of Calvinistic sectaries, might be naturally expected to cherish the opposite principles. These are manifest in the sermons of Barrow, rather perhaps by his silence than his tone, and more explicitly in those of South. But many exceptions might be found among leading men, such as Sanderson; while in an opposite quarter, among the younger generation who had conformed to the times, arose a more formidable spirit of Arminianism, which changed the face of the English church. This was displayed among those who, just about the epoch of the Restoration, were denominated Latitude-men, or more commonly Latitudinarians, trained in the principles of Episcopius and Chillingworth, strongly averse to every compromise with popery, and thus distinguished from the high church party, learned rather in profane philosophy than in the fathers, more full of Plato and Plotinus than Jerome or Chrysostom, great maintainers of natural religion and of the eternal laws of morality, not very solicitous about systems of orthodoxy, and limiting very considerably beyond the notions of former ages, the fundamental tenets of Christianity. This is given as a general character, but varying in the degree of its application to particular persons. Burnet enumerates as the chief of this body of men, More, Cudworth, Whichcot, Tillotson, Stillingfleet; some, especially the last, more tenacious of the authority of the fathers and of the church than others, but all concurring in the adoption of an Arminian theology.[738] This became so predominant before the revolution, that few English divines of eminence remained, who so much as endeavoured to steer a middle course, or to dissemble their renunciation of the doctrines which had been sanctioned at the synod of Dort by the delegates of their church. “The Theological Institutions of Episcopius,” says a contemporary writer, “were at that time (1685) generally in the hands of our students of divinity in both universities, as the best system of divinity that had appeared.”[739] And he proceeds afterwards: “The Remonstrant writers, among whom there were men of excellent learning and parts, had now acquired a considerable reputation in our universities by the means of some great men among us.” This testimony seems irresistible; and as one hundred years before the Institutes of Calvin were read in the same academical studies, we must own, unless Calvin and Episcopius shall be maintained to have held the same tenets, that Bossuet might have added a chapter to the Variations of Protestant Churches.

[738] Burnet’s History of His Own Times, i., 187. Account of the new sect called Latitudinarians, in the collection of tracts, entitled Phœnix, vol. ii., p. 499.

[739] Nelson’s Life of Bull, in Bull’s Works, vol. viii., p. 257.

|Bull’s Harmonia Apostolica.|

27. The methods adopted in order to subvert the Augustinian theology were sometimes direct, by explicit controversy, or by an opposite train of scriptural interpretation in regular commentaries; more frequently perhaps indirect, by inculcating moral duties, and especially by magnifying the law of nature. Among the first class, the Harmonia Apostolica of Bull seems to be reckoned the principal work of this period. It was published in 1669, and was fiercely encountered at first, not merely by the presbyterian party, but by many of the church, the Lutheran tenets as to justification by faith being still deemed orthodox. Bull establishes as the groundwork of his harmony between the apostles Paul and James, on a subject where their language apparently clashes in terms, that we are to interpret St. Paul by St. James, and not St. James by St. Paul, because the latest authority, and that which may be presumed to have explained what was obscure in the former, ought to prevail;[740] a rule doubtless applicable in many cases, whatever it may be in this. It, at least, turned to his advantage; but it was not so easy for him to reconcile his opinions with those of the reformers, or with the Anglican articles.

[740] Nelson’s Life of Bull.

|Hammond--Locke--Wilkins.|

28. The Paraphrase and Annotations of Hammond on the New Testament, give a different colour to the Epistles of St. Paul, from that which they display in the hands of Beza and the other theologians of the sixteenth century. And the name of Hammond stood so high with the Anglican clergy, that he naturally turned the tide of interpretation his own way. The writings of Fowler, Wilkins, and Whichcot are chiefly intended to exhibit the moral lustre of Christianity, and to magnify the importance of virtuous life. The first of these ventured on an express defence of Latitudinarianism; but in general those to whom their adversaries gave that name declined the invidious prejudices which they knew to be associated with it. Wilkins left an unfinished work on the Principles and Duties of Natural Religion. Twelve chapters only, about half the volume, were ready for the press at his death; the rest was compiled by Tillotson as well as the materials left by the author would allow; and the expressions employed lead us to believe that much was due to the editor. The latter’s preface strongly presses the separate obligation of natural religion, upon which both the disciples of Hobbes, and many of the less learned sectaries, were at issue with him.

|Socinians in England.|

29. We do not find much of importance written on the Trinitarian controversy before the middle of the seventeenth century, except by the Socinians themselves. But the case was now very different. Though the Polish or rather German Unitarians did not produce more distinguished men than before, they came more forward in the field of dispute. Finally, expelled from Poland in 1660, they sought refuge in more learned, as well as more tolerant, regions, and especially in the genial soil of religious liberty, the United Provinces. Even here, they enjoyed no avowed toleration; but the press, with a very slight concealment of place, under the attractive words, Eleutheropolis, Irenopolis, or Freystadt, was ready to serve them with its natural impartiality. They began to make a slight progress in England; the writings of Biddle were such as even Cromwell, though habitually tolerant, did not overlook; the author underwent an imprisonment both at that time and after the Restoration. In general, the Unitarian writers preserved a disguise. Milton’s treatise, not long since brought to light, goes on the Arian hypothesis, which had probably been countenanced by some others. It became common, in the reign of Charles II., for the English divines to attack the Anti-Trinitarians of each denomination.

|Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenæ.|

30. An epoch is supposed to have been made in this controversy, by the famous work of Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicenæ. This was not primarily directed against the heterodox party. In the Dogmata Theologica of Petavius, published in 1644, that learned Jesuit, laboriously compiling passages from the fathers, had come to the conclusion that most of those before the Nicene council had seemed, by their language, to run into nearly the same heresy as that which the council had condemned, and this inference appeared to rest on a long series of quotations. The Arminian Courcelles, and even the English philosopher, Cudworth, the latter of whom was as little suspected of a heterodox leaning, as Petavius himself, had come to the same result; so that a considerable triumph was given to the Arians, in which the Socinians, perhaps at that time more numerous, seem to have thought themselves entitled to partake. Bull had, therefore, to contend with authorities not to be despised by the learned.

31. The Defensio Fidei Nicenæ was published in 1685. It did not want answerers in England; but it obtained a great reputation, and an assembly of the French clergy, through the influence of Bossuet, returned thanks to the author. It was, indeed, evident that Petavius, though he had certainly formed his opinion with perfect honesty, was preparing the way for an inference, that if the primitive fathers could be heterodox on a point of so great magnitude, we must look for infallibility, not in them nor in the diffusive church, but in general councils presided over by the pope, or ultimately in the pope himself. This, though not unsuitable to the notions of some Jesuits, was diametrically opposite to the principles of the Gallican church, which professed to repose on a perpetual and catholic tradition.

|Not satisfactory to all.|

32. Notwithstanding the popularity of this defence of the Nicene faith, and the learning it displays, the author was far from ending the controversy, or from satisfying all his readers. It was alledged that he does not meet the question with which he deals; that the word ὁμοουσιος [homoousios], being almost new at the time of the council, and being obscure and metaphysical in itself, required a precise definition to make the reader see his way before him, or, at least, one better than Bull has given, which the adversary might probably adopt without much scruple; that the passages adduced from the fathers are often insufficient for his purpose; that he confounds the eternal essence with the eternal personality or distinctness of the Logos, though well aware, of course, that many of the early writers employed different names (ενδιαθετος [endiathetos] and προφορικος [prophorikos]) for these; and that he does not repel some of the passages which can hardly bear an orthodox interpretation. It was urged, moreover, that his own hypothesis, taken altogether, is but a palliated Arianism; that by insisting, for more than one hundred pages, on the subordination of the Son to the Father, he came close to what since has borne that name, though it might not be precisely what had been condemned at Nice, and could not be reconciled with the Athanasian creed, except by such an interpretation of the latter as is neither probable, nor has been reputed orthodox.

|Mystics.|

|Fenelon.|

33. Among the theological writers of the Roman church, and in a less degree among protestants, there has always been a class not inconsiderable for numbers or for influence, generally denominated mystics, or, when their language has been more unmeasured, enthusiasts and fanatics. These may be distinguished into two kinds, though it must readily be understood that they may often run much into one another; the first believing that the soul, by immediate communion with the Deity, receives a peculiar illumination and knowledge of truths, not cognisable by the understanding; the second less solicitous about intellectual than moral light, and aiming at such pure contemplation of the attributes of God, and such an intimate perception of spiritual life as may end in a sort of absorption into the divine essence. But I should not probably have alluded to any writings of this description, if the two most conspicuous luminaries of the French church, Bossuet and Fenelon, had not clashed with each other in that famous controversy of Quietism, to which the enthusiastic writings of Madame Guyon gave birth. The “Maximes des Saints” of Fenelon I have never seen: the editions of his entire works as they affect to be, do not include what the church has condemned; and the original book has probably become scarce. Fenelon appears to have been treated by his friend, shall we call him? or rival, with remarkable harshness. Bossuet might have felt some jealousy at the rapid elevation of the archbishop of Cambray: but we need not have recourse to this; the rigour of orthodoxy in a temper like his will account for all. There could be little doubt but that many saints honoured by the church had uttered things quite as strong as any that Fenelon’s work contained. Bossuet however succeeded in obtaining its condemnation at Rome. Fenelon was of the second class above-mentioned among the mystics, and seems to have been absolutely free from such pretences to illumination as we find in Behmen or Barclay. The pure disinterested love of God was the main spring of his religious theory. The Divine Œconomy of Poiret, 1686, and the writings of a German quietist, Spener, do not require any particular mention.[741]

[741] Bibl. Universelle, v., 412; xvi., 224.

|Change in the character of theological literature.|

34. This later period of the seventeenth century was marked by an increasing boldness in religious inquiry; we find more disregard of authority, more disposition to question received tenets, a more suspicious criticism, both as to the genuineness and the credibility of ancient writings, a more ardent love of truth, that is, of perceiving and understanding what is true, instead of presuming that we possess it without any understanding at all. Much of this was associated, no doubt, with the other revolutions in literary opinion; with the philosophy of Bacon, Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes, Bayle, and Locke, with the spirit which a slightly learned, yet acute generation of men rather conversant with the world than with libraries, to whom the appeal in modern languages must be made, was sure to breathe, with that incessant reference to proof which the physical sciences taught mankind to demand. Hence, quotations are comparatively rare in the theological writings of this age; they are better reduced to their due office of testimony as to fact, sometimes of illustration or better statement of an argument, but not so much alledged as argument or authority in themselves. Even those who combated on the side of established doctrines were compelled to argue more from themselves, lest the public, their umpire, should reject, with an opposite prejudice, what had enslaved the prejudices of their fathers.

|Freedom of many writings.|

35. It is well known that a disbelief in Christianity became very frequent about this time. Several books more or less appear to indicate this spirit, but the charge has often been made with no sufficient reason. Of Hobbes, enough has been already said, and Spinosa’s place as a metaphysician will be in the next chapter. His Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, published anonymously at Amsterdam, with the false date of Hamburg, in 1670, contains many observations on the Old Testament, which, though they do not really affect its general authenticity and truth, clashed with the commonly received opinion of its absolute inspiration. Some of these remarks were, if not borrowed, at least repeated in a book of more celebrity, Sentimens de quelques Theologiens d’Hollande sur l’Histoire Critique du Père Simon. This work is written by Le Clerc, but it has been doubted whether he is the author of some acute, but hardy, remarks on the inspiration of scripture which it contains. These, however, must be presumed to coincide for the most part with his own opinion; but he has afterwards declared his dissent from the hypothesis contained in these volumes, that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. The Archæologia Philosophica of Thomas Burnet is intended to question the literal history of the creation and fall. But few will pretend that either Le Clerc or Burnet were disbelievers in revelation.

|Thoughts of Pascal.|

36. Among those who sustained the truth of Christianity by argument rather than authority, the first place both in order of time and of excellence is due to Pascal, though his Thoughts were not published till 1670, some years after his death, and, in the first edition, not without suppressions. They have been supposed to be fragments of a more systematic work that he had planned, or perhaps only reflections committed to paper, with no design of publication in their actual form. But, as is generally the case with works of genius we do not easily persuade ourselves that they could have been improved by any such alteration as would have destroyed their type. They are at present bound together by a real coherence through the predominant character of the reasonings and sentiments, and give us everything that we could desire in a more regular treatise without the tedious verbosity which regularity is apt to produce. The style is not so polished as in the Provincial Letters, and the sentences are sometimes ill constructed and elliptical. Passages almost transcribed from Montaigne have been published by careless editors as Pascal’s.

37. But the Thoughts of Pascal are to be ranked, as a monument of his genius, above the Provincial Letters, though some have asserted the contrary. They burn with an intense light; condensed in expression, sublime, energetic, rapid, they hurry away the reader till he is scarcely able or willing to distinguish the sophisms from the truth they contain. For that many of them are incapable of bearing a calm scrutiny is very manifest to those who apply such a test. The notes of Voltaire, though always intended to detract, are sometimes unanswerable; but the splendour of Pascal’s eloquence absolutely annihilates, in effect on the general reader, even this antagonist.

38. Pascal had probably not read very largely, which has given an ampler sweep to his genius. Except the Bible and the writings of Augustin, the book that seems most to have attracted him was the Essays of Montaigne. Yet no men could be more unlike in personal dispositions and in the cast of their intellect. But Pascal, though abhorring the religious and moral carelessness of Montaigne, found much that fell in with his own reflections in the contempt of human opinions, the perpetual humbling of human reason, which runs through the bold and original work of his predecessor. He quotes no book so frequently; and, indeed, except Epictetus, and once or twice Descartes, he hardly quotes any other at all. Pascal was too acute a geometer, and too sincere a lover of truth to countenance the sophisms of mere Pyrrhonism; but, like many theological writers, in exalting faith he does not always give reason her value, and furnishes weapons which the sceptic might employ against himself. It has been said that he denies the validity of the proofs of natural religion. This seems to be in some measure an error, founded on mistaking the objections he puts in the mouths of unbelievers for his own. But it must, I think, be admitted that his arguments for the being of a God are too often à tutiori, that it is the safer side to take.

39. The Thoughts of Pascal on miracles abound in proofs of his acuteness and originality; an originality much more striking when we recollect that the subject had not been discussed as it has since, but with an intermixture of some sophistical and questionable positions. Several of them have a secret reference to the famous cure of his niece, Mademoiselle Perier, by the holy thorn. But he is embarrassed with the difficult question whether miraculous events are sure tests of the doctrine they support, and is not wholly consistent in his reasoning, or satisfactory in his distinctions. I am unable to pronounce whether Pascal’s other observations on the rational proofs of Christianity are as original as they are frequently ingenious and powerful.

40. But the leading principle of Pascal’s theology, that from which he deduces the necessary truth of revelation, is the fallen nature of mankind; dwelling less upon scriptural proofs, which he takes for granted, than on the evidence which he supposes man himself to supply. Nothing, however, can be more dissimilar than his beautiful visions to the vulgar Calvinism of the pulpit. It is not the sordid, groveling, degraded, Caliban of that school, but the ruined archangel that he delights to paint. Man is so great, that his greatness is manifest, even in his knowledge of his own misery. A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is true that to know we are miserable is misery; but still it is greatness to know it. All his misery proves his greatness; it is the misery of a great lord, of a king, dispossessed of their own. Man is the feeblest branch of nature, but it is a branch that thinks. He requires not the universe to crush him. He may be killed by a vapour, by a drop of water. But if the whole universe should crush him, he would be nobler than that which causes his death, because he knows that he is dying, and the universe would not know its power over him. This is very evidently sophistical and declamatory; but it is the sophistry of a fine imagination. It would be easy, however, to find better passages. The dominant idea recurs in almost every page of Pascal. His melancholy genius plays in wild and rapid flashes, like lightning round the scathed oak, about the fallen greatness of man. He perceives every characteristic quality of his nature under these conditions. They are the solution of every problem, the clearing up of every inconsistency that perplexes us. “Man,” he says very finely, “has a secret instinct that leads him to seek diversion and employment from without; which springs from the sense of his continual misery. And he has another secret instinct, remaining from the greatness of his original nature, which teaches him that happiness can only exist in repose. And from these two contrary instincts there arises in him an obscure propensity, concealed in his soul, which prompts him to seek repose through agitation, and even to fancy that the contentment he does not enjoy will be found, if by struggling yet a little longer he can open a door to rest.”[742]

[742] Œuvres de Pascal, vol. i., p. 121.

41. It can hardly be conceived that any one would think the worse of human nature or of himself by reading these magnificent lamentations of Pascal. He adorns and ennobles the degeneracy he exaggerates. The ruined aqueduct, the broken column, the desolated city, suggest no ideas but of dignity and reverence. No one is ashamed of a misery which bears witness to his grandeur. If we should persuade a labourer that the blood of princes flows in his veins, we might spoil his contentment with the only lot he has drawn, but scarcely kill in him the seeds of pride.

42. Pascal, like many others who have dwelt on this alledged degeneracy of mankind, seems never to have disentangled his mind from the notion that what we call human nature has not merely an arbitrary and grammatical, but an intrinsic objective reality. The common and convenient forms of language, the analogies of sensible things, which the imagination readily supplies, conspire to delude us into this fallacy. Each man is born with certain powers and dispositions which constitute his own nature; and the resemblance of these in all his fellows produces a general idea, or a collective appellation, whichever we may prefer to say, called the nature of man; but few would in this age contend for the existence of this as a substance capable of qualities, and those qualities variable, or subject to mutation. The corruption of human nature is therefore a phrase which may convey an intelligible meaning, if it is acknowledged to be merely analogical and inexact, but will mislead those who do not keep this in mind. Man’s nature, as it now is, that which each man and all men possess, is the immediate workmanship of God, as much as at his creation; nor is any other hypothesis consistent with theism.

43. This notion of a real universal in human nature, presents to us in an exaggerated light those anomalies from which writers of Pascal’s school are apt to infer some vast change in our original constitution. Exaggerated, I say, for it cannot be denied, that we frequently perceive a sort of incoherence, as it appears at least to our defective vision, in the same individual; and, like threads of various hues shot through one web, the love of vice and of virtue, the strength and weakness of the heart, are wonderfully blended in self-contradictory and self-destroying conjunction. But even if we should fail altogether in solving the very first steps of this problem, there is no course for a reasonable being, except to acknowledge the limitations of his own faculties; and it seems rather unwarrantable, on the credit of this humble confession, that we do not comprehend the depths of what has been withheld from us, to substitute something far more incomprehensible and revolting to our moral and rational capacities in its place. “What,” says Pascal, “can be more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice, than to damn eternally an infant incapable of volition, for an offence wherein he seems to have had no share, and which was committed six thousand years before he was born? Certainly, nothing shocks us more rudely than this doctrine; and yet, without this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. Man is more inconceivable without this mystery, than the mystery is inconceivable to man.”

44. It might be wandering from the proper subject of these volumes if we were to pause, even shortly, to inquire whether, while the creation of a world so full of evil must ever remain the most inscrutable of mysteries, we might not be led some way in tracing the connection of moral and physical evil in mankind with his place in that creation; and especially, whether the law of continuity, which it has not pleased his Maker to break with respect to his bodily structure, and which binds that, in the unity of one great type, to the lower forms of animal life by the common conditions of nourishment, reproduction, and self-defence, has not rendered necessary both the physical appetites and the propensities which terminate in self: whether, again, the superior endowments of his intellectual nature, his susceptibility of moral emotion, and of those disinterested affections which, if not exclusively, he far more intensely possesses than any inferior being; above all, the gifts of conscience, and a capacity to know God, might not be expected, even beforehand, by their conflict with the animal passions, to produce some partial inconsistencies, some anomalies at least, which he could not himself explain, in so compound a being. Every link in the long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps, from one creature to another, which, though not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars, and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute, who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus, standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both! But these are things which it is difficult to touch; nor would they have been here introduced, but in order to weaken the force of positions so confidently asserted by many, and so eloquently by Pascal.

|Vindications of Christianity.|

45. Among the works immediately designed to confirm the truth of Christianity, a certain reputation was acquired, through the known erudition of its author, by the Demonstratio Evangelica of Huet, bishop of Avranches. This is paraded with definitions, axioms, and propositions, in order to challenge the name it assumes. But the axioms, upon which so much is to rest, are often questionable or equivocal; as, for instance: Omnis prophetia est verax, quæ prædixit res eventu deinde completas--equivocal in the word verax. Huet also confirms his axioms by argument, which shows that they are not truly such. The whole book is full of learning; but he frequently loses sight of the points he would prove, and his quotations fall beside the mark. Yet he has furnished much to others, and possibly no earlier work on the same subject is so elaborate and comprehensive. The next place, if not a higher one, might be given to the treatise of Abbadie, a French refugee, published in 1684. His countrymen bestow on it the highest eulogies; but it was never so well known in England, and is now almost forgotten. The oral conferences of Limborch with Orobio, a Jew of considerable learning and ability, on the prophecies relating to the Messiah, were reduced into writing and published; they are still in some request. No book of this period among many that were written, reached so high a reputation in England as Leslie’s Short Method with the Deists, published in 1694: in which he has started an argument, pursued with more critical analysis by others, on the peculiarly distinctive marks of credibility that pertain to the scriptural miracles. The authenticity of this little treatise has been idly questioned on the Continent, for no better reason than that a translation of it has been published in a posthumous edition (1732) of the works of Saint Real, who died in 1692. But posthumous editions are never deemed of sufficient authority to establish a literary title against possession; and Prosper Marchand informs us, that several other tracts, in this edition of Saint Real, are erroneously ascribed to him. The internal evidence that the Short Method was written by a protestant should be conclusive.[743]

[743] The Biographie Universelle, art. Leslie, says: Cet ouvrage, qui passe pour ce qu’il a fait de mieux, lui a été contesté. Le Docteur Gleigh [sic] a fait de grands efforts pour prouver qu’il appartenait à Leslie, quoiqu’il fût publié parmi les ouvrages de l’Abbe de Saint Real, mort en 1692. It is melancholy to see this petty spirit of cavil against an English writer in so respectable a work as the Biographic Universelle. No grands efforts could be required from Dr. Gleig or anyone else, to prove that a book was written by Leslie, which bore his name, which was addressed to an English peer, and had gone through many editions; when there is literally no claimant on the other side; for a posthumous edition, forty years after an author’s death, without attestation, is no literary evidence at all, even where a book is published for the first time, much less where it has a known status as the production of a certain author. This is so manifest to anyone who has the slightest tincture of critical judgment, that we need not urge the palpable improbability of ascribing to Saint Real, a Romish ecclesiastic, an argument which turns peculiarly on the distinction between the scriptural miracles and those alledged upon inferior evidence. I have lost, or never made, the reference to Prosper Marchand; but the passage will be found in his Dictionnaire Historique, which contains a full article on Saint Real.

|Progress of tolerant principles.|

46. Every change in public opinion which this period witnessed, confirmed the principles of religious toleration, that had taken root in the earlier part of the century; the progress of a larger and more catholic theology, the weakening of bigotry in the minds of laymen, and the consequent disregard of ecclesiastical clamour, not only in England and Holland, but to a considerable extent in France; we might even add, the violent proceedings of the last government, in the revocation of the edict of Nantes, and the cruelties which attended it. Louis XIV., at a time when mankind were beginning to renounce the very theory of persecution, renewed the ancient enormities of its practice, and thus unconsciously gave the aid of moral sympathy and indignation to the adverse argument. The Protestant refugees of France, scattered among their brethren, brought home to all minds the great question of free conscience; not with the stupid and impudent limitation which even protestants had sometimes employed, that truth indeed might not be restrained, but that error might; a broader foundation was laid by the great advocates of toleration in this period, Bayle, Limborch, and Locke, as it had formerly been by Taylor and Episcopius.[744]

[744] The Dutch clergy, and a French minister in Holland, Jurieu, of great polemical fame in his day, though now chiefly known by means of his adversaries, Bayle and Le Clerc, strenuously resisted both the theory of general toleration, and the moderate or liberal principles in religion which were connected with it. Le Clerc passed his life in fighting this battle, and many articles in the Bibliothèque Universelle relate to it.

|Bayle’s Philosophical Commentary.|

47. Bayle, in 1686, while yet the smart of his banishment was keenly felt, published his Philosophical Commentary on the text in Scripture, “Compel them to come in;” a text which some of the advocates of persecution were accustomed to produce. He gives in the first part nine reasons against this literal meaning, among which none are philological. In the second part he replies to various objections. This work of Bayle does not seem to me as subtle and logical as he was wont to be, notwithstanding the formal syllogisms with which he commences each of his chapters. His argument against compulsory conversions, which the absurd interpretation of the text by his adversaries required, is indeed irresistible; but this is far from sufficiently establishing the right of toleration itself. It appears not very difficult for a skilful sophist, and none was more so than Bayle himself, to have met some of his reasoning with a specious reply. The sceptical argument of Taylor, that we can rarely be sure of knowing the truth ourselves, and consequently of condemning in others what is error, he touches but slightly; nor does he dwell on the political advantages which experience has shown a full toleration to possess. In the third part of the Philosophical Commentary, he refutes the apology of Augustin for persecution; and a few years afterwards he published a supplement answering a book of Jurieu, which had appeared in the mean time.

|Locke’s Letter on Toleration.|

48. Locke published anonymously his Letter on Toleration in 1689. The season was propitious; a legal tolerance of public worship had first been granted to the dissenters after the revolution, limited indeed to such as held most of the doctrines of the church, but preparing the nation for a more extensive application of its spirit. In the Liberty of Prophesying, Taylor had chiefly in view to deduce the justice of tolerating a diversity in religion from the difficulty of knowing the truth. He is not very consistent as to the political question, and limits too narrowly the province of tolerable opinions. Locke goes more expressly to the right of the civil magistrate, not omitting, but dwelling less forcibly on the latitudinarian scepticism of his predecessor. His own theory of government came to his aid. The clergy in general, and perhaps Taylor himself, had derived the magistrate’s jurisdiction from paternal power. And as they apparently assumed this power to extend over adult children, it was natural to give those who succeeded to it in political communities, a large sway over the moral and religious behaviour of subjects. Locke, adopting the opposite theory of compact, defines the commonwealth to be a society of men constituted only for the procuring, preserving, and advancing their own civil interests. He denies altogether that the care of souls belongs to the civil magistrate, as it has never been committed to him. “All the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the things of this world, and hath nothing to do with the world to come.”

49. The admission of this principle would apparently decide the controversy, so far as it rests on religious grounds. But Locke has recourse to several other arguments independent of it. He proves, with no great difficulty, that the civil power cannot justly, or consistently with any true principle of religion, compel men to profess what they do not believe. This, however, is what very few would, at present, be inclined to maintain. The real question was as to the publicity of opinions deemed heterodox, and especially in social worship; and this is what those who held the magistrate to possess an authority patriarchal, universal, and arbitrary, and who were also rigidly tenacious of the necessity of an orthodox faith, and perfectly convinced that it was no other than their own, would hardly be persuaded to admit by any arguments that Locke has alledged. But the tendency of public opinion had begun to manifest itself against both these tenets of the high-church party, so that, in the eighteenth century, the principles of general tolerance became too popular to be disputed with any chance of attention. Locke was engaged in a controversy, through his first letter on toleration, which produced a second and a third; but it does not appear that these, though longer than the first, have considerably modified its leading positions.[745] It is to be observed that he pleads for the universal toleration of all modes of worship not immoral in their nature, or involving doctrines inimical to good government; placing in the latter category some tenets of the church of Rome.

[745] Warburton has fancied that Locke’s real sentiments are only discoverable in his first Letter on Toleration, and that in the two latter he “combats his intolerant adversary quite through the controversy with his own principles, well foreseeing, that at such a time of prejudice arguments built on received opinions would have greatest weight, and make quickest impression on the body of the people whom it was his business to gain.” Biogr. Britannica, art. Locke.

|French Sermons.|

50. It is confessed by Goujet that, even in the middle of the seventeenth century, France could boast very little of pulpit eloquence. Frequent quotations from heathen writers and from the schoolmen, with little solid morality and less good reasoning, make up the sermons of that age.[746] But the revolution in this style, as in all others, though perhaps gradual, was complete in the reign of Louis XIV. A slight sprinkling of passages from the fathers, and still more frequently from the Scriptures, but always short, and seeming to rise out of the preacher’s heart, rather than to be sought for in his memory, replaced that intolerable parade of a theological common place book, which had been as customary in France as in England. The style was to be the perfection of French eloquence, the reasoning persuasive rather than dogmatic, the arrangement more methodical and distributive than at present, but without the excess we find in our old preachers. This is the general character of French sermons; but those who most adorned the pulpit, had of course their individual distinctions. Without delaying to mention those who are now not greatly remembered, such as La Rue, Hubert, Mascaron, we must confine ourselves to three of high reputation, Bourdaloue, Bossuet, and Fléchier.

[746] Bibliothèque Française, vol. ii., p. 283.

|Bourdaloue.|

51. Bourdaloue, a Jesuit, but as little of a Jesuit in the worst acceptation of the word, as the order has produced, is remarkably simple, earnest, practical: he convinces rather than commands; and by convincing he persuades; for his discourses tend always to some duty, to something that is to be done or avoided. His sentences are short, interrogative, full of plain and solid reasoning, unambitious in expression, and wholly without that care in the choice of words and cadences which we detect in Bossuet and Fléchier. No one would call Bourdaloue a rhetorician, and though he continually introduces the fathers, he has not caught their vices of language.[747]

[747] The public did justice to Bourdaloue, as they generally do to a solid and impressive style of preaching. Je crois, says Goujet, p. 300, que tout le monde convient qu’aucun autre ne lui est supérieur. C’est le grand maître pour l’éloquence de la chaire; c’est le prince des prédicateurs. Le public n’a jamais été partagé sur son sujet; la ville et la cour l’ont également estimé et admiré. C’est qu’il avoit réuni en sa personne tous les grands caractères de la bonne éloquence; la simplicité du discours Chrétien avec la majesté et la grandeur, le sublime avec l’intelligible et le populaire, la force avec la douceur, la véhémence avec l’onction, la liberté avec la justesse, et le plus vive ardeur avec la plus pure lumière.

|Compared with Bossuet.|

52. Bourdaloue is almost in the same relation to Bossuet, as Patru to Le Maistre, though the two orators of the pulpit are far above those of the bar. As the one is short, condensed, plain, reasoning, and though never feeble, not often what is generally called eloquent, so the other is animated, figurative, rather diffuse and prodigal of ornament, addressing the imagination more than the judgment, rich and copious in cadence, elevating the hearer to the pitch of his own sublimity. Bossuet is sometimes too declamatory; and Bourdaloue perhaps sometimes borders on dryness. Much in the sermons of the former is true poetry; but he has less of satisfactory and persuasive reasoning than the latter. His tone is also, as in all his writings, too domineering and dogmatical for those who demand something beyond the speaker’s authority when they listen.

|Funeral discourses of Bossuet.|

53. The sermons, however, of Bossuet, taken generally, are not reckoned in the highest class of his numerous writings; perhaps scarcely justice has been done to them. His genius, on the other hand, by universal confession, never shone higher than in the six which bear the name of Oraisons Funèbres. They belong in substance so much more naturally to the province of eloquence than of theology, that I should have reserved them for another place, if the separation would not have seemed rather unexpected to the reader. Few works of genius perhaps in the French language are better known, or have been more prodigally extolled. In that style of eloquence which the ancients called demonstrative, or rather descriptive (επιδεικτικος [epideiktikos]), the style of panegyric or commemoration, they are doubtless superior to those justly celebrated productions of Thucydides and Plato that have descended to us from Greece; nor has Bossuet been equalled by any later writer. Those on the Queen of England, on her daughter the Duchess of Orleans, and on the Prince of Condé, outshine the rest; and if a difference is to be made among these, we might, perhaps, after some hesitation, confer the palm on the first. The range of topics is so various, the thoughts so just, the images so noble and poetical, the whole is in such perfect keeping, the tone of awful contemplation, is so uniform, that if it has not any passages of such extraordinary beauty as occur in the other two, its general effect on the mind is more irresistible.[748]

[748] An English preacher of conspicuous renown for eloquence was called upon, within no great length of time, to emulate the funeral discourse of Bossuet on the sudden death of Henrietta of Orleans. He had before him a subject incomparably more deep in interest, more fertile in great and touching associations--he had to describe, not the false sorrow of courtiers, not the shriek of sudden surprise that echoed by night in the halls of Versailles, not the apocryphal penitence of one so tainted by the world’s intercourse, but the manly grief of an entire nation in the withering of those visions of hope which wait upon the untried youth of royalty, in its sympathy with grandeur annihilated, with beauty and innocence precipitated into the tomb. Nor did he sink beneath this subject, except as compared with Bossuet. The sermon to which my allusion will be understood, is esteemed by many the finest effort of this preacher; but if read together with that of its prototype, it will be laid aside as almost feeble and unimpressive.

54. In this style, much more of ornament, more of what speaks in the spirit, and even the very phrase, of poetry, to the imagination and the heart, is permitted by a rigorous criticism, than in forensic or in deliberative eloquence. The beauties that rise before the author’s vision are not renounced; the brilliant colours of his fancy are not subdued; the periods assume a more rhythmical cadence, and emulate, like metre itself, the voluptuous harmony of musical intervals; the whole composition is more evidently formed to delight; but it will delight to little purpose, or even cease, in any strong sense of the word, to do so at all, unless it is ennobled by moral wisdom. In this Bossuet was pre-eminent; his thoughts are never subtle or far-fetched; they have a sort of breadth, a generality of application, which is peculiarly required in those who address a mixed assembly, and which many that aim at what is profound and original are apt to miss. It may be confessed, that these funeral discourses are not exempt from some defects, frequently inherent in panegyrical eloquence; they are sometimes too rhetorical, and do not appear to show so little effort as some have fancied; the amplifications are sometimes too unmeasured, the language sometimes borders too nearly on that of the stage; above all, there is a tone of adulation not quite pleasing to a calm posterity.

|Fléchier.|

55. Fléchier (the third name of the seventeenth century, for Massillon belongs only to the next), like Bossuet, has been more celebrated for his funeral sermons than for any others; but, in this line, it is unfortunate for him to enter into unavoidable competition with one whom he cannot rival. The French critics extol Fléchier for the arrangement and harmony of his periods; yet, even in this, according to La Harpe, he is not essentially superior to Bossuet; and, to an English ear, accustomed to the long swell of our own writers, and of the Ciceronian school in Latin, he will probably not give so much gratification. He does not want a moral dignity, or a certain elevation of thought, without which the funeral panegyric must be contemptible; but he has not the majestic tone of Bossuet; he does not, like him, raise the heroes and princes of the earth in order to abase them by paintings of mortality and weakness, or recall the hearer in every passage to something more awful than human power, and more magnificent than human grandeur. This religious solemnity, so characteristic in Bossuet, is hardly felt in the less emphatic sentences of Fléchier. Even where his exordium is almost worthy of comparison, as in the funeral discourse on Turenne, we find him degenerate into a trivial eulogy, and he flatters both more profusely and with less skill. His style is graceful, but not without affectation and false taste. La Harpe has not ill compared him to Isocrates among the orators of Greece, the place of Demosthenes being, of course, reserved for Bossuet.[749]

[749] The native critics ascribe a reform in the style of preaching to Paolo Segneri, whom Corniani does not hesitate to call, with the sanction, he says, of posterity, the father of Italian eloquence. It is to be remembered, that in no country has the pulpit been so much degraded by empty declamation, and even by a stupid buffoonery. “The language of Segneri,” the same writer observes, “is always full of dignity and harmony. He inlaid it with splendid and elegant expressions, and has thus obtained a place among the authors to whom authority has been given by the Della Crusca dictionary. His periods are flowing, natural, and intelligible, without the affectation of obsolete Tuscanisms, which pass for graces of the language with many.” Tiraboschi, with much commendation of Segneri, admits that we find in him some vestiges of the false taste he endeavoured to reform. The very little that I have seen of the sermons of Segneri, gives no impression of any merit that can be reckoned more than relative to the miserable tone of his predecessors. The following specimen is from one of his most admired sermons:--E Cristo non potrà ottenere da voi che gli rimettiate un torto, un affronto, un aggravio, una parolina? Che vorreste da Christo? Vorreste ch’egli vi si gettasse supplichevole a’ piedi a chiedergli questa grazia? Io son quasi per dire ch’egli il farebbe; perchè se non dubiti di prostrarsi a’ piedi di un traditore, qual’era Guida, di lavarglieli, di asciugarglieli, di baciarglieli, non si vergognerebbe, cred’io, di farsi vedere ginocchioni a’ piè vostri. Ma vi fa bisogno di tanto per muovervi a compiacerlo? Ah Cavalieri, Cavalieri, io non vorrei questa volta farvi arrossire. Nel resto io so di certo, che se altrettanto fosse a voi domandato da quella donna che chiamate la vostra dama, da quella, di cui forsennati idolatrate il volto, indovinate le voglie, ambite le grazie, non vi farete pregar tanto a concederglielo. E poi vi fate pregar tanto da un Dio per voi crocefisso? O confusione! O vitupero! O vergogna! Raccolta di Prose Italiane (in Classici Italiani), vol. ii., p. 345.

This is certainly not the manner of Bossuet, and more like that of a third-rate Methodist among us.

|English sermons--Barrow.|

56. The style of preaching in England was less ornamental, and spoke less to the imagination and affections, than these celebrated writers of the Gallican church; but in some of our chief divines it had its own excellencies. The sermons of Barrow display a strength of mind, a comprehensiveness and fertility, which have rarely been equalled. No better proof can be given than his eight sermons on the government of the tongue; copious and exhaustive without tautology or superfluous declamation, they are, in moral preaching, what the best parts of Aristotle are in ethical philosophy, with more of development and a more extensive observation. It would be said of these sermons, and indeed, with a few exceptions, of all those of Barrow, that they are not what is called evangelical; they indicate the ascendancy of an Arminian party, dwelling far more than is usual in the pulpit on moral and rational, or even temporal, inducements, and sometimes hardly abstaining from what would give a little offence in later times.[750] His quotations also from ancient philosophers, though not so numerous as in Taylor, are equally uncongenial to our ears. In his style, notwithstanding its richness and occasional vivacity, we may censure a redundancy and excess of apposition; it is not sufficient to avoid strict tautology; no second phrase (to lay down a general rule not without exception) should be so like the first, that the reader would naturally have understood it to be comprised therein. Barrow’s language is more antiquated and formal than that of his age; and he abounds too much in uncommon words of Latin derivation, frequently such as appear to have no authority but his own.

[750] Thus, in his sermon against evil speaking (xvi.), Barrow treats it as fit “for rustic boors or men of coarsest education and employment, who, having their minds debased by being conversant in meanest affairs, do vent their sorry passions and bicker about their petty concernments in such strains, who also, not being capable of a fair reputation, or sensible of disgrace to themselves, do little value the credit of others, or care for aspersing it. But such language is unworthy of those persons, and cannot easily be drawn from them, who are wont to exercise their thoughts about nobler matters,” &c. No one would venture this now from the pulpit.

|South.|

57. South’s sermons begin, in order of date, before the Restoration, and come down to nearly the end of the century. They were much celebrated at the time, and retain a portion of their renown. This is by no means surprising. South had great qualifications for that popularity which attends the pulpit, and his manner was at that time original. Not diffuse, not learned, not formal in argument like Barrow, with a more natural structure of sentences, a more pointed, though by no means a more fair and satisfactory turn of reasoning, with a style clear and English, free from all pedantry, but abounding with those colloquial novelties of idiom, which, though now become vulgar and offensive, the age of Charles II. affected, sparing no personal or temporary sarcasm, but, if he seems for a moment to tread on the verge of buffoonery, recovering himself by some stroke of vigorous sense and language; such was the witty Dr. South, whom the courtiers delighted to hear. His sermons want all that is called unction, and sometimes even earnestness, which is owing, in a great measure, to a perpetual tone of gibing at rebels and fanatics; but there is a masculine spirit about them, which, combined with their peculiar characteristics, would naturally fill the churches where he might be heard. South appears to bend towards the Arminian theology, without adopting so much of it as some of his contemporaries.

|Tillotson.|

59. The sermons of Tillotson were, for half a century, more read than any in our language. They are now bought almost as waste paper, and hardly read at all. Such is the fickleness of religious taste, as abundantly numerous instances would prove. Tillotson is reckoned verbose and languid. He has not the former defect in nearly so great a degree as some of his eminent predecessors; but there is certainly little vigour or vivacity in his style. Full of the Romish controversy, he is perpetually recurring to that “world’s debate;” and he is not much less hostile to all the Calvinistic tenets. What is most remarkable in the theology of Tillotson is his strong assertion, in almost all his sermons, of the principles of natural religion and morality, not only as the basis of all revelation, without a dependence on which it cannot be believed, but as nearly coincident with Christianity in its extent, a length to which few at present would be ready to follow him. Tillotson is always of a tolerant and catholic spirit, enforcing right actions rather than orthodox opinions, and obnoxious, for that and other reasons, to all the bigots of his own age.

|Expository Theology.|

60. It has become necessary to draw towards a conclusion of this chapter; the materials are far from being exhausted. In expository, or, as some call it, exegetical theology, the English divines had already taken a conspicuous station. Andrès, no partial estimator of Protestant writers, extols them with marked praise.[751] Those who belonged to the earlier part of the century form a portion of a vast collection, the Critici Sacri, published by one Bee, a bookseller, in 1660. This was in nine folio volumes; and in 1669, Matthew Pool, a nonconforming minister, produced his Synopsis Criticorum, in five volumes, being, in great measure, an abridgment and digest of the former. Bee complained of the infraction of his copyright, or rather his equitable interest; but such a dispute hardly pertains to our history.[752] The work of Pool was evidently a more original labour than the former. Hammond, Patrick, and other commentators, do honour to the Anglican church in the latter part of the century.

[751] I soli Inglesi, che ampio spazio non dovrebbono occupare in questo capo dell’esegetica sacra, se l’istituto della nostr’opera ci permettesse tener dietro a tutti i più degni della nostra stima? Vol. xix., p. 253.

[752] Chalmers.

|Pearson on the Creed.|

61. Pearson’s Exposition of the Apostle’s Creed, published in 1659, is a standard book in English divinity. It expands beyond the literal purport of the creed itself to most articles of orthodox belief, and is a valuable summary of arguments and authorities on that side. The closeness of Pearson, and his judicious selection of proofs, distinguish him from many, especially the earlier, theologians. Some might surmise that his undeviating adherence to what he calls the church is hardly consistent with independence of thinking; but, considered as an advocate, he is one of much judgment and skill. Such men as Pearson and Stillingfleet, would have been conspicuous at the bar, which we could not quite affirm of Jeremy Taylor.

|Simon’s Critical Histories.|

62. Simon, a regular priest of the congregation called The Oratory, which has been rich in eminent men, owes much of his fame to his Critical History of the Old Testament. This work, bold in many of its positions, as it then seemed to both the Catholic and Protestant orthodox, after being nearly strangled by Bossuet in France, appeared at Rotterdam in 1685. Bossuet attacked it with extreme vivacity, but with a real inferiority to Simon, both in learning and candour.[753] Le Clerc on his side carped more at the Critical History than it seems to deserve. Many paradoxes, as they then were called, in his famous work are now received as truth, or at least pass without reproof. Simon may possibly be too prone to novelty, but a love of truth as well as great acuteness are visible throughout. His Critical History of the New Testament was published in 1689, and one or two more works of a similar description before the close of the century.

[753] Défense de la Tradition des Saints Pères. Œuvres de Bossuet, vol. v., and Instructions sur la Version du N. T., imprimée à Trevoux, Id. vol. iv., 313. Bausset, Vie de Bossuet, iv., 276.

63. I have, on a former occasion, adverted, in a corresponding chapter, to publications on witchcraft, and similar superstitions. Several might be mentioned at this time; the belief in such tales was assailed by a prevalent scepticism which called out their advocates. Of these, the most unworthy to have exhibited their great talents in such a cause were our own philosophers Henry More and Joseph Glanvil. The Sadducismus Triumphatus, or Treatise on Apparitions, by the latter, has passed through several editions, while his Scepsis Scientifica has hardly been seen, perhaps, by six living persons. A Dutch minister, by name Bekker, raised a great clamour against himself by a downright denial of all power to the devil, and consequently to his supposed instruments, the ancient beldams of Holland and other countries. His Monde Enchanté, originally published in Dutch, is in four volumes, written in a systematic manner and with tedious prolixity. There was no ground for imputing infidelity to the author, except the usual ground of calumniating everyone who quits the beaten path in theology; but his explanations of scripture in the case of the demoniacs and the like are, as usual with those who have taken the same line, rather forced. The fourth volume which contains several curious stories of imagined possession, and some which resemble what is now called magnetism, is the only part of Bekker’s once celebrated book that can be read with any pleasure. Bekker was a Cartesian, and his theory was built too much on Cartesian assumptions of the impossibility of spirit acting on body, which are easily parried by denying his inference from them.

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