CHAPTER 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.