[185] Following the course pursued in the Psalterium Quincuplex, published shortly before by Henri Estienne, Tory proposed to write with a cedilla the last e but one of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation (emere, contendere, etc.), to distinguish it from the infinitive. In our day the circumflex accent has been adopted for this purpose; but accented letters did not exist in Tory's time, and he sought to utilise, in the interest of the metre, the only distinctive sign at the disposal of typography, the e with the cedilla, which was then generally used for æ, in imitation of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Tory also proposed to spell with s, instead of x, certain words like mixtum; 'for,' he said, 'misceo has miscui in the perfect; and so, by analogy, we must say mistum.'
I will not comment here on some other observations of the same sort made by Tory in this same note to the reader; I will say simply that they all tend to prove his erudition and peremptorily contradict the extraordinary assertion of a certain Abbé Joly, who, in a huge folio, entitled Remarques critiques sur le Dictionnaire de Bayle, and published in 1740, observes that Tory was 'very ignorant,' without adducing a single fact in support of his opinion. In the Menagiana (vol. iv, p. 84 of the 12mo edition of 1729) Tory is rebuked, to be sure, for forging Latin words, after the example of the author of the Songe du Poliphile; but this is a less serious charge, and is not a proof of ignorance; on the contrary it proves misuse of knowledge. Geofroy Tory, says the author, attracted by the style of the Poliphile, composed seven epitaphs filled with words most worthy of a place in that work, 'such as murmurillare, insatianter, hilaranter, pederaptim, velocipediter, ægrimoniosius, avicipes, conspergitare, venustulentissus, vinulentibibulus, apneumaticus, and collifrangibulum, which he represented as ancient words, and which the excellent Catherinot, in his epitaph of this same Tory, did not fail to guarantee to be such.'—See what Catherinot has to say of Tory's Epitaphs in his epitaph of Tory, p. 44 supra. [Tumulos aliquot ludicros veterrimo stylo latine condiderit.]
[186] This is the correct reading, not Hongoti, which M. Renouard mistakenly adopts (Ann. des Estienne, 3d ed., p. 6, 2d col., no. 3; and p. 276), having failed to notice the line over the o in the second syllable of the word. However, this is the only place in which this Jean Hongont is mentioned, and nothing is known of him save that he was associated with the first Henri Estienne in the publication of this edition of the Cosmography of Pope Pius II, otherwise called Æneas Sylvius, edited by Tory. This book is in the Bibliothèque Mazarine.
[187] October 10, 1509.
[188] See infra, Part 3, § III, sub nomine Bade.
[189] Bibliothèque Mazarine.
[190] [For Latin original, see Appendix [X], l.]
[191] As to this adage, see the Collection of Erasmus (folio, Basle, 1574), p. 302: Aristophanis et Cleantis lucerna.
[192] Claudian, xv, 385: Minuit præsentia famam.
[193] As to this adage, see the Collection of Erasmus, ubi sup., p. 134 a: Non absque Theseo.