Soleil des savants, qui parle elegamment
Hebreu, Greçois, Romain, Espagnol, Allemand,
François, Italien, Nubien, Arabique,
Syriaque, Persian, Anglois, Chaldaique.”[99]
In his case it is difficult, as in most others, to ascertain the degree of his familiarity with each of these. To Du Bartas’s poetical epithet, elegamment, of course, no importance is to be attached; and it would perhaps be equally unsafe to rely on the depreciatory representations of his literary antagonists. One thing, at least, is certain, that he himself made the most of his accomplishment. He was not the man to hide his light from any overweening delicacy. He was one of the greatest boasters of his own or any other time. In one place he boasts that there is no language in which he could write with such elegance as Arabic.[100] In another he professes to write Syriac as well as the Syrians themselves.[101] And it is curiously significant of the reputation which he commonly enjoyed, that the wits of his own day used to say that there was one particular department of each language in which there could be no doubt of his powers—its Billingsgate vocabulary! There was not one, they confessed, of the thirteen languages to which he laid claim, in which he was not fully qualified to scold![102]
The eminent botanist, Charles Le Cluse, (Clusius), a contemporary of Scaliger, can hardly be called a great linguist, as his studies were chiefly confined to the modern European languages, with several of which he was thoroughly conversant; but he is remarkable as having contributed, by a familiarity with modern languages very rare among the naturalists of his day, to settle the comparative popular nomenclature of his science. He is even still a high authority on this curious branch of botanical study.
The reader who remembers the extraordinary reputation enjoyed among his contemporaries by the learned Nicholas Peiresc, may be disappointed at finding him overlooked in this enumeration: but, as of his extraordinary erudition he has left no permanent fruit in literature, so of his acquirements as a linguist no authentic record has been preserved. The same is true of his friend, Galaup de Chasteuil, a less showy, perhaps, but better read orientalist. Through devotion to these studies, quite as much as under the influence of religious feeling, Chasteuil made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, in 1631, permanently fixed his abode in Palestine; and so thoroughly conversant did he become, not only with the language and literature, but also with the manners, usages and feelings of the Maronites of the Lebanon, that, on the death of their patriarch, despite the national predilections by which all Easterns are characterized, they desired to elect him, a Western as he was, head of their national church.[103] Lewis de Dieu, the two Morins—Stephen, the Calvinist minister, and John, the learned Oratorian convert—the two Cappels, Lewis and James, and even the celebrated D’Herbelot, author of the Bibliothèque Orientale, all belong rather to the class of oriental scholars than of linguists in the popular acceptation of the word. The two Cappels, as well as their adversaries, the Buxtorfs, are best known in connexion with the controversy about the Masoretic Points.
One of the writers named in a previous page, Claude Duret, although Adelung[104] could not discover any particulars regarding him, beyond those which are detailed in the title of his book, (where he is merely described as “Bourbonnais, President a Moulins,”) nevertheless deserves very special mention on account of the extensive and curious learning, not alone in languages, but also in general literature, history and science, which characterize his rare work, Thresor de l’Histoire des Langues de cet Univers.[105] This work is undoubtedly far from being exempt from grave inaccuracies; but it is nevertheless, for its age, a marvel, as well of curious learning and extensive research, as of acquaintance with a great many (according to one account, seventeen,) languages, both of the East and of the West.[106] How much of this, however, is mere book-scholarship, and how much is real familiarity, it is impossible, in the absence of all details of the writer’s personal history, to decide.
Although far from being so universal a linguist as Duret, the great biblical scholar, Samuel Bochart (born at Rouen in 1599) was much superior to him in his knowledge of Hebrew and the cognate languages, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, and even Coptic. His Hierozoicon and Geographia Sacra, as monuments of philological as well as antiquarian knowledge, have maintained a high reputation even to the present time, notwithstanding the advantages enjoyed by modern students of biblical antiquities and history.[107]
Bochart’s pupil and his friend in early life, (although they were bitterly alienated from each other at a later period, and although Bochart’s death is painfully associated with their literary quarrel[108]) the celebrated Peter Daniel Huet, can hardly deserve a place in the catalogue of French linguists; but he was at least a liberal and enlightened patron of the study.