Regius a Brenni deductus sanguine sanguis
Qui dominos rerum tot numerabat avos,
Cui nihil indulsit sors, nil natura negavit,
Et jure imperii conditor ipse sui,
Invidiæ scopulus, sed cœlo proximus, illa,
Illa Juliades conditur, hospes, humo.
Centum illic proavos et centum pone triumphos,
Sceptraque Veronæ sceptrigerosque Deos;
Mastinosque, Canesque, et totam ab origine gentem,
Et quæ præterea non bene nota latent.
Illic stent aquilæ priscique insignia regni,
Et ter Cæsareo munere fulta domus
Plus tamen invenies quicquid sibi contulit ipse,
Et minimum tantæ nobilitatis eget.
Aspice tot linguas, totumque in pectore mundum;
Innumeras gentes continet iste locus.
Crede illic Arabas, desertaque nomina Pœnos,
Et crede Armenios Æthiopasque tegi.
Terrarum instar habes; et quam natura negavit
Laudem uni populo, contigit illa viro.
[947] Niceron, vol. xxiii. Blount, Biogr. Univ.
Isaac Casaubon. 38. This eminent person, a native of Geneva[948]—that little city, so great in the annals of letters—and the son-in-law of Henry Stephens, rose above the horizon in 1583, when his earliest work, the Annotations on Diogenes Laertius, was published; a performance of which he was afterwards ashamed, as being unworthy of his riper studies. Those on Strabo, an author much neglected before, followed in 1587. For more than twenty years Casaubon employed himself upon editions of Greek authors, many of which, as that of Theophrastus, in 1593, and that of Athenæus, in 1600, deserve particular mention. The latter, especially, which he calls, “molestissimum, difficillimum et tædii plenissimum opus,” has always been deemed a noble monument of critical sagacity and extensive erudition. In conjectural emendation of the text, no one hitherto had been equal to Casaubon. He may probably be deemed a greater scholar than his father-in-law Stephens, or even, in a critical sense, than his friend Joseph Scaliger. These two lights of the literary world, though it is said, that they had never seen each other,[949] continued till the death of the latter in regular correspondence and unbroken friendship. Casaubon, querulous but not envious, paid freely the homage which Scaliger was prepared to exact, and wrote as to one superior in age, in general celebrity, and in impetuosity of spirit. Their letters to each other, as well as to their various other correspondents, are highly valuable for the literary history of the period they embrace; that is, the last years of the present, and the first of the ensuing century.
[948] The father of Casaubon was from the neighbourhood of Bordeaux. He fled to Geneva during a temporary persecution of the Huguenots, but returned home afterwards. Casaubon went back to Geneva in his nineteenth year for the sake of education. See his life by his son Meric, prefixed to Almeloveen’s edition of his epistles.
[949] Morhof, l. i. c. xv. s. 57.
General result. 39. Budæus, Camerarius, Stephens, Scaliger, Casaubon, appear to stand out as the great restorers of ancient learning, and especially of the Greek language. I do not pretend to appreciate them by deep skill in the subject, or by a diligent comparison of their works with those of others, but from what I collect to have been the more usual suffrage of competent judges. Canter, perhaps, or Sylburgius might be rated above Camerarius; but the last seems, if we may judge by the eulogies bestowed upon him, to have stood higher in the estimation of his contemporaries. Their labours restored the integrity of the text in the far greater part of the Greek authors—though they did not yet possess as much metrical knowledge as was required for that of the poets—explained most dubious passages, and nearly exhausted the copiousness of the language. For another century mankind was content, in respect of Greek philology, to live on the accumulations of the sixteenth; and it was not till after so long a period had elapsed, that new scholars arose, more exact, more philosophical, more acute in “knitting up the ravelled sleeve” of speech, but not, to say the least, more abundantly stored with erudition than those who had cleared the way, and upon whose foundations they built.
Learning in England under Edward and Mary. 40. We come, in the last place, to the condition of ancient learning in this island; a subject which it may be interesting to trace with some minuteness, though we can offer no splendid banquet, even from the reign of the Virgin Queen. Her accession was indeed a happy epoch in our literary, as well as civil annals. She found a great and miserable change in the state of the universities since the days of her father. Plunder and persecution, the destroying spirits of the last two reigns, were enemies, against which our infant muses could not struggle.[950] Ascham, indeed, denies that there was much decline of learning at Cambridge before the time of Mary. The influence of her reign was, not indirectly alone, but by deliberate purpose, injurious to all useful knowledge.[951] It was in contemplation, he tells us (and surely it was congenial enough to the spirit of that government) that the ancient writers should give place in order to restore Duns Scotus, and the scholastic barbarians.
[950] The last editor of Wood’s Athenæ Oxonienses bears witness to having seen chronicles and other books mutilated, as he conceives, by the protestant visitors of the university under Edward, “What is most,” he says, “to the discredit of Cox (afterwards bishop of Ely), was his unwearied diligence in destroying the ancient manuscripts and other books in the public and private libraries at Oxford. The savage barbarity with which he executed this hateful office can never be forgotten,” &c., p. 478. One book only of the famous library of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, bequeathed to Oxford, escaped mutilation. This is a Valerius Maximus. But as Cox was really a man of considerable learning, we may ask whether there is evidence to lay these Vandal proceedings on him rather than on his colleagues.
[951] “And what was the fruit of this seed? Verily, judgment in doctrine was wholly altered; order in discipline very much changed; the love of good learning began suddenly to wax cold; the knowledge of the tongues, in spite of some that therein had flourished, was manifestly contemned, and so the way of right study manifestly perverted; the choice good authors of malice confounded; old sophistry, I say not well, not old, but that new rotten sophistry, began to beard and shoulder logic in their own tongue; yea, I know that heads were cast together, and counsel devised, that Duns, with all the rabble of barbarous questionists, should have dispossessed, of their places and room, Aristotle, Plato, Tully, and Demosthenes; whom good Mr. Redman, and those two worthy stars of the university, Mr. Cheke and Mr. Smith, with their scholars, had brought to flourish as notably in Cambridge, as ever they did in Greece and in Italy; and for the doctrine of those four, the four pillars of learning, Cambridge then giving no place to no university, neither in France, Spain, Germany, nor Italy.”—P. 317.
Revival under Elizabeth. 41. It is indeed impossible to restrain the desire of noble minds for truth and wisdom. Scared from the banks of Isis and Cam, neglected or discountenanced by power, learning found an asylum in the closets of private men, who laid up in silence stores for future use. And some of course remained out of those who had listened to Smith and Cheke, or the contemporary teachers of Oxford. But the mischief was effected, in a general sense, by breaking up the course of education in the universities. At the beginning of the new queen’s reign, but few of the clergy, to whichever mode of faith they might conform, had the least tincture of Greek learning, and the majority did not understand Latin.[952] The protestant exiles, being far the most learned men of the kingdom, brought back a more healthy tone of literary diligence. The universities began to revive. An address was delivered in Greek verses to Elizabeth at Cambridge in 1564, to which she returned thanks in the same language.[953] Oxford would not be outdone. Lawrence, regius professor of Greek, as we are told by Wood, made an oration at Carfax, a spot often chosen for public exhibition, on her visit to the city in 1566; when her majesty, thanking the university in the same tongue, observed “it was the best Greek speech she had ever heard.”[954] Several slight proofs of classical learning appear from this time in the “History and Antiquities of Oxford;” marks of a progress, at first slow and silent, which I only mention, because nothing more important has been recorded.