[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.
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.