ADDITIONAL ACCOUNT of the LIFE OF JOHN PHILIP BARRETIER [46].
"As the nature of our collections requires that our accounts of remarkable persons and transactions should be early, our readers must necessarily pardon us, if they are often not complete, and allow us to be sufficiently studious of their satisfaction, if we correct our errours, and supply our defects from subsequent intelligence, where the importance of the subject merits an extraordinary attention, or when we have any peculiar opportunities of procuring information. The particulars here inserted we thought proper to annex, by way of note, to the following passages, quoted from the magazine for December, 1740, and for February, 1741."
P. 377. At the age of nine years he not only was master of five languages.
French, which was the native language of his mother, was that which he learned first, mixed, by living in Germany, with some words of the language of the country. After some time, his father took care to introduce, in his conversation with him, some words of Latin, in such a manner that he might discover the meaning of them by the connexion of the sentence, or the occasion on which they were used, without discovering that he had any intention of instructing him, or that any new attainment was proposed.
By this method of conversation, in which new words were every day introduced, his ear had been somewhat accustomed to the inflections and variations of the Latin tongue, he began to attempt to speak like his father, and was in a short time drawn on, by imperceptible degrees, to speak Latin, intermixed with other languages.
Thus, when he was but four years old, he spoke every day French to his mother, Latin to his father, and high Dutch to the maid, without any perplexity to himself, or any confusion of one language with another.
P. 377. He is no stranger to biblical criticism.
Having now gained such a degree of skill in the Hebrew language, as to be able to compose in it, both in prose and verse, he was extremely desirous of reading the rabbins; and having borrowed of the neighbouring clergy, and the jews of Schwabach, all the books which they could supply him, he prevailed on his father to buy him the great rabbinical Bible, published at Amsterdam, in four tomes, folio, 1728, and read it with that accuracy and attention which appears, by the account of it written by him to his favourite M. le Maitre, inserted in the beginning of the twenty-sixth volume of the Bibliothéque germanique.
These writers were read by him, as other young persons peruse romances or novels, only from a puerile desire of amusement; for he had so little veneration for them, even while he studied them with most eagerness, that he often diverted his parents with recounting their fables and chimeras.
P. 381. In his twelfth year he applied more particularly to the study of the fathers.