pages of the Thesaurus of Nicetas Choniates in the original Greek; seven of Juan de la Puenta in Spanish; fifteen of the acts of the Council of Chalcedon in Greek; and thirteen of Laurentius Syslyga, although but hastily looked over,' besides lesser fragments not mentioned in detail. His evening recreations consisted of such light reading as Wake's Rex Pla'tonicus,' or lessons in Rabbinical Hebrew from a young Jew! It is not surprising,' Mr. Pattison adds, to read in 'the Diary, that in the second week of this régime, as he was 'ascending the Bodleian stairs, he was seized with a sudden 'giddiness of the head!'

On his return from Oxford, on June 9th, he began to copy for the press, and on the 18th the work of printing actually began. He was able thenceforth to keep ahead of the press, although the printing proceeded at the rate of four folio pages per day. At the end of November, he had reached the five hundredth page. The remaining two hundred and seventy, the introductory epistle, and other prefatory pages, were completed on February 14th, and on March 23rd the volume was presented to the King!

Looking at the 'Exercitationes' apart from the interest which the work had in the personal controversy with Baronius, it must be felt that it was not a book for which it was possible to hope for general popularity, or even for success with the more select. body of scholars. It is not a consecutive history of the period over which it ranges, or even a connected essay on Baronius's history of that period. It is a collection of detached notes and criticisms of the Annals; and even considered as such, there is not any continuous thread of argument to give unity to the composition. If there be any principle running through the whole, it is simply that of hostile criticism of Baronius; and in most instances the stores of erudition which are heaped together appear to have been gathered less for the sake of the knowledge which they embody than with a view to depreciate and discredit the authority of the Roman historian. It is not wonderful, therefore, that the Exercitationes' fell below expectation.

"Because the "Annals" did not sink out of sight at one touch of the enchanter's wand, the "Exercitations were proclaimed a failure by exulting enemies and disappointed friends. The Savile set were happy to think that Casaubon could not do what he had prevented them from doing. Richard Montagu laments that the very learned Isaac Casaubon was not a theologian; that he followed Scaliger even in his paradoxes; that he made much of trifles-critica titivillitia; that he spent all his Ihour on the volume of the gospel history, and not on the later

periods; that he allows himself in irrelevant digressions. These were things that could be said at the time by the envious "friends." He did not please his immediate patrons, the bishops, who wished now that Casaubon had handled Baronius a little more roughly. Like their successors in the eighteenth century, who regretted Butler's "want of vigour," they had no means of knowing which was in the right, and thought want of passion a sign of weakness. The puritan party wished to see Baronius well abused, and charged with disaffection the man who would not stop to do it.' (Pp. 380-1.)

There can be little doubt that these excessive labours accelerated the death of Casaubon. Other causes concurred to disturb his health, and to increase the nervous irritability from which he had long been a sufferer-the fierce and galling personalities which were showered upon him by anonymous antagonists, as well as by his adversaries in the various controversies in which he took part; the discomforts of his new life in a foreign country and among entirely strange associations; the pecuniary difficulties by which, notwithstanding his bettered income in England, he was still beset; and, perhaps most of all, the protracted absence of his wife, to whose affectionate care he had in great degree owed even the moderate vigour which he had hitherto enjoyed. And if the crisis was precipitated by his own indiscreet excesses of labour, by unintermitted study and late vigils, the seeds of early decay had existed from the beginning.

'Nature had given him a puny and infirm frame. Though not so little as some other celebrated men of learning, as e.g. Pietro Pomponazzo, as Melanchthon, or Lobeck, Casaubon was a man of small stature, "corpusculum tanto ingenio impar," says Thoris. The same observant physician, when introduced to him in 1610, was astonished to see that "such exalted wisdom could be lodged in such a wretched "tenement." It did not need Thoris's experienced eye to read the sentence of death in the emaciated frame, the sunken chest, the stooping shoulders, the wasted features, the prominent cheek-bone, the dark ring round the eye, the hectic flush, the accumulation of phlegm in the air-passages, the hacking cough. "I foresaw that his new "calling in the service of his majesty, and his own greediness of work, "would precipitate the catastrophe.' Isaac became Thoris's patient, and the worst symptoms then disclosed to him, verified the diagnostic of his eye-the fevered pulse, the labouring heart, the sleepless unrefreshing nights, the long-standing of his cough.' (P. 460.)

With all these formidable symptoms his energy of mind still maintained itself. In June 1614, he was projecting the continuation of the Exercitations, and contemplating the great things (magna moliemur') which he hoped to accomplish in it. In the end of that month his friends took him on a country

excursion to Greenwich. It was too much for his strength. He passed the night in great torture. In the morning when his friendly physician, Thoris, came to see him, the patient said that like Theophrastus, he was dying of a holiday; when Theophrastus had passed his hundredth year, he went to his nephew's wedding, and gave up a day's study to do it. But ' he never studied more. He died of it.' This characteristic anticipation was but too just. Casaubon lingered for a fortnight. He looked forward to death with great resignation, expressing but one single regret, that he must leave his work on Church history unfinished. He died, in his fifty-sixth year, on the 12th July, 1614. Up to the very eve of his fatal seizure he himself had not had any thought of proximate signs of death; and it might have been expected that a scholar of reading so miscellaneous and of energy so vast, cut off thus unexpectedly in the very noon of his literary vigour, would have left behind him stores of miscellaneous literary materials prepared, or at least designed for publication. In matter of fact, Mr. Pattison has collected together from various sources the titles of no fewer than twenty-four separate works or essays which Casaubon, at different periods of his career, had not merely projected but had announced his intention of preparing. Nevertheless at his death he left nothing prepared for press beyond avery small portion of his intended Commentary on Polybius,' upon which he had begun to labour as early as 1604. Of the schemes enumerated in Mr. Pattison's list, hardly a trace remained among his manuscripts, because hardly anything was ever put on paper. It is not easy to account for this, and it would actually appear as though Casaubon often deceived himself into thinking that he had made progress in writing, when in truth the material was only laid up in his memory and not committed to paper. He got at last into the habit of putting by any topic as it came up with the remark, this we have discussed at length elsewhere. The distinction between what he had read, and what he had noted down, and what he had 'printed, became obliterated in his mind.' (P. 487.)

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His published works or essays, not including second editions, or prefaces to the works of others, amount to twenty-five, beginning with the Notes on Diogenes Laertius,' printed in 1583, and ending with the Polybius,' in 1617. With his earlier efforts he himself was entirely dissatisfied. The first work which can be regarded as a fair sample of his matured powers is the Theophrastus' of 1593, of which even to this day every scholar speaks with admiration and reverence. As a critical editor, perhaps the most favourable specimens of his powers

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are the Persius' (1605), and the Polybius' (1609). But the book on which his reputation for scholarship must rest is his Commentary upon Athenæus;' of which Schweighäuser* declares that its merits are universally admitted by the learned, and are most freely acknowledged by those who are most distinguished for their scholarship and for their special familiarity with the subject. It is strange that it should be so; for the Diary furnishes innumerable evidences that after a certain stage of his progress, the task was persevered in grudg ingly and invita Minerva. There was none of his works upon which he had entered with so much ardour, and at the same time none which as it proceeded became so irksome to him. While engaged upon it as a daily duty, he was perpetually pining for the more congenial occupation of patristic study. He first had entertained the thought of editing Athenæus' as far back as 1590, and in 1594 he tells Scaliger that he is engaged upon that author. Before he left Geneva in 1596, he had completed the revision of the text, and had already passed the greater part through the press. It was at Montpellier that he began the Commentary, the first draft of which occupied him about ten months, from June 23, 1599, to April 13, 1598. His revision of the draft for press was much interrupted, but he managed to complete it by the following March, on the 20th of which month he commenced to print the volume, the last sheet being corrected on the 9th of August, 1600. Still the picture which the Diary discloses of the details of the task is sadly disenchanting as to the supposed charm of literary labour. Day after day we meet weary and almost despairing records of the worker's groans and sighs. His faculties as well as his spirits are oppressed by the very burden of his knowledge. He writhes under the enforced and ungrateful toil-' catenati in ergastulo labores.' He confesses to Scaliger that he had repented times beyond number that he had ever taken the work in hand; and in the letter in which he announces its final completion, he exults in his release from a task which had become oppressive and intolerable.†

Nevertheless, distasteful as was the task, it was manfully and conscientiously executed; and although Casaubon's text of Athenæus' will not, in point of correctness, satisfy all the requirements of modern criticism, his Commentary, as a whole, may safely invite comparison with the very happiest efforts of the scholars of his own or any later age. His marvellous inas

liv.

Schweighäuser's Athenæus,' Præf. vol. i. P.
Magna et molesta cura liberati sumus.' Ep. 166, Ad Scaligerum.

tery of the Greek language gave him an especial aptitude for the work of interpreting an author whose vocabulary is probably the most varied and comprehensive in the whole range of the Greek literature; and his extraordinary stores of ancient learning, unsurpassed among moderns, except perhaps by our own Bentley, may truly be said to exhaust every source of illustration available in his time.

Of this remarkable mastery of the Greek language and familiarity with its use, Casaubon's Diary supplies innumerable and often very curious and amusing examples. This Diary extends from February 1597 to June 1614, with the exception of a gap for the years 1604-7, owing to the loss of one of the fasciculi. The language is Latin; but from the first entry to the last, it is interlarded with Greek words, phrases, and sentences, always most appropriate and significant, and falling so easily and naturally into the context as to show that they are not drawn in for parade, but are the spontaneous outpouring of the writer's stores of knowledge. It is impossible not to agree with Mr. Pattison that Casaubon's habitual use of Greek phrases was no pedantic affectation, but the natural language of a man who spent most of the hours of every day so entirely in the company of Greek authors, that, as a foreigner long resident in France becomes habituated to French, he came naturally and without effort to think and to clothe his thoughts in Greek as the most familiar and significant embodiment of the process. If he records a temptation to read in his neighbour's book over his shoulder at church, the word that occurs to him is elσKÚTTE. The best phrase he can find to express the intractable character of the Genevese is τὸ δυσάγωγον. He habitually speaks of his ærumnas et πειρασμούς. The Greek of the proverbial saying θεὸς ἐκ μήχανης comes more naturally to him than the usual Latin one. The readiest form of wish for a pleasant journey is ut in itinere svodwow.' The vagaries of modern doctors he expresses by Doctores hodierni 'ad capita viarum Toλvoxidŵr nos deducerent;' and with all the tenderness of his love for his dear wife, he is unable even in the solemn prayers which he puts forth for the restoration of her health, to repress the inveterate habit::- - Domine 'Jesu,' he prays, redde uxori priorem eveğíav.' In a word, so far as a dead language can be made vernacular, Casaubon had appropriated the Greek of the New Attic period. He never used a lexicon. At the request of a Greek who professed to be a descendant of John Lascaris, he translated a petition into Greek without a moment's hesitation.

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versation he could express himself in Greek as readily as in