Budaeus of extracts from the gnomic poets called the liber gnomagyricus, the first Greek book printed in France. In the course of a brief preface the editor, François Tissard, insists on the importance of Greek :—nemini dubium est...quanti sit Latinis eruditio Graeca in hac praecipue tempestate aestimanda. He also describes the difficulty with which he had induced the printers to put a Greek work into type by appealing to their sense of honour, their ambition, their public spirit, and their hope of personal profit'. In the same year, Gourmont printed the Frogs and Mice of 'Homer', the Works and Days of Hesiod, and the Erotemata of Chrysoloras. He also printed Musaeus and Theocritus, and (in 1528) the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes, and Demosthenes and Lucian. The text of the whole of Sophocles was completed by Simon Colinaeus on Dec. 16th, 1528". The following year was the date of the publication of the celebrated Commentarii Linguae Graecae of Budaeus. Guillaume Budé (1467-1540), who was born in Paris, was the son of a wealthy civilian who had a considerable collection of books. After spending three years in studying law with little success at Orleans, he returned to Paris and gave himself up to the pleasures of the chase, a pursuit on which he long afterwards wrote a dialogue by the command of Charles IX. It was not until the age of 24 that he became a serious student and began to form his Latin style on the study of Cicero. His letter to Cuthbert Tunstall assures us of the little Greek that he ever learned from Hermonymus of Sparta. He derived far more profit from the occasional instructions of the busy Greek diplomatist, Janus Lascaris. Budaeus rose to be secretary to Louis XII and a Maître des Requêtes; he was charged with diplomatic missions to Julius II and Leo X; and in 1520 was present at the interview between Francis I and Henry VIII in the 'Field of the Cloth of Gold'. Under Francis I and Henry II his fame as a Greek scholar was one of the glories of his country. In 1502-5 he 1 Egger, Hellénisme en France, i 154-7. 2 Cp. Didot's Alde Manuce, 596 f; Lefranc, Collège de France, 29–33. 3 Th. Renouard, Bibl. de Simon de Colines, 1894, p. 128. Ed. Badius, 1529; ed. R. Estienne, 1548. Opera, i 362 (1557). produced a Latin rendering of three treatises of Plutarch; in his 'Annotations' on the Pandects (1508) he opened a new era in the study of Roman law; and, in 1515 (N. S.), he broke fresh ground as the first serious student of the Roman coinage in his treatise De Asse. It was the ripe result of no less than nine years of research, and in twenty years passed through ten editions. Its abundant learning is said to have aroused the envy of Erasmus, and its dry erudition was preferred by one of the author's partisans to the rich variety and the sparkling wit of the Adagia'. The collection of letters which he published in 1520 included several in Greek, and thenceforth he held, by the side of Erasmus, the foremost rank as a scholar. The original aim of his Commentarii was the elucidation of the legal terminology of Greece and Rome, and, amid all the miscellaneous information here accumulated, that aim remains prominent'. The author's learning was generously recognised by Scaliger, and much of the material stored in his pages was incorporated in the Greek Thesaurus of Henri Estienne. The little volume De Philologia (1530) is a plea for the public recognition of classical scholarship, in the form of a dialogue between Budaeus and Francis I. In his far more extensive work De Transitu Hellenismi ad Christianismum (1534) he describes the philosophy of Greece as a preparation for Christianity, and defends the study of Greek from the current imputation of 'heresy'. His French treatise, De l'Institution du Prince, written in 1516, was not printed until 1547. He here declares that 'every man, even if he be a king, should be devoted to philology', which is interpreted as 'the love of letters and of all liberal learning'. Such learning, he adds, can only be attained through Greek and Latin, and of these Greek is the more important". Besides two villas in the country, he owned a house in the Rue Saint-Martin (no. 203), which in the seventeenth century still bore the motto selected by Budaeus himself :— 'Summum crede nefas animam praeferre pudori 1 Hallam, i 2784 f. Quarterly Review, vol. xxii (Hallam, i 329′). Scaligerana, 39, ça esté le plus grand Grec de l'Europe. 4 Woodward, Renaissance Education, 127–138. In 1503 he married the daughter of an ancient Norman house, and it is said that, on his wedding-day, by an exceptional act of self-denial, he limited his time of study to three hours only. In his studies he was aided in every possible way by the devotion of his wife. Once, when he was busy reading in his library, one of the servants suddenly rushed in to inform him that the house was on fire. The scholar, without lifting up his eyes from his book, simply said to his informant :-allez avertir ma femme ; vous savez bien que je ne m'occupe pas des affaires du menage l1 His health was seriously impaired by his prodigious industry, and the surgeons of the day vainly endeavoured to cure him of his constant headaches by applying a red-hot iron to the crown of his head. Happily he was enabled to find a safer remedy by taking long walks and by cultivating his garden3. When he died in 1539, he had a simple burial in the church of SaintNicolas-des-Champs. The contrast between this great Greek scholar and his contemporary, the admirable Latinist, Erasmus, has been felicitously drawn by M. Egger: 'Budé ne sut jamais emprunter à son ami les charmes d'une latinité facile et amusante. Il dit lourdement des choses souvent neuves, toujours sensées, quelquefois profondes, sur l'efficacité des études helléniques et sur l'utilité de leur alliance avec l'esprit chrétien. Il n'a du réformateur que le savoir et les convictions sérieuses; il n'en a point le talent '". Perhaps his most important, certainly his most permanent, service to the cause of scholarship was his prompting Francis I to found in 1530 the Corporation of the Royal Readers. It had no official residences, or even public lecture-rooms. Il était bâti en hommes. It was many years before it attained the dignity of a local habitation' and the name of the Collège de France. In front of the present buildings of that centre of eloquent and inspiring teaching the place of honour is justly assigned to the 7 The first stone was laid 28 Aug. 1610 (Lefranc, 235), and the fabric finished about 1778 (ib. 266 f). statue of Budaeus'. In his own age, Calvin had proudly described him as primum rei literariae decus et columen, cuius beneficio palmam eruditionis hodie sibi vindicat nostra Gallia. It was mainly owing to Budaeus that the primacy in scholarship had passed from Italy to France'. Cordier The foundation of the royal readerships had been opposed by the obscurantists in the University, but lectures in Greek were already being given in several of the Colleges, and, in the College of SainteBarbe, Maturin Cordier (1479-1564) had been active as an educational reformer for the sixteen years immediately preceding the publication of his treatise attacking the barbarous Latin of the day3. Among his pupils at another College was Calvin, who afterwards invited him to Geneva, where he taught in 1536-38, and in 1559–64, and where he published his celebrated Colloquies (1564)*. Robert Estienne The year 1527 was memorable as that in which the famous printer and scholar, Robert Estienne, or Stephanus (1503-1559), first assumed an independent position as a publisher. His Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, published in a single volume in 1532, as a reprint of' Calepinus' (1502), became in its final form an entirely new work in three folio volumes (1543). It was not until 1544 that he turned his attention to Greek, and produced a series of eight editiones principes, beginning with Eusebius (1544-6) and going on with Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1546-7), Dio Cassius (1548), and 1 On Budaeus cp. Vita by Louis le Roy 1540-1; Rebitté, Guillaume Budé, restaurateur des Études grecques en France (1846); and Eugène de Budé, Vie de Guillaume Budé, Fondateur du Collège de France (1884); M. Triwunatz, in Münchener Beiträge, no. 28 (1903); also Egger, i 161–173; Lefranc, Hist. du Collège de France, 46f, 102-6; and A. A. Tilley, Literature of the French Renaissance, 1904, i 14-19. Portrait on p. 164 supra. Tilley, i 19. On Germanus Brixius and Nicolas Berauld, who ranked next to Budaeus as Greek scholars, and on Pierre du Chastel, one of his successors, see ib. i 20 f. 3 Corderius, De corrupti sermonis apud Gallos et loquendi latine ratione libellus, 1530. E. T. 1614, 1657; latest ed. London, 1830. Cp. E. Puech, Maturin Cordier, 1895; Tilley, i 17f; and Woodward, Renaissance Education, 154— 166. Cp. Christie's Étienne Dolet, 235 n. The words in the preface, locos mutilos intactos reliquimus, give proof of a more cautious and critical spirit than that of the Italian humanists. ROBERTVS STEPHAN V S.. ROBERT ESTIENNE.. From a photograph of one of Croler's reproductions of the original engraving by Léonard Gaultier (copied in Renouard's Annales, p. 24). Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. |