a large series of similar sculptures included in the Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum vestigia (1693). The engravings for these great works were mainly executed by Pietro Bartoli'. His contemporary, Raphael Fabretti of Urbino (1619) R. Fabretti -1700), who became director of the archives of Rome, published a clear and almost complete account of the Roman aqueducts (1680), and a fine folio volume on Trajan's column (1683). He also did good service by his learned labours in the field of Latin inscriptions. 'His diligence in collecting inscriptions was only surpassed by his sagacity in explaining them; and his authority has been preferred to that of any other antiquary. His time was spent in delving among ruins and vaults, to explore the subterranean treasures of Latium; no heat, nor cold, nor rain, nor badness of road, could deter him from these solitary peregrinations. Yet the glory of Fabretti must be partly shared with his horse. This wise and faithful animal, named Marco Polo, had acquired, it is said, the habit of standing still, and as it were pointing, when he came near an antiquity; his master candidly owning that several things which would have escaped him had been detected by the antiquarian quadruped '*. Strada In Latin scholarship the most pleasing product of this century is to be found in the Prolusiones Academicae of the Roman Jesuit, Famianus Strada (1572--1649), first published in 1617. In the varied pages of this compact and compendious volume the author shows considerable taste in dealing with large questions of historical, oratorical and political style. The most interesting of his Prolusiones are the fifth and sixth of the second book, where we have a critical review of the Latin poets of the age of Leo, and a discourse on poetry, purporting to have been delivered by one of their number, Sadoleto. The ancient models imitated by the poets of that age are next illustrated by a series of six short poems composed by Strada himself, with criticisms on each. The following are the six poets selected, with the names of the modern poets to whom the several imitations are dramatically assigned :-Lucan (Janus Parrhasius), Lucretius (Bembo), Claudian (Castiglione), Ovid (Hercules Strozzi), Statius (Pontano), and Virgil (Naugerio)3. The happiest of these parodies are those on Lucan and Ovid; a lower degree of 11635-1700; Stark, 115. 2 Hallam, iii 255', who refers to Fabroni, Vitae Italorum, vi, and Visconti in Biographie Universelle. Cp. Stark, 116. 3 pp. 322—342, Amsterdam, 1658. success is attained in the case of Virgil, Statius and Claudian, and the lowest in that of Lucretius. But this last has an interest of its own. The theme is the magnet, and the poem describes an imaginary method of communication between absent friends by means of two magnetic needles which successively point towards the same letters of the alphabet, however far the friends may be removed from one another,—an ingenious play of fancy, which almost anticipates the electric telegraph. This poem has been specially mentioned by Addison in the Spectator', while all the six poems are noticed in the Guardian3. The theme of the poem in the style of Claudian is the famous contest between the nightingale and the player on the lute, which (as observed by Addison) is introduced into one of the pastorals of Ambrose Philips (d. 1749). But Addison omits to observe that the whole of the poem had been elegantly translated by Richard Crashaw, who died exactly a hundred years before Philips, in fact in the same year as Strada himself. Strada's name is not mentioned in the Delights of the Muses, where the first poem, on Music's Duel, ends with the following description of the nightingale's fate: 'She fails; and failing, grieves; and grieving, dies;— That lived so sweetly-dead, so sweet a grave'. Ceva In the second half of this century there were other Latin poets, both within and without the 'Society of Jesus'. Among these may be mentioned Tommaso Ceva (1648-1737), the author of an elegant, though somewhat incongruous, poem on the childhood of Jesus; and Sergardi, who bitterly satirises the jurist Gravina". But to the classical scholar not one of these poets is equal in interest to Strada. Sergardi Strada was violently attacked in a curious work by Caspar Scioppius (1576-1649), the Infamia Famiani, in which that captious critic objects to Strada's use of Latin words found only in authors of the Silver age. The critic, who was born near Nuremberg, had spent nearly half a century in Italy after joining the Church of Rome in 1598. An account of his varied career is reserved for the chapter on the land of his birth'. In the Italian literature of the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century the lyric poet Chiabrera (1552—1637), who was educated by the Jesuits in Rome but spent most of his life at his birthplace 1 No. 241 (iii 135 of Addison's Works, ed. 1868). Imitators of Pindar and Horace 2 Nos. 115, 119, 122 (Works iv 221, 237-243). Cp. Sir Thomas Browne's Works, i 152 f, 155, ed. 1852; Hallam, iii 132*. 3 Hallam, iii 490 f1. 4 c. xxi infra. Savona, endeavoured to strike out a new line by the avowed imitation of Pindar. His ruling instinct as a scholar is revealed in the sentence:-'When I see anything eminently beautiful, or taste something that is excellent, I say: It is Greek Poetry". The Pindaric Ode', with its strophe, antistrophe and epode, but without any imitation of the poet's style, had been introduced by Trissino (d. 1550). The study of Pindar is also exemplified in the free translation by Alessandro Adimari (d. 1649)'. In 1671 'Pindaric Odes' appear among the works of the great lyric poet Guidi (1650-1712), but Guidi was unfamiliar with the text of Pindar himself. Pindar was afterwards translated by the Abate Angelo Mazzo of Parma (d. 1817), but the eminent critic Carducci considers that the only Italian lyric poem, 'in the deep Pindaric sense of the term', is the Sepolcri of Ugo Foscolo (d. 1827). The Alcaic odes of Horace were imitated by Chiabrera, and the 'Roman Pindar' was emulated by Fulvio Testi of Ferrara (1593-1606), of whom it has been said that 'had he chosen his diction with greater care, he might have earned the name of the Tuscan Horace 8. The odes had already been imitated by Bernardo Bembo (1493-1569), by Bartolomeo del Bene of Florence (d. 1558), and, later than this century, by Luigi Cerretti (d. 1808) 10 and others. 1 Symonds, vii 316 f. Cp. Hallam, iii 9 f1; portrait in Wiese u. Pèrcopo, It. Litt. 399. 2 Hallam, iii 11a. 4 Wiese u. Pèrcopo, 532. 6 ib. 401. 8 Crescimbeni (Hallam, iii 101). 10 Wiese u. Pèrcopo, 532. 3 Wiese u. Percopo, 409. 5 ib. 532. 7 ib. 400, 402. 9 ib. 339. CHAPTER XVIII. FRANCE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. Sirmond We have seen that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, the two greatest representatives of classical learning in France, Scaliger and Casaubon, were Protestants, who, in 1593 and 1610, were compelled to leave their native land for the Netherlands and England'. Owing to the influence of the Counter-Reformation, and the training of the Jesuits, the energies of the classical scholars that still remained in France were diverted from pagan to Christian studies. Thus the Jesuit, Jacques Sirmond (15591651), edited Apollinaris Sidonius (1614), together with a number of ecclesiastical writers. Another Jesuit, Denys Petau, or Petavius, of Orleans (1583 -1652), besides editing Synesius (1612) and Epiphanius (1622), devoted a large part of his chronological work, the Doctrina Temporum (1627), to the criticism of Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum". A third, Fronton du Duc (1558-1624), edited Chrysostom; while a pupil of the Jesuits, Nicolas Rigault (15771654), edited Tertullian and Cyprian. Among other eminent men of learning, who were trained by that Society, were the brothers Henri and Adrien de Valois, and Du Cange, to whom we shall shortly return. The Catholic side was also represented by François Guyet of Angers (1575-1655), a private tutor in Rome and Paris, whose posthumous works include acute criticisms on Hesiod and Hesychius, 1 pp. 203, 207 supra. 2 Cp. Gibbon's Life and Letters, 56, ed. 1869. 3 Hallam, ii 295-7; Bernays, Scaliger, 76, 165. Guyet Peiresc 4 pp. 287-9 infra. Cp. Tilley, in Camb. Mod. Hist. iii 61. |