knowledge of Latin was imperfect”; and, during his three years in Italy (1506–1509), he worked quietly at Greek in Bologna and attended the lectures of Musurus in Padua. In October 1511 he was teaching Greek to a little band of students in Cambridge; at Basel in 1516 he produced his edition of the Greek Testament, the first that was actually published; and during the next few years he was helping to organize the college lately founded at Louvain for the study of Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin. Seven years at Basel were followed by five at Freiburg, and by two more at Basel, where he died. The names of all these places are suggestive of the wide range of his influence. By his published works, his Colloquies, his Adages and his Apophthegms, he was the educator of the nations of Europe. An educational aim is also apparent in his editions of Terence and of Seneca, while his Latin translations made his contemporaries more familiar with Greek poetry and prose, and his Paraphrase promoted a better understanding of the Greek Testament. He was not so much a scientific scholar as a keen and brilliant man of letters and a widely influential apostle of humanism.
In France the most effective of the early teachers of Greek
was Janus Lascaris (1495–1503). Among his occasional pupils
was Budaeus (d. 1540), who prompted Francis I.
to found in 1530 the corporation of the Royal Readers
in Greek, as well as Latin and Hebrew, afterwards famous
France.
Germany.
under the name of the Collège de France. In the study of
Greek one of the earliest links between Italy and Germany
was Rudolf Agricola, who had learned Greek under
Gaza at Ferrara. It was in Paris that his younger contemporary
Reuchlin acquired part of that proficiency in Greek
which attracted the notice of Argyropulus, whose admiration
of Reuchlin is twice recorded by Melanchthon, who soon afterwards
was pre-eminent as the “praeceptor” of Germany.
In the age of the revival the first Englishman who studied Greek was a Benedictine monk, William of Selling (d. 1494), who paid two visits to Italy. At Canterbury he inspired with his own love of learning his nephew, Linacre, who joined him on one of those visits, studied Greek England. at Florence under Politian and Chalcondyles, and apparently stayed in Italy from 1485 to 1499. His translation of a treatise of Galen was printed at Cambridge in 1521 by Siberch, who, in the same year and place, was the first to use Greek type in England. Greek had been first taught to some purpose at Oxford by Grocyn on his return from Italy in 1491. One of the younger scholars of the day was William Lilye, who picked up his Greek at Rhodes on his way to Palestine and became the first high-master of the school founded by Colet at St Paul’s (1510).
(b) That part of the Modern Period of classical studies which succeeds the age of the Revival in Italy may be subdivided into three periods distinguished by the names of the nations most prominent in each.
1. The first may be designated the French period. It begins with the foundation of the Royal Readers by Francis I. in 1530, and it may perhaps be regarded as extending to 1700. This period is marked by a many-sided erudition rather than by any special cult of the form of the The French period. classical languages. It is the period of the great polyhistors of France. It includes Budaeus and the elder Scaliger (who settled in France in 1529), with Turnebus and Lambinus, and the learned printers Robertus and Henricus Stephanus, while among its foremost names are those of the younger (and greater) Scaliger, Casaubon and Salmasius. Of these, Casaubon ended his days in England (1614); Scaliger, by leaving France for the Netherlands in 1593, for a time at least transferred the supremacy in scholarship from the land of his birth to that of his adoption. The last sixteen years of his life (1593–1609) were spent at Leiden, which was also for more than twenty years (1631–1653) the home of Salmasius, and for thirteen (1579–1592) that of Lipsius (d. 1606). In the 17th century the erudition of France is best represented by “Henricus Valesius,” Du Cange and Mabillon. In the same period Italy was represented by Muretus, who had left France in 1563, and by her own sons, Nizolius, Victorius, Robortelli and Sigonius, followed in the 17th century by R. Fabretti. The Netherlands, in the 16th, claim W. Canter as well as Lipsius, and, in the 17th, G. J. Vossius, Johannes Meursius, the elder and younger Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, J. F. Gronovius, J. G. Graevius and J. Perizonius. Scotland, in the 16th, is represented by George Buchanan; England by Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and Sir Henry Savile, and, in the 17th, by Thomas Gataker, Thomas Stanley, Henry Dodwell, and Joshua Barnes; Germany by Janus Gruter, Ezechiel Spanheim and Chr. Cellarius, the first two of whom were also connected with other countries.
We have already seen that a strict imitation of Cicero was one of the characteristics of the Italian humanists. In and after the middle of the 16th century a correct and pure Latinity was promoted by the educational system of the Jesuits; but with the growth of the Literary Latin. vernacular literatures Latin became more and more exclusively the language of the learned. Among the most conspicuous Latin writers of the 17th century are G. J. Vossius and the Heinsii, with Salmasius and his great adversary, Milton. Latin was also used in works on science and philosophy, such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), and many of the works of Leibnitz (1646–1705). In botany the custom followed by John Ray (1627–1705) in his Historia Plantarum and in other works was continued in 1760 by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. The last important work in English theology written in Latin was George Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenae (1685). The use of Latin in diplomacy died out towards the end of the 17th century; but, long after that date negotiations with the German empire were conducted in Latin, and Latin was the language of the debates in the Hungarian diet down to 1825.
2. During the 18th century the classical scholarship of the Netherlands was under the healthy and stimulating influence of Bentley (1662–1742), who marks the beginning of the English and Dutch period, mainly represented in Holland by Bentley’s younger contemporary and The English and Dutch period. correspondent, Tiberius Hemsterhuys (1685–1766), and the latter scholar’s great pupil David Ruhnken (1723–1798). It is the age of historical and literary, as well as verbal, criticism. Both of these were ably represented in the first half of the century by Bentley himself, while, in the twenty years between 1782 and 1803, the verbal criticism of the tragic poets of Athens was the peculiar province of Richard Porson (1759–1808), who was born in the same year as F. A. Wolf. Among other representatives of England were Jeremiah Markland and Jonathan Toup, Thomas Tyrwhitt and Thomas Twining, Samuel Parr and Sir William Jones; and of the Netherlands, the two Burmanns and L. Küster, Arnold Drakenborch and Wesseling, Lodewyk Valckenaer and Daniel Wyttenbach (1746–1829). Germany is represented by Fabricius and J. M. Gesner, J. A. Ernesti and J. J. Reiske, J. J. Winckelmann and Chr. G. Heyne; France by B. de Montfaucon and J. B. G. D. Villoison; Alsace by French subjects of German origin, R. F. P. Brunck and J. Schweighäuser; and Italy by E. Forcellini and Ed. Corsini.
3. The German period begins with F. A. Wolf (1759–1824), whose Prolegomena to Homer appeared in 1795. He is the founder of the systematic and encyclopaedic type of scholarship embodied in the comprehensive term Altertumswissenschaft, or “a scientific knowledge The German period. of the old classical world.” The tradition of Wolf was ably continued by August Böckh (d. 1867), one of the leaders of the historical and antiquarian school, brilliantly represented in the previous generation by B. G. Niebuhr (d. 1831).
In contrast with this school we have the critical and grammatical school of Gottfried Hermann (d. 1848). During this period, while Germany remains the most productive of the nations, scholarship has been more and more international and cosmopolitan in its character.
19th Century.—We must here be content with simply recording the names of a few of the more prominent representatives of
