298 Prowe's Life of Copernicus. Oct.
entitled to congratulation. He has set before us a figure carved out of the granite of bare fact, neither polished up nor rounded off for the sake of pleasing effect, in the rough where details were wanting, set off by no showman's trickery, but impressive in the simplicity of unadorned truth.
The earliest biographer of Copernicus worthy the name was separated by an interval of above a hundred years in time, and of many hundred miles in space, from the life which he portrayed. Gassendi was, moreover, an astronomer writing of an astronomer, and it was inevitable that he should lean towards a scientific treatment of his subject. Indeed, the information at his disposal was of such a nature as to leave him no alternative. It referred almost exclusively to the contemplative function of the great man ; it passed by with slight notice his personal relations and practical activities. From Gassendi's biography was formed the mental image of Copernicus which has, during the last two centuries, occupied a more or less prominent place in every cultured mind. We have all in some dim fashion, pictured to ourselves a dark-browed ecclesiastic watching, amid the wintry mists of the Baltic, for glimpses of the wandering luminaries whose movements he had, in the course of long vigils, reduced to a marvellous and novel harmony ; thinking thoughts that were not those of other men ; heedless of, and unheeded by, the vulgar, the worldly, even, with few exceptions, the learned ; but the various capacities of politician, scholar, economist, physician, administrator, which m the real man accompanied, and at times over-shadowed, that of astronomer, were all but wholly ignored, and indeed have never until now been united into a complete, detailed, and authentic portrait.
This result has been achieved by the labours of many men extending over many decades. The field of enquiry was almost coextensive with Europe. The libraries and archives of Italy, Bohemia, Sweden, Prussia, and Poland, have all been examined, and have all yielded something to the search. Slowly and painfully, as the fruit of these toilsome enquiries, the true life of Copernicus has, at least partially, emerged from the shadow of four centuries. The simplicity of tradition is replaced by the complexity of actual existence. The four times nine years, during which the author held communion with his book, is perceived to have been not a span of unbroken leisure, but a period diversified by numerous avocations and distracted by urgent cares. Dr. Prowe's pages, in which the scattered items of information gleaned by his fellow-workers are collected and combined with data furnished by his
