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supplied by his highly respectable and long respected translator and editor, whose biographical notes, forming probably half the contents of these volumes, have connected short histories with many of the names transiently mentioned in the text, and dates and additional characteristic sketches with the scanty notices of the persons of whom Huet seems eveu the most willing to talk. It is not so much for merely supplying a correct and neat version of Huet's book that Dr. Aikin will receive the thanks of the English public, as for these valuable additions, forming a kind of biographical dictionary of the distinguished literary names of the Continent, during the seventeenth century. Very many readers, we are sure, will acknowledge their obligations to him, for making them a little acquainted with a number of once distinguished persons, of whom they previously knew absolutely nothing; and for making them somewhat better acquainted with others of whom they cannot soon be satisfied that they have heard enough. They will feel indebted equally to the industry which has inquired out the precise periods of the birth and death, together with the few recorded facts of the lives, of the less noted persons; and to the judgement and good taste exercised in selecting the most important particulars and characteristic anecdotes from the more ample and various records of the lives of the more celebrated individuals. It may be added, that some assistance will be afforded to the collectors of books, by the notices in some of these brief memoirs, of the dates and sizes of the most remarkable literary works of the scholar to whom they relate. Besides the biographical notes, there are many others of the nature of moral and philosophical criticism; commenting, for the most part in a style not very laudatory, on points of Huet's charac ter, and on several of his notions, and remarking on the effects of superstition and despotism in his nation and age.

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The translator has very properly premised,' in the form of an introduction, a summary view of the state of European literature anteriorly to the commencement of this biographical history, or in the early part of the seventeenth century; order that the reader may be enabled to form an idea of the kind of education a scholar was likely to receive at the time when Huet entered upon his studies, and of the progress that had already been made in those branches of science and literature, which he and his contemporaries were engaged in cultivating. At the beginning of this introduction, and in a few sentences at the end of the work, Dr. A. makes a fair estimate of the character of his author.

He was a person greatly celebrated in his age for profound and ex

tensive erudition, and for the use he made of it as an author of various esteemed works. That he ranks among men of the first order of intellect, I by no means intend to assert; but he was one of those who fill a certain space in the literary history of their time, and whose name is too firmly associated with the durable nonuments of lettered industry to be in danger of perishing. The incidents of his life are not very different from those common to scholars and ecclesiastics; yet the manner in which he was trained to each of these characters was marked by certain peculiarities which rendered him a distinct individual in those orders of men. Long his own master, and enabled to pursue what studies, and in what mode and company, he chose, he considerably varied his objects, and his residence. An enquirer from youth, on religious topics, and familiarly connected with protestants, as well as with the members of his own communion, he imbibed a degree of learned catholicism which did not entirely quit him even when become a prelate; and which induced him to cultivate a freer and more promiscuous acquaintance among his lettered contemporaries, than could have been the lot of one,brought up in the trammels of a religious order, or originally destined to an exclusive priesthood. On these various accounts, added to a life protracted to nearly a century, the biography of few men affords so wide a basis for the superstructure of a literary history of the age in which he flourished.' Vol. I. p. ix.

'Little addition needs to be made to the view he has himself afforded of his character. It was purely that of a man devoted to literature, his passion for which absorbed all other propensities. It did not, however, interfere with that social civility, and disposition to oblige, which was partly the instinct of his natural temper, and partly the habit of a polished age and country. Yet he displayed no small degree of impatience under -criticism; and from some of his manuscript letters he seems to have given way to querulous dissatisfaction with his relations and fellow towns-men, especially in his declining years. Though he had his own peculiar controversies, he wisely abstained from interfering in those disputes between the different religious parties, which so much agitated France at the close of Louis the fourteenth's reign; and his attachment to the society of Jesuits was merely in their private and literary capacity. His profound and extensive erudition gave him a high rank among the learned, not only in his own country, but throughout Europe; and his works were generally received with much respect and deference. Vol. I. p. 462.

Though the number of remarkable facts in this memoir is indeed very small, for a busy life of more than eighty years, it would be possible, if we had room, to extract a tolerable portion of entertainment; and as to profit, the whole history Js one most dense piece of instruction on the wonderful effects of unremitting industry. Men of ordinary literary hardihood, look over the dusty and solemn ranks of learned works in a great public library as an invincible terra incognita; they gaze on the lettered latitude and altitude, as they would on the inaccessible shore of some great island bounded on all sides with a rocky precipice. Huet gives the example of a man having no

such submitting and retiring sensations at sight of the most formidable masses of literature. There was no point where he had the smallest fear of not being able to make an entrance and a lodgement, and to extend his researches and conquests rapidly on all sides, while the common tribe of scholars should stand gazing and confounded at a distance. It is not the question, whether this literary rivalship of the military projects of Alexander, this scheme of universal conquest, was a judicious plan of life. Whether it was wise or foolish, the marvellous effect of unrelenting industry in the prosecu tion of it may afford a valuable lesson to those, whose ambition to accomplish something great and good is often repressed by the consideration of human imbecility and the shortness of life.

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We must be very brief in attempting to give our readers a slight view of the successive events and stages of the life of Huet. He was of noble descent, as he had occasion to prove, not without much trouble and expense, by a process at law soon after he came of age. He was born at Caen, in 1630; lost his parents in his childhood; up to manhood was a good deal plagued by perverse relations, guardians, and fellowscholars; was, notwithstanding, a discreet and inoffensive youth; and was actuated every day and hour by that passion for knowledge, which had been kindled almost in his infancy. The mental superiority to which this naturally raised him, drew upon him many petty persecutions, which it must have been very amusing to recollect and recount in his ultimate supremacy of learning.

When my love of letters had excited the envy of my companions, they did every thing in their power to interrupt me in my studies; my books were stolen, my papers, torn, or wetted or greased so as not to bear ink, and my chamber door was barred, that whilst they were at play I might not be lurking in my room with a book, as I was frequently detected in doing. When we were in the country during the autumnal vacation, it was held as a crime to take a book, and they compelled me to pass whole days in playing, hunting, or walking. In order to indulge my own taste, it was my custom to rise with the sun, while they were buried in sleep, and either hide myself in the wood, or seek some thick shade which might conceal me from their sight whilst I was reading and studying in quiet. It was their practice, however, to hunt for me among the bushes, to drive me out of my hiding place.'. Vol. I P. 13.

This passage is followed by grateful acknowledgements to Heaven for this early and perpetual devotedness to literature, as one of the greatest of the many benefits conferred on him; since,' he says,

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by the incessant labours and nobler aims of study, I was without dif

ficulty diverted from those intemperate pursuits and juvenile excesses, to which a natural vivacity of disposition, and the ardour of a temper not easily submitting to controul, afterwards too frequently exposed me; from this unabating love of letters, and perpetual occupation in my studies, besides innumerable other advantages, I have derived this benefit, which alone I regard as of the highest value, that I have never felt that satiety of life, that weariness with all its objects, of which other persons are so often heard to complain; and that the loss of time has of all losses ever appeared to me the greatest, which I have attempted to repair by incessant diligence and exertion. Vol. I. P. 14.

His juvenile studies comprehended languages, philosophy, and mathematics; which last department he found such an enchanted region, that it required the strongest remonstrances of a preceptor that he loved and revered, to prevent him from yielding himself to be bound and fixed there by a spell that could never be broken. He had much greater reason to be attached to this director of his mind, than to the legal guardian of his person and small fortune; but it is not made a matter of complaint against this rather harsh and illiberal person, that before the young man got out his hands he insisted on having him exercised in fencing, dancing, and riding. On the contrary, the most learned ecclesiastic, of between 80 and 90 years old, betrays full as much vanity as in any of his references to his literary exploits, when he says, after acknowledging that as a dancer he was always faukward and unskilful,

• but in fencing and riding I became so expert as to excite the envy of my companions, and even of the masters. For my agility was so great that I could leap up to whatever place I could touch with my hand; and in running, left all at a distance behind me; and such was my strength of limbs, that sitting on the ground with two very strong men, they holding a stick on the one side, and I on the other, they were unable to wrench it from me or stir me from the place.' Vol. 1. P. 49.

And as to swimming, some of our readers would not believe it on any thing less than the word of a bishop, that, when a child, he accidentally learnt the mechanism of that art just in the moment of drowning.

From childhood I learnt the art of swimming without a master and without corks, but accidentally. For being, like other boys, accustomed in the hot weather to bathe several times in the day for the sake of coolness, it once happened that I ventured into a stream without first. trying its depth, and immediately sunk to the bottom; when being roused to the utmost exertion by the urgency of the danger, I struggled so hard with my hands and feet as to raise myself to the surface of the water; and having thus discovered that I possessed a faculty with which I was before unacquainted, I swam across a deep river on that very day.' Vol. I. p. 49.

There are certain odd tokens, in more than one part of the work, that this most accomplished person, (very much to his disgrace as contrasted, if it were fair to contrast him, with the young scholars and philosophers, and lawyers and divines, of our own time and nation,) thought it incumbent on him to affect somewhat of the beau, in order to obtain forgiveness, from the connoisseurs in smirks and cringes, and silks and buttons, for so vulgar a possession as the seven sciences and the languages of the Polyglot. Some of that foolish insipid sort of gallantry to the female sex, so long a distinguishing characteristic of his country, was also an indispensable part of the piacular service. In this part of his work he laboured with a laudable diligence, and it is evident enough, he does not expect or wish the concurrence of his readers with that language of disapprobation, which he affects to apply to himself for having been so employed. For the very sentence in which he would seem to dismiss the subject in haste, as if improper to be more than slightly mentioned, even for the purpose of penitential confession, by a venerable ecclesiastic, is a contrivance, as his translator remarks, to get us to read a fuller exhibition of his performances in this line, in another place; where they are not exhibited in the way of pretended self-accusation but of self-complacency. Even in this confessional, indeed, the worthy prelate does not pretend to tax himself with any thing of the nature of vice in the usual and gross sense of the word. His story is, that his disposition to piety, being trampled down by the constant course of profane studies, and deprived of the celestial dew afforded by a frequent recourse to the holy sacraments, had nearly withered; and that his young companions too easily drew him in to be the associate of their manners and their errors.' 'I therefore,' says he,

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frequented the circles of men, and especially of women, to be a favourite of whom I regarded as the surest proof of politeness. In this view I omitted nothing that I thought necessary to ingratiate myself with them; such as care of my person, elegance of dress, officious and frequent attendance upon them, amatory verses, and gentle whispers, which feed the insanity of love: practices which I have with too little reserve displayed in a metrical espistle addressed to Menage, well known to the public. Vol. I. p. 48.

At the age of twenty he became his own master, and, though not without considerable difficulty, the master of his property. He then frequented Paris, not however to sport amidst its gaieties, but to obtain a personal acquaintance with all the persons most celebrated for knowledge, and to ransack the booksellers' shops and stalls. This last purpose was pro

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