secuted so effectually, that his stock of money was soon exhausted; a circumstance, he says, which often happened, from the same cause, in his subsequent life. He describes in lively terms the delight with which he surveyed in the evening, and the eagerness with which he examined during a great part of the night, the literary treasures which he had acquired in the course of the day. The complacency with which he contemplated his valuable and continually augmenting collection, was frequently disturbed by the idea that a library formed by so much labour and expense, the dearest solace and food of his mind, would hereafter be dispersed, in alleys and upon booksellers' stalls, and come into the hands of the ignorant vulgar. To obviate the possibility of such a disaster, he early thought of the expedient which he at length adopted, of bequeathing the entire assemblage to one of the colleges of the Jesuits, under the most precise conditions possible to be contrived for securing its preservation and integrity; little dreaming that the most learned and powerful society in the world would be dissolved in less than half a century after his death, and his library, sharing the fate of the rest of their effects, be confiscated and sold.

The reader may now endeavour to represent to himself a man who, from this outset at the age of twenty, to nearly the age of ninety, most ardently prosecuted the investigations which extended to the substance of almost all ancient and modern literature; held a communication, either by personal or epistolary intercourse, with almost all the most learned men of his age-a communication sought in many instances by him, and in many by them; and who every now and then, as if to save himself from being completely inundated with learning, threw off a quantity in the form of printed composition. In making, however, any estimate of the merit of this wonderful course of exertion, it would be necessary to take into the account, as deduction, one circumstance which, if we must be compelled to believe his statement to the full amount of his expressions, places him on a different ground, perhaps, from all other laborious intellectual men. He says,

I have reason to be highly grateful to God for his singular favour, in framing me so, that not only during the vigorous period of youth, but down to my present state of senile debility, no protraction of study by day or night, no want of exercise in a sedentary life, has ever given me a sense of fatigue or languor; but I have always, after six or seven hours without intermission spent over my books, arisen from them fresh and cheerful, sometimes even in high spirits, singing to myself and the Muses, in contrast to so many others, who leave study sunk and exhausted. I cannot therefore concur with the medical tribe in their general maxims,

that the corporeal powers are debilitated by rest, and invigorated by motion. How many literary men have we known who have reached extreme old age with a sound constitution.' Vol. I. p. 34.

This last suggestion certainly receives a very striking illustration from the biographical notes to this work. Dr. Aikin has given the dates of the birth and death of more, probably, than two hundred of Huet's contemporaries, eminent in literature, or public business, or both-a considerable proportion of them quite as indefatigable students, and many of them all but as indefatigable, as Huet himself; and we think if their ages were added together they would average more than seventy. More than a few of them lived beyond eighty, and the most ordinary age is between seventy and eighty.

One of the first and chief of the few adventures, if they may be so called, of Huet's life, was his embarking, along with his learned friend Bochart, in an expedition to the court of queen Christina; an enterprise which the scholars and philosophers of that time appear to have rushed into with all the ardour of a crusade, to the great dissatisfaction and dismay, as Huet acknowledges, of the poor Swedes, especially of the financiers, who apprehended nothing less than ruin from so many processes of philosophical experiment and scholastic translation, set in operation on her majesty's treasury. On the way, our learned adventurer staid a little while in Holland, in the company of Salmasius, Vossius, and other literati. In Denmark also he was detained a little while by Runic inscriptions, by relics of the astronomical apparatus of Tycho Brahe, and by an excursion to the isle of Huen, which Tycho had made the seat of his astronomical studies for 21 years, and ennobled by his celestial observations and excellent writings. Our author traced the vestiges of the philosopher with enthusiasm, and has given a considerably extended sketch of his life, with a due portion of indignation against Christiern IV, for having expelled him from his dominions. Philosophers and philosophy, however, were not the only things of which the vestiges were perceptible.

While we were travelling through Denmark, we often saw hanging from gibbets the bodies of robbers and wolves, and in the lower beam of the gibbet some handsome knives sticking. On asking the inhabitants the reason of this custom, they told us that the knives were stuck into the wood by persons labouring under fever, or some other lingering disease; and that is was the common notion that if any one should take a knife out, the disease of its owner would immediately be transferred to him. This superstitious practice I have recorded in the following verses, &c.' Vol. I. p. 140.

It was, of course, only foreigners that were expected to

fall into this trap. Our author was very soon tired of Sweden. The young queen, whom so many wise men had hailed as the true Aurora Borealis,-the precursor of a brighter age, dawning from the polar regions, than the world had ever yet beheld, was found to be a very mortal, whose composition included no little fickleness and caprice. An ignorant but artful and insinuating French physician, had contrived to make himself so necessary to her by his gaiety and buffoonery, that he had influence enough to cool her passion for learning, and withdraw her from the domination of scholars, in a degree very mortifying to Vossius, Bochart, and Huet. This last would appear, notwithstanding, to have been on easy terms with her majesty, and represents her as pertinaciously urging his continuance in Sweden; and, when his resolution was found immovable, exicting a kind of promise that he would soon return, which he avows he had no intention to fulfil. At the end of his narrative of this short residence in Sweden, he relates an action, which we cannot comprehend on what ground he attributes to an agent of sound mind."

It may not be impertinent or uninteresting to the readers, here to relate a deed of singular atrocity, which would be almost incredible were it not supported by the testimony of many from whom I heard it, and had it not been perpetrated in this very place not long before my arrival. A Swede, of sound mind and good morals, well esteemed among his neighbours, as noon-day seized a boy four years old as he was playing in the street amidst his companions before his father's house, and killed him by plunging a knife in his throat. On being apprehended and brought before the magistrate, he neither denied nor excused the fact, nor deprecated the punishment. "I know," said he, "that I have deserved death, and I employed this artifice to obtain it from you, satisfied that there could scarcely be a safer way of securing eternal salvation, than to quit the world with the senses entire, with a body undebilitated by disease, the soul being lifted to God by the pious prayers of religious men, and aided by their counsels and exhortations. Apprised, therefore, that such a kind of death was not here to be procured but through the commission of some capital crime, I thought that I perpetrated the lightest in killing a child not yet infected with the contagion of this world, and taken from indigent parents, burthened with a numerous offspring." Having thus said, and received the sentence of condemnation, with a cheerful and smiling countenance, and chanting hymns aloud, he underwent the punishment.' Vol. I. p. 154.

In a rather long note suggested by this account, the trans lator appears to concur with the author in ascribing this act to fanaticism, in the sense in which fanaticism is distinguishable from the mental disease we commonly call insanity: and takes occasion to make the just observations, that the desire of la future life is not in itself of the nature of moral virtue; that

this desire is capable of becoming, under the direction of delusive opinions, a prompter to crimes; that a mischievous effect must result from the prevalence of a doctrine, which should admit the elation with which a man may die as an infallible evidence of his future felicity; and that nothing can be more detestable than that large apparatus of ceremonies, which, in popish countries, is ready to be applied in behalf of those who are able and willing to pay for its operation, to inspire in even the worst men a complacency or triumph in death. In this note, however, and in several others, animadverting on points of the fanaticism and superstition so incessantly obtruding on the attention of an examiner of the continental biography of the seventeenth century, there are some expressions of censure of all the popular religions,' which we wish this very respectable writer had put in so careful and explicit a form, as to prevent the possibility of a doubt whether, as applied to the Jewish and Christian systems, they are meant to reach further than those depravations which these religions were not long in the world without contracting.

From accidentally meeting with some volumes of Greek manuscript in the royal library of Stockholm, Huet conceived the design of editing the whole existing works of Origen; but prosecuted it only so far, (and that at a very great and illbestowed expense of labour and time) as to publish, a number of years afterwards, the commentaries of that Christian father. -On his return he made a longer sojourn with the great scholars of Holland, especially Salmasius, whom during most of the time he visited almost every day, and of whom and of whose wife he has given an entertaining account. Every one knows of the mortification inflicted on this most proud and arrogant of men by Milton; but it is not so familiarly known that he was under the unrelenting despotism of a virago, against whose sceptre and whip he never dared to rebel. His arrogance being so extreme as to preclude all compassion, it is very amusing to see him under the combined discipline of two such gentle spirits as Milton and Madame.

When returned to France, Huet, as before, prosecuted alternately at Caen and Paris his solitary and social studies; for that name may fairly be applied to an intercourse, which must have advanced his learning as effectually as the severest recluse application. Nor were his indefatigable inquiries confined within even the widest range of what is usually denominated literature; since they reached into the departments of astronomy, chemistry, and anatomy. In the last of these he busied himself so eagerly as to conduct and assist numerous dissections, and even dissected more than three hundred eyes

with his own hands. Caen appears, from the number of learned and philosophic men with whom he associated there, and who at length formed themselves into a regular academy, to have been, for a provincial situation, excellently suited to both his social disposition and his ambitious designs on the whole world of knowledge.

The fate which less or more befel the greatest part of the talent and learning in France, in the detestable though gaudy reign of Lewis XIV, of being drawn within the vortex of the court, awaited Hut also, long after he had escaped from all the vortices of the Cartesian philosophy, in which he had taken a few whirls in his youth. In conjunction with Bossuet he was made preceptor to the Dauphin; and no doubt he performed, when in this situation and when out of it, his due share of that vile worship of the monarch, of which the collective literati of the country were proud to be the priests, with the noble exception of Tanaquil Faber, who dedicated a book to Pellisson, then an inhabitant of his majesty's prison of the Bastille. Huet, however, had really not time to go far in this or any other species of fashionable vice: for it was during his preceptorship, which involved a considerable portion of official labour and duties of courtiership, that he performed his greatest work, Demonstratio Evangelica. He has given a striking account, and not in an ostentatious style, of the labours of research required even for assembling together the crude materials for this monument of his erudition. It was also during the period of his service at court, and of his employment on his Demonstratio,' that he undertook, at the carnest recommendation of the Dauphin's governor, the duke of Montausier, the plan of publishing all the Latin classics, with that ample furniture of illustration which has made what are called the Delphin editions so well known throughout Europe; and this plan was executed within less than 20 years, to the extent of 62 volumes. Huet's office was to obtain competent editors for the respective authors, and to exercise a general superintendance, by examining, once a fortnight, the portions of work they had performed. And by degrees, he says, he became more of a workman himself than he had intended; the editors of some of the most obscure authors, as Manilius, applying to him for assistance. In this comprehensive plan for the facilitation of the royal studies, Lucan, much to his honour, as Dr. Aikin remarks, was not recognized as a classic. His most serene highness, the heir apparent, was evidently likely to derive far more valuable instructions on the principles of just government from the obscure astronomical futilities of Manilius, than from