Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 21.djvu/386

Rh 364 SCALIGEK Protestantism be no bar to distinction and advancement. The invitation was renewed in the most gratifying and flattering manner a year later. Scaliger would not be required to lecture. The university only wished for his presence. He would be in all respects the master of his time. This offer Scaliger provisionally accepted. About the middle of 1593 he started for Holland, where he passed the remaining thirteen years of his life, never returning to France. His reception at Leyden was all that he could wish. A handsome income was assured to him. He was treated with the highest consideration. His rank as a prince of Verona was recognized. Placed midway between The Hague and Amsterdam, he was able to obtain, besides the learned circle of Leyden, the advant- ages of the best society of both these capitals. For Scaliger was no hermit buried among his books ; he was fond of social intercourse with persons of merit and intelligence, and was himself a good talker. For the first seven years of his residence at Leyden his reputation was at its highest point. His literary dictator- ship was unquestioned. It was greater in kind and in extent than that of any man since the revival of letters greater even than that of Erasmus had been. From his throne at Leyden he ruled the learned world, and a word from him could make or mar a rising reputation. The electric force of his genius drew to him all the rising talent of the republic. He was surrounded by young men eager to listen to and profit by his conversation, and he enjoyed nothing better than to discuss with them the books they were reading, and the men who wrote them, and to open up by his suggestive remarks the true methods and objects of philological and historical study. He encouraged Grotius when only a youth of sixteen to edit Capella; the early death of the younger Douza he wept as that of a beloved son ; Daniel Heinsius, from being his favourite pupil, became his most intimate friend. But Scaliger had made numerous enemies. He hated ignorance, but he hated still more half learning, and most of all dishonesty in argument or in quotation. Himself the soul of honour and truthfulness, with a single aim in all his writings, namely, to arrive at the truth, he had no toleration for the disingenuous arguments, and the mis- statements of facts, of those who wrote to support a theory or to defend an unsound cause. Neither in his conversa- tion nor in his writings did he conceal his contempt for the ignorant and the dishonest. His pungent sarcasms were soon carried to the ears of the persons of whom they were uttered, and his pen was not less bitter than his tongue. He resembles his father in his arrogant tone towards those whom he despises and those whom he hates, and he despises and hates all who differ from him. He is conscious of his power as a literary dictator, and not always sufficiently cautious or sufficiently gentle in its exercise. Nor, it must be admitted, was Scaliger always right. He trusted much to his memory, which was occasionally treacherous. His emendations, if frequently happy, were sometimes absurd. In laying the foundations of a science of ancient chronology, he relied sometimes upon groundless, sometimes even upon absurd hypotheses, frequently upon an imperfect induction of facts. Some- times he misunderstood the astronomical science of the ancients, sometimes that of Copernicus and Tyeho Brahe. And he was no mathematician. But his enemies were not merely those whose errors he had exposed, and whose hostility he had excited by the violence of his language. The results of his system of historical criticism had been adverse to the Catholic controversialists, and to the authenticity of many of the documents upon which they had been accustomed to rely. The Jesuits, who aspired to be the expounders of antiquity, the source of all scholarship and criticism, perceived that the writings and authority of Scaliger were the most formidable barrier to their claims. It was the day of conversions. Muretus in the latter part of his life professed the strictest ortho- doxy; Lipsius had been reconciled to the Church of Kome; Casaubon was supposed to be wavering; but Scaliger was known to be hopeless, and as long as his supremacy was unquestioned the Protestants had the victory in learning and scholarship. A determined attempt must be made, if not to answer his criticisms, or to disprove his statements, yet to attack him as a man, and to destroy his reputation. This was no easy task, for his moral character was ab- solutely spotless. After several scurrilous attacks by the Jesuit party, in which coarseness and violence were more conspicuous than ability, in 1607 a new and more successful attempt was made. Scaliger's weak point was his pride. Brought up by his father, whom he greatly reverenced, in the belief that he was a prince of Verona, he never forgot this him- self, nor suffered it to be forgotten by others. Naturally truthful, honourable, and virtuous in every respect, he conceived himself especially bound to be so on account of his illustrious ancestry. In 1594, in an evil hour for his happiness and his reputation, he published his Epistola de Vetustate et Splendore Gentis Scaligerae et J. C. Scaligeri Vita. In 1607 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits, whom he afterwards so bitterly libelled, published his Scaliger Hypobolimaeus (" The Supposititious Scaliger"), a quarto volume of more than four hundred pages, written with consummate ability, in an admirable and incisive style, with the entire disregard for truth which Scioppius always displayed, and with all the power of that sarcasm in which he was an accomplished master. Every piece of gossip or scandal which could be raked together respecting Scaliger or his family is to be found there. The author professes to point out five hundred lies in the Epistola de Vetustate of Scaliger, but the main argument of the book is to show the falsity of his pretensions to be of the family of La Scala, and of the narrative of his father's early life, and to hold up both father and son to contempt and ridicule as impudent impostors. " No stronger proof," says Mr Pattison, " can be given of the impressions produced by this powerful philippic, dedicated to the defamation of an individual, than that it has been the source from which the biography of Scaliger, as it now stands in our biographical collections, has mainly flowed." To Scaliger the blow was crushing. Whatever the case as to Julius, Joseph had undoubtedly believed himself a prince of Verona, and in his Epistola had put forth with the most perfect good faith, and without inquiry, all that he had heard from his father as to his family and the early life of Julius. It was this good faith that laid the way for his humiliation. His Epistola is full of blunders and mistakes of fact, and, relying partly on his own memory partly on his father's good faith, he has not verified one of the statements of Julius, most of which, to speak most favourably, are characterized by rhodomontade, exaggeration, or inaccuracy. He immediately wrote a reply to Scioppius, entitled Confutatio Falmlse Burdonum. It is written, for Scaliger, with unusual moderation and good taste, but perhaps for that very reason had not the success which its author wished and even expected. In the opinion of the highest and most competent authority, Mr Pattison, "as a refutation of Scioppius it is most complete"; but there are certainly grounds for dissenting, though with diffidence, from this judgment. Scaliger undoubtedly shows that Scioppius has committed more blunders than he has corrected, that his book literally bristles with pure lies and baseless calumnies ; but he does not succeed in