Page:English Historical Review Volume 35.djvu/620

 612 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October and the text and preacher when he was ' bevestigd ', and we are referred to a source where a dispute between Bennet and a member of his congrega- tion is discussed at length (' breedvoerig besproken wordt '). Epitaphs are often added, and we get mild lapidary verse such as Nu ken ik langer boei noch band Aan aarde en aardsche dingen, Daar boven in mijn vaderland 1 Bij al de hemellingen, Ce ministre sage honnette homme L'un des plus grands predicateurs Meme dans I'Eglise de Rome Merita des aprobateurs. Wilhelmus van Eenhoorn's name was irresistible : Inter quadrupedes est rarior Unicornis ! Est inter bipedes noster rariseimus Eenhoom. At times this appetite for the circumstantial becomes morbid. "Was it needful when remarking that Jean le Clerc could not be ranked as a critic with J. J. Scaliger and Bentley to append day, month, and year for the birth and death of both these scholars ? Yet, when all is said, there is a strange fascination about detail, ce superflu, si necessaire, and the vast wealth of particulars here stored up helps us to form a picture of a whole past world of Netherland ministers.* Not the least attractive parts are those that bring before us their pastoral and linguistic services in South Africa and the East Indies.^ It would be of interest to ascertain the proportion occupied by the clergy in van der Aa's Biographisch Woordenboek and the Dictionary of National Biography respectively, and to compare their relative importance in the scholarship, literature, and politics of England and the Netherlands. In the present book among scholars of note outside theology are Bayle, Chaufepie (on the great indebtedness of whose dictionary to English sources ' something might have been said), Jean le Clerc, Cunaeus (his Satyra Menippea familiar to Robert Burton is still read by the curious), and the orientalist Erpenius. But they are not treated primarily from the point of view of the historian of scholarship. The collection of Isaac Casaubon's Epistolae is not men- tioned under the name of T. J. van Almeloveen, and in Caspar van Baerle we pnly just recognize one of the best known of seventeenth-century Latin versifiers. There are occasional points of connexion with England and, less frequently, with America. In several cases the subject of a notice was of British origin : * William Ames (1576-1633), W. L. Brown ' We have noticed the life of one woman, the mystic Margaretha van Dyck. Caron, who was bom in Japan c. 1634, and was for some years a minister in Amboina, producing translations in the Malay language. J. E. J. Capitein, a negro, studied at Leyden and wrote De servitute, libertati Christianae non contraria. He was afterwards a minister at St. George d'Elmina. ' See R. C. Christie's essay on Biographical Dictionaries in his Selected Essays and Papers, pp- 14 seqq. Robert Baillie aan Sprang (Spranch) '. The name of Baillie's correspondent, the Scottish minister of Campvere in Holland, appears in the Bannatyne Club edition as Spang. Carlyle suggested Strang : ' Spang (which is a Scottish verb, signifying hap violently, leap distractedly, — as an imprisoned terrified kangaroo might leap) we never heard
 * Dutch enterprise in the seventeenth century is illustrated by the life of Francois
 * In the life of Willem ApoUonius there is a reference to ' een schrijven van