Page:Essays in librarianship and bibliography.djvu/182

 162 own, I am about to bore or entertain you with some anecdotes of book-collectors of the seventeenth century, borrowed from that illustrious gossip and anecdote monger, Nicius Erythræus, with a brief account of whom I will preface my paper.

I scarcely think that I shall underrate the amount of information respecting Nicius Erythraeus current at this time in this country by remarking that the name is probably best known as a pseudonym of Coleridge, under which his poem of "Lewti," a Circassian love-chant, was first given to the world, and most readers will have deemed his adoption of it a mere freak. I confess that I am myself unable to discover what Nicius Erythræus has to do with the Circassians, but it is not an imaginary name, being the Latinisation of that of Vittorio dé Rossi, an Italian Jesuit, who flourished during the last quarter of the sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth century, and, always writing in Latin, translated his vernacular appellation into that language. The circumstance of his having written in Latin is no doubt one principal reason why he is now so little remembered. He was one of the pioneers of a reviving form of literature, the anecdotic. Poggio Bracciolini had written a very popular book of anecdotes in the fifteenth century, but his tales are often mere Joe Millers, and not always authentic. Nicius's stories are bona-fide anecdotes or reminiscences of actual personages, with most of whom he had conversed. All roads, it is said, lead to Rome, and his position as an ecclesiastic about the Papal court, albeit a