Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 8.djvu/523

 9* s. vm. DEC. 2i, i9oi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Mr. Nichols aims at doing for the great thinker what has not hitherto been done, and enabling the student to read the correspondence in the order in which it was written. He supplies, accordingly, a chronological register. Beginning with the letters written from the Augustinian monastery of Emmaus at Stein, near Gouda, Erasmus's convent residence, in 1482-3, the register ends with the close of 1517, when Erasmus, at the height of his reputa- tion, and then in his fifty-second year, was keeping the Christmas festival at Louvain. It comprises more than seven hundred letters. The epistles of a later date are more numerous, but owing to many causes among which may be counted knowledge of the circumstances under which they were written and the personages to whom they were addressed the task of fixing their dates is less difficult. A translation of the whole or portions of two hundred and eleven of these letters is given, with a com- mentary and foot-notes concerning them, which, besides constituting the book to a certain extent a biography, supply the original date, if any, assigned to each letter on its first publication, and such additions to date as were made " in the later authorized editions of the Latin text." Every letter in the register of which a translation is not given is described in the commentary. For further explanations of the principles on which the trans- lation has been executed, and the nature and extent of the omissions, the reader is referred to the book. No intention to attempt a complete translation of the epistles is entertained by Mr. Nichols, who, however, speaks of a second and complementary volume being in contemplation. The task Mr. Nichols has set himself is well executed, and the arrangement of the letters will facilitate greatly the labours of the student. In some points, how- ever, we find ourselves at disaccord with our author. It is undeniably better to give a portion of a letter, as is done, than an abridgment. We have com- pared many of the letters with the originals as given in the thirty-one books of the collected letters of Erasmus, Melanchthon, More, and Vives, printed in London by Flecher & Young in 1642 ("Sumptibus Adriani Vlacq"), and find the omissions both more numerous and more im- portant than is desirable. Nor do we agree with the counsel, or perhaps rather the assumption, that the first two books of the letters should be skimmed over, and the reader's attention be con- centrated upon the books which follow, when the correspondents of Erasmus were men of greater eminence and when the style of the writer was more formed. The letters to Servatius are not wholly satisfactory. They illustrate, as is said, a " somewhat feminine side of the character of Eras- mus, whom they exhibit as having formed a devoted attachment to one of his own sex, which not being returned with equal fervour, was a source of pain to himself and or some annoyance to the object of his affection." That they were to some extent intellectual exercises, in which Erasmus, in spite of the character for extreme truthfulness which he somewhat superfluously assigns himself, loved to indulge, is conceivable enough. The language is that, however, of human passion, and in the case of a man of reputation so unblemished as Erasmus we cannot afford to neglect the evidence of the kind of friendship which was common in his days, as in the subsequent times of Michel Angelo and Shakespeare. These letters, which are accepted as genuine, have escaped the attention of biographers.

A translation of the ' Compendium Vitee,' whic h is generally attributed to Erasmus, and supplies the leading details concerning his birth and parentage, is given. We agree with Mr. Nichols in admit- ting both the compendium and the epistle of Erasmus to Goclen, though doubt has been thrown by recent writers upon both. We have noted for comment some scores of passages during the perusal of the book. In so doing we have ourselves defeated the aim with which we set out. Within the space at our disposal it is obviously impossible to deal with all these matters. No resource is left but to pass by them, and recommend the reader to turn for himself to the book. No student of fifteenth- century literature can afford to neglect this; and though we should have preferred a more liberal policy in regard to the translations, we are aware of the difficulties in Mr. Nichols's path, and are indebted to him for a thoughtful and serviceable, and to some extent a captivating volume.

Les Portraits de V Enfant.

THOUGH no name of author or publisher appears to this sumptuous volume, concerning which all the information vouchsafed us is that it issues from the press of Lahure, we can scarcely be in error in assigning it to the eminent Parisian house of Hachette. In almost all respects it is a com- panion volume to ' L'Image de la Femme' of M. Armand Dayot, the Inspecteur des Beaux - Arts, issued by that firm a couple of years ago (see 9 th S. iv. 549). The character and method of the work and the illustrations are all but identical, and the title-pages and the designs in both are of ravishing elegance. In some respects the volume is likely to be even more popular than its predecessor. No subject whatever can be of more inexhaustible interest to the one half of human beings than the other half, and we cannot but wonder whether the spirited publisher to whom we owe ' L'Image de la Femme ' will dare in a couple of years more to give us * L'Image de 1'Homme,' and whether the fair sex will study its coarser, if more trustworthy half with the same unwavering devotion that the sterner sex has displayed to itself. On the ground of children both sexes meet, and the father is as proud of the grace and affection of his daughter as the mother is of the approaching virility of her son. The scheme of the book is, then, to show the child as it appears in the works of the greatest artists from the infancy of art until to-day. Mate- rials are fortunately abundant, more than they would have been had not the cult of the Mother of God involved that of the infant Godhead. Wher- ever the Madonna had to be shown in Christian art, her inseparable companion was necessarily il Bambino, a caressing Italian word, the liquid music of which disappears from the enfant and the child, though a measure of it is preserved in bdbe and baby. Italy, as the source of most religious art, comes practically foremost in the volume, and is assigned the largest space,though an opening chapter of no great extent is devoted to the child in clas- sical art. Next it, sed longo intervallo, comes Spain ; after it arrive Flanders and Germany, France, and, lastly, England. A final chapter is occupied with the art of to-day. The earliest representation of a child is an Egyptian girl, the lithe, graceful figure of which is very seductive. It comes from the Turin Museum. With this must be compared the bas-relief from the Mus4e du Louvre of Sesostris as a child, a curious but artis-