Curiosities of Literature Volume I Part 11

Several men of letters have been known to have risen from their death-bed to destroy their MSS. So solicitous have they been not to venture their posthumous reputation in the hands of undiscerning friends. Colardeau, the elegant versifier of Pope's epistle of Eliosa to Abelard, had not yet destroyed what he had written of a translation of Ta.s.so. At the approach of death, he recollected his unfinished labour; he knew that his friends would not have the courage to annihilate one of his works; this was reserved for him. Dying, he raised himself, and as if animated by an honourable action, he dragged himself along, and with trembling hands seized his papers, and consumed them in one sacrifice.--I recollect another instance of a man of letters, of our own country, who acted the same part. He had pa.s.sed his life in constant study, and it was observed that he had written several folio volumes, which his modest fears would not permit him to expose to the eye even of his critical friends. He promised to leave his labours to posterity; and he seemed sometimes, with a glow on his countenance, to exult that they would not be unworthy of their acceptance. At his death his sensibility took the alarm; he had the folios brought to his bed; no one could open them, for they were closely locked. At the sight of his favourite and mysterious labours, he paused; he seemed disturbed in his mind, while he felt at every moment his strength decaying; suddenly he raised his feeble hands by an effort of firm resolve, burnt his papers, and smiled as the greedy Vulcan licked up every page. The task exhausted his remaining strength, and he soon afterwards expired. The late Mrs.

Inchbald had written her life in several volumes; on her death-bed, from a motive perhaps of too much delicacy to admit of any argument, she requested a friend to cut them into pieces before her eyes--not having sufficient strength left herself to perform this funereal office. These are instances of what may be called the heroism of authors.

The republic of letters has suffered irreparable losses by s.h.i.+pwrecks.

Guarino Veronese, one of those learned Italians who travelled through Greece for the recovery of MSS., had his perseverance repaid by the acquisition of many valuable works. On his return to Italy he was s.h.i.+pwrecked, and lost his treasures! So poignant was his grief on this occasion that, according to the relation of one of his countrymen, his hair turned suddenly white.

About the year 1700, Hudde, an opulent burgomaster of Middleburgh, animated solely by literary curiosity, went to China to instruct himself in the language, and in whatever was remarkable in this singular people.

He acquired the skill of a mandarine in that difficult language; nor did the form of his Dutch face undeceive the physiognomists of China. He succeeded to the dignity of a mandarine; he travelled through the provinces under this character, and returned to Europe with a collection of observations, the cherished labour of thirty years, and all these were sunk in the bottomless sea.

The great Pinellian library, after the death of its ill.u.s.trious possessor, filled three vessels to be conveyed to Naples. Pursued by corsairs, one of the vessels was taken; but the pirates finding nothing on board but books, they threw them all into the sea: such was the fate of a great portion of this famous library.[26] National libraries have often perished at sea, from the circ.u.mstance of conquerors transporting them into their own kingdoms.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 23: Henry gave a commission to the famous antiquary, John Leland, to examine the libraries of the suppressed religious houses, and preserve such as concerned history. Though Leland, after his search, told the king he had "conserved many good authors, the which otherwyse had bene lyke to have peryshed, to the no smal incommodite of good letters," he owns to the ruthless destruction of all such as were connected with the "doctryne of a rowt of Romayne bysshopps." Strype consequently notes with great sorrow that many "ancient ma.n.u.scripts and writings of learned British and Saxon authors were lost. Libraries were sold by mercenary men for anything they could get, in that confusion and devastation of religious houses. Bale, the antiquary, makes mention of a merchant that bought two n.o.ble libraries about these times for forty s.h.i.+llings; the books whereof served him for no other use but for waste paper; and that he had been ten years consuming them, and yet there remained still store enough for as many years more. Vast quant.i.ties and numbers of these books vanished with the monks and friars from their monasteries, were conveyed away and carried beyond seas to booksellers there, by whole s.h.i.+p ladings; and a great many more were used in shops and kitchens."]

[Footnote 24: One of the most disastrous of these losses to the admirers of the old drama occurred through the neglect of a collector--John Warburton, Somerset herald-at-arms (who died 1759), and who had many of these early plays in ma.n.u.script. They were left carelessly in a corner, and during his absence his cook used them for culinary purposes as waste paper. The list published of his losses is, however, not quite accurate, as one or more escaped, or were mislaid by this careless man; for Ma.s.singer's tragedy, _The Tyrant_, stated to have been so destroyed, was found among his books, and sold at his sale in 1759; another play by the same author, _Believe as You List_, was discovered among some papers from Garrick's library in 1844, and was printed by the Percy Society, 1849. It appears to be the very ma.n.u.script copy seen and described by Cibber and Chetwood.]

[Footnote 25: One of these shrivelled volumes is preserved in a case in our British Museum. The leaves have been twisted and drawn almost into a solid ball by the action of fire. Some few of the charred ma.n.u.scripts have been admirably restored of late years by judicious pressure, and inlaying the damaged leaves in solid margins. The fire occurred while the collection was temporarily placed in Ashburnham House, Little Dean's Yard, Westminster, in October, 1731. From the Report published by a Committee of the House of Commons soon after, it appears that the original number of volumes was 958--"of which are lost, burnt, or entirely spoiled, 114; and damaged so as to be defective, 98."]

[Footnote 26: Gianvincenzo Pinelli was descended from a n.o.ble Genoese family, and born at Naples in 1535. At the age of twenty-three he removed to Padua, then noted for its learning, and here he devoted his time and fortune to literary and scientific pursuits. There was scarcely a branch of knowledge that he did not cultivate; and at his death, in 1601, he left a n.o.ble library behind him. But the Senate of Venice, ever fearful that an undue knowledge of its proceedings should be made public, set their seal upon his collection of ma.n.u.scripts, and took away more than two hundred volumes which related in some degree to its affairs. The rest of the books were packed to go to Naples, where his heirs resided. The printed books are stated to have filled one hundred and sixteen chests, and the ma.n.u.scripts were contained in fourteen others. Three s.h.i.+ps were freighted with them. One fell into the hands of corsairs, and the contents were destroyed, as stated in the text; some of the books, scattered on the beach at Fermo, were purchased by the Bishop there. The other s.h.i.+p-loads were ultimately obtained by Cardinal Borromeo, and added to his library.]

SOME NOTICES OF LOST WORKS.

Although it is the opinion of some critics that our literary losses do not amount to the extent which others imagine, they are however much greater than they allow. Our severest losses are felt in the historical province, and particularly in the earliest records, which might not have been the least interesting to philosophical curiosity.

The history of Phoenicia by Sanchoniathon, supposed to be a contemporary with Solomon, now consists of only a few valuable fragments preserved by Eusebius. The same ill fortune attends Manetho's history of Egypt, and Berosu's history of Chaldea. The histories of these most ancient nations, however veiled in fables, would have presented to the philosopher singular objects of contemplation.

Of the history of Polybios, which once contained forty books, we have now only five; of the historical library of Diodorus Siculus fifteen books only remain out of forty; and half of the Roman antiquities of Dionysius Helicarna.s.sensis has perished. Of the eighty books of the history of Dion Ca.s.sius, twenty-five only remain. The present opening book of Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus is ent.i.tled the fourteenth. Livy's history consisted of one hundred and forty books, and we only possess thirty-five of that pleasing historian. What a treasure has been lost in the thirty books of Tacitus! little more than four remain. Murphy elegantly observes, that "the reign of t.i.tus, the delight of human kind, is totally lost, and Domitian has escaped the vengeance of the historian's pen." Yet Tacitus in fragments is still the colossal torso of history. Velleius Paterculas, of whom a fragment only has reached us, we owe to a single copy: no other having ever been discovered, and which has occasioned the text of this historian to remain incurably corrupt. Taste and criticism have certainly incurred an irreparable loss in that _Treatise on the Causes of the Corruption of Eloquence_, by Quintilian; which he has himself noticed with so much satisfaction in his "Inst.i.tutes." Petrarch declares, that in his youth he had seen the works of Varro, and the second Decad of Livy; but all his endeavours to recover them were fruitless.

These are only some of the most known losses; but in reading contemporary writers we are perpetually discovering many important ones.

We have lost two precious works in ancient biography: Varro wrote the lives of seven hundred ill.u.s.trious Romans; and Atticus, the friend of Cicero, composed another, on the acts of the great men among the Romans.

When we consider that these writers lived familiarly with the finest geniuses of their times, and were opulent, hospitable, and lovers of the fine arts, their biography and their portraits, which are said to have accompanied them, are felt as an irreparable loss to literature. I suspect likewise we have had great losses of which we are not always aware; for in that curious letter in which the younger Pliny describes in so interesting a manner the sublime industry, for it seems sublime by its magnitude, of his Uncle,[27] it appears that his Natural History, that vast register of the wisdom and the credulity of the ancients, was not his only great labour; for among his other works was a history in twenty books, which has entirely perished. We discover also the works of writers, which, by the accounts of them, appear to have equalled in genius those which have descended to us. Pliny has feelingly described a poet of whom he tells us, "his works are never out of my hands; and whether I sit down to write anything myself, or to revise what I have already wrote, or am in a disposition to amuse myself, I constantly take up this agreeable author; and as often as I do so, he is still new."[28]

He had before compared this poet to Catullus; and in a critic of so fine a taste as Pliny, to have cherished so constant an intercourse with the writings of this author, indicates high powers. Instances of this kind frequently occur. Who does not regret the loss of the Anticato of Caesar?

The losses which the poetical world has sustained are sufficiently known by those who are conversant with the few invaluable fragments of Menander, who might have interested us perhaps more than Homer: for he was evidently the domestic poet, and the lyre he touched was formed of the strings of the human heart. He was the painter of pa.s.sions, and the historian of the manners. The opinion of Quintilian is confirmed by the golden fragments preserved for the English reader in the elegant versions of c.u.mberland. Even of aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who each wrote about one hundred dramas, seven only have been preserved of aeschylus and of Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides. Of the one hundred and thirty comedies of Plautus, we only inherit twenty imperfect ones.

The remainder of Ovid's Fasti has never been recovered.

I believe that a philosopher would consent to lose any poet to regain an historian; nor is this unjust, for some future poet may arise to supply the vacant place of a lost poet, but it is not so with the historian.

Fancy may be supplied; but Truth once lost in the annals of mankind leaves a chasm never to be filled.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 27: Book III. Letter V. Melmoth's translation.]

[Footnote 28: Book I. Letter XVI.]

QUODLIBETS, OR SCHOLASTIC DISQUISITIONS.

The scholastic questions were called _Questiones Quodlibeticae_; and they were generally so ridiculous that we have retained the word _Quodlibet_ in our vernacular style, to express anything ridiculously subtile; something which comes at length to be distinguished into nothingness,

"With all the rash dexterity of wit."

The history of the scholastic philosophy furnishes an instructive theme; it enters into the history of the human mind, and fills a niche in our literary annals. The works of the scholastics, with the debates of these _Quodlibetarians_, at once show the greatness and the littleness of the human intellect; for though they often degenerate into incredible absurdities, those who have examined the works of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus have confessed their admiration of the Herculean texture of brain which they exhausted in demolis.h.i.+ng their aerial fabrics.

The following is a slight sketch of the school divinity.

The christian doctrines in the primitive ages of the gospel were adapted to the simple comprehension of the mult.i.tude; metaphysical subtilties were not even employed by the Fathers, of whom several are eloquent. The Homilies explained, by an obvious interpretation, some scriptural point, or inferred, by artless ill.u.s.tration, some moral doctrine. When the Arabians became the only learned people, and their empire extended over the greater part of the known world, they impressed their own genius on those nations with whom they were allied as friends, or reverenced as masters. The Arabian genius was fond of abstruse studies; it was highly metaphysical and mathematical, for the fine arts their religion did not permit them to cultivate; and the first knowledge which modern Europe obtained of Euclid and Aristotle was through the medium of Latin translations of Arabic versions. The Christians in the west received their first lessons from the Arabians in the east; and Aristotle, with his Arabic commentaries, was enthroned in the schools of Christendom.

Then burst into birth, from the dark cave of metaphysics, a numerous and ugly sp.a.w.n of monstrous sects; unnatural children of the same foul mother, who never met but for mutual destruction. Religion became what is called the study of Theology; and they all attempted to reduce the wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d into a system! and the creed into a thesis! Every point relating to religion was debated through an endless chain of infinite questions, incomprehensible distinctions, with differences mediate and immediate, the concrete and the abstract, a perpetual civil war carried on against common sense in all the Aristotelian severity. There existed a rage for Aristotle; and Melancthon complains that in sacred a.s.semblies the ethics of Aristotle were read to the people instead of the gospel.

Aristotle was placed a-head of St. Paul; and St. Thomas Aquinas in his works distinguishes him by the t.i.tle of "The Philosopher;" inferring, doubtless, that no other man could possibly be a philosopher who disagreed with Aristotle. Of the blind rites paid to Aristotle, the anecdotes of the Nominalists and Realists are noticed in the article "Literary Controversy" in this work.

Had their subtile questions and perpetual wranglings only been addressed to the metaphysician in his closet, and had nothing but strokes of the pen occurred, the scholastic divinity would only have formed an episode in the calm narrative of literary history; but it has claims to be registered in political annals, from the numerous persecutions and tragical events with which they too long perplexed their followers, and disturbed the repose of Europe. The Thomists, and the Scotists, the Occamites, and many others, soared into the regions of mysticism.

Peter Lombard had laboriously compiled, after the celebrated Abelard's "Introduction to Divinity," his four books of "Sentences," from the writings of the Fathers; and for this he is called "The Master of Sentences." These Sentences, on which we have so many commentaries, are a collection of pa.s.sages from the Fathers, the real or apparent contradictions of whom he endeavours to reconcile. But his successors were not satisfied to be mere commentators on these "sentences," which they now only made use of as a row of pegs to hang on their fine-spun metaphysical cobwebs. They at length collected all these quodlibetical questions into enormous volumes, under the terrifying form, for those who have seen them, of _Summaries of Divinity_! They contrived, by their chimerical speculations, to question the plainest truths; to wrest the simple meaning of the Holy Scriptures, and give some appearance of truth to the most ridiculous and monstrous opinions.

One of the subtile questions which agitated the world in the tenth century, relating to dialectics, was concerning _universals_ (as for example, man, horse, dog, &c.) signifying not _this_ or _that_ in particular, but _all_ in general. They distinguished _universals_, or what we call abstract terms, by the _genera_ and _species rerum_; and they never could decide whether these were _substances_--or _names_!

That is, whether the abstract idea we form of a horse was not really a _being_ as much as the horse we ride! All this, and some congenial points respecting the origin of our ideas, and what ideas were, and whether we really had an idea of a thing before we discovered the thing itself--in a word, what they called universals, and the essence of universals; of all this nonsense, on which they at length proceeded to accusations of heresy, and for which many learned men were excommunicated, stoned, and what not, the whole was derived from the reveries of Plato, Aristotle, and Zeno, about the nature of ideas, than which subject to the present day no discussion ever degenerated into such insanity. A modern metaphysician infers that we have no ideas at all!

Of the scholastic divines, the most ill.u.s.trious was Saint THOMAS AQUINAS, styled the Angelical Doctor. Seventeen folio volumes not only testify his industry but even his genius. He was a great man, busied all his life with making the charades of metaphysics.

My learned friend Sharon Turner has favoured me with a notice of his greatest work--his "Sum of all Theology," _Summa totius Theologiae_, Paris, 1615. It is a metaphysicological treatise, or the most abstruse metaphysics of theology. It occupies above 1250 folio pages, of very small close print in double columns. It may be worth noticing that to this work are appended 19 folio pages of double columns of errata, and about 200 of additional index!

The whole is thrown into an Aristotelian form; the difficulties or questions are proposed first, and the answers are then appended. There are 168 articles on Love--358 on Angels--200 on the Soul--85 on Demons--151 on the Intellect--134 on Law--3 on the Catamenia--237 on Sins--17 on Virginity, and others on a variety of topics.

The scholastic tree is covered with prodigal foliage, but is barren of fruit; and when the scholastics employed themselves in solving the deepest mysteries, their philosophy became nothing more than an instrument in the hands of the Roman Pontiff. Aquinas has composed 358 articles on angels, of which a few of the heads have been culled for the reader.

He treats of angels, their substance, orders, offices, natures, habits, &c., as if he himself had been an old experienced angel!

Angels were not before the world!

Angels might have been before the world!

Angels were created by G.o.d--They were created immediately by Him--They were created in the Empyrean sky--They were created in grace--They were created in imperfect beat.i.tude. After a severe chain of reasoning, he shows that angels are incorporeal compared to us, but corporeal compared to G.o.d.

An angel is composed of action and potentiality; the more superior he is, he has the less potentiality. They have not matter properly. Every angel differs from another angel in species. An angel is of the same species as a soul. Angels have not naturally a body united to them. They may a.s.sume bodies; but they do not want to a.s.sume bodies for themselves, but for us.

The bodies a.s.sumed by angels are of thick air.

The bodies they a.s.sume have not the natural virtues which they show, nor the operations of life, but those which are common to inanimate things.