From a MS of Petrarch, De viris illustribus (1379), in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. Reproduced (by permission) from M. Pierre de Nolhac's Pétrarque et l'Humanisme, 1892; ed. 2, 1907.

[Frontispiece to Vol. II.

OF

CLASSICAL SCHOLARSHIP

VOL. II

FROM THE REVIVAL OF LEARNING

TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
(IN ITALY, FRANCE, ENGLAND, AND THE

NETHERLANDS)

BY

JOHN EDWIN SANDYS, LITT.D.,

FELLOW OF ST JOHN'S COLLEGE,

AND PUBLIC ORATOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE,
HON. LITT.D. DUBLIN

CAMBRIDGE

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1908

Univ. Library, Univ. Calif., Santa Cruz

A just story of learning, containing the antiquities and originals of knowledges and their sects, their inventions, their traditions, their diverse administrations and managings, their flourishings, their oppositions, decays, depressions, oblivions, removes, with the causes and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world, I may truly affirm to be wanting.

BACON'S Advancement of Learning, 1605, Book II, i 2.

THE

PREFACE.

HE publication of the second and third volumes of the present History of Classical Scholarship brings to a close. a work that was begun on New Year's day in 1900. The first volume, extending from the sixth century B.C. to the end of the Middle Ages, had only recently appeared, in October, 1903, when I had the honour of being invited to deliver the Lane lectures at Harvard in the spring of 1905, and the result was published in the same year under the title of Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning. The kindly reception accorded to the first volume of the History in the United States of America, as well as in England and on the continent of Europe, led to the publication of a second edition in October, 1906.

The volumes now published begin with the Revival of Learning and end with the present day. They include a survey of the lives and works of the leading scholars from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Each of the periods embraced in these volumes opens with a chronological conspectus of the scholars of that period, giving the dates of their births and deaths, and, in the last four centuries, grouping them under the nations to which they belong. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the nations are arranged in the following order,-Italy, France, the Netherlands, England, and Germany. This order has, however, been abandoned in the eighteenth, in which the influence of Bentley on Greek scholarship in Holland makes it historically necessary to place England immediately before the Netherlands. It has also, for still more obvious reasons, been abandoned in the nineteenth century in the case of Germany. Hence, in the first part of the third volume, the history of the eighteenth century in Germany is immediately followed by that of the nineteenth in the same country. There is good precedent for treating German

Switzerland in connexion with Germany, and French Switzerland in connexion with France. Spain and Portugal concern us mainly in the sixteenth century; Belgium and Holland are treated separately after the establishment of the Belgian kingdom in 1830. Under the same century, room has been found for a retrospect of the history of classical learning in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, in Greece and in Russia, and also for a brief notice of its recent fortunes in Hungary. The history of the nineteenth century in England is immediately followed by that of the United States in the last chapter of the work.

The bibliography prefixed to the second volume indicates most of the sources of information used in preparing the second and third volumes. It may possibly give the impression that the present work has had more precursors than is actually the case. At Göttingen, Ernst Curtius attempted in vain to induce Sauppe, and, failing him, Dittenberger, to write a general history of classical philology. Brief and suggestive outlines of the subject have appeared from time to time, but the present is the sole attempt to cover the whole ground with any fulness of detail. It is only the first century of the Revival of Learning in Italy that has been treated in the admirable work of Voigt. Bursian's valuable History of Classical Philology in Germany' is almost exclusively confined to that country; a handy volume on classical learning in Holland was written by Lucian Müller; and a very brief sketch of its fortunes in Belgium was buried by Roersch in a Belgian encyclopaedia. In the case of all the other countries of Europe, and in that of the United States of America, there has been no separate history; so that, in the present volumes, the work has been done for the first time, not for England alone, but also for Italy, France, Scandinavia, Greece and Russia, and for the United States, while the history of scholarship in Holland, Belgium, and Germany has been studied anew, and has been brought down to the present date. The scholars whose lives and works are reviewed in the present volumes are almost exclusively those who have already passed away. It is only in a very few cases, where complete silence would have been unnatural, that I have mentioned the names of living scholars, such as Weil and Comparetti.