THE LIFE
OF
CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI.

J. Card. Mezzofanti

Perugini, del. H. Adlard, sc.

THE LIFE
OF
CARDINAL MEZZOFANTI;
WITH
AN INTRODUCTORY MEMOIR
OF
EMINENT LINGUISTS, ANCIENT AND MODERN.

BY
C. W. RUSSELL, D.D.
PRESIDENT OF ST. PATRICK’S COLLEGE, MAYNOOTH.

LONDON:
LONGMAN, BROWN, AND CO.
PATERNOSTER-ROW.
1858.

[The Right of Translation is reserved.]

PREFACE.

The following Memoir had its origin in an article on Cardinal Mezzofanti, contributed to the Edinburgh Review in the year 1855. The subject appeared at that time to excite considerable interest. The article was translated into French, and, in an abridged form, into Italian; and I received through the editor, from persons entirely unknown to me, more than one suggestion that I should complete the biography, accompanied by offers of additional information for the purpose.

Nevertheless, the notices of the Cardinal on which that article was founded, and which at that time comprised all the existing materials for a biography, appeared to me, with all their interest, to want the precision and the completeness which are essential to a just estimate of his attainments. I felt that to judge satisfactorily his acquaintance with a range of languages so vast as that which fame ascribed to him, neither sweeping statements founded on popular reports, however confident, nor general assertions from individuals, however distinguished and trustworthy, could safely be regarded as sufficient. The proof of his familiarity with any particular language, in order to be satisfactory, ought to be specific, and ought to rest on the testimony either of a native, or at least of one whose skill in the language was beyond suspicion.

At the same time the interest with which the subject seemed to be generally regarded, led me to hope that, by collecting, while they were yet recent, the reminiscences of persons of various countries and tongues, who had known and spoken with the Cardinal, it might be possible to lay the foundation of a much more exact judgment regarding him than had hitherto been attainable.

A short inquiry satisfied me that, although scattered over every part of the globe, there were still to be found living representatives of most of the languages ascribed to the Cardinal, who would be able, from their own personal knowledge, to declare whether, and in what degree, he was acquainted with each; and I resolved to try whether it might not be possible to collect their opinions.

The experiment has involved an extensive and tedious correspondence; many of the persons whom I have had to consult being ex-pupils of the Propaganda, residing in very distant countries; more than one beyond the range of regular postal communication, and only accessible by a chance message transmitted through a consul, or through the friendly offices of a brother missionary.

For the spirit in which my inquiries have been met, I am deeply grateful. I have recorded in the course of the narrative the names of many to whom I am indebted for valuable assistance and information. Other valued friends whom I have not named, will kindly accept this general acknowledgment.

There is one, however, to whom I owe a most special and grateful expression of thanks—his Eminence the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. From him, at the very outset of my task, I received a mass of anecdotes, recollections, and suggestions, which, besides their great intrinsic interest, most materially assisted me in my further inquiries; and the grace of the contribution was enhanced by the fact, that it was generously withdrawn from that delightful store of Personal Recollections which his Eminence has since given to the public; and in which his brilliant pen would have made it one of the most attractive episodes.

Several of the autographs, also, which appear in the sheet of fac-similes, I owe to his Eminence. Others I have received from friends who are named in the Memoir.

CONTENTS.

CORRIGENDA.

Transcriber’s Note: The corrections have been made.

Fac-similes in Sixteen Languages.

MEMOIRS
OF
EMINENT LINGUISTS.

In the Life of Cardinal Mezzofanti I have attempted to ascertain, by direct evidence, the exact number of languages with which that great linguist was acquainted, and the degree of his familiarity with each.

Eminence in any pursuit, however, is necessarily relative. We are easily deceived about a man’s stature until we have seen him by the side of other men; nor shall we be able to form a just notion of the linguistic accomplishments of Cardinal Mezzofanti, or at least to bring them before our minds as a practical reality, until we shall have first considered what had been effected before him by other men who attained to distinction in the same department.

I have thought it desirable, therefore, to prefix to his Life a summary history of the most eminent linguists of ancient and modern times. There is no branch of scholarship which has left fewer traces in literature, or has received a more scanty measure of justice from history. Viewed in the light of a curious but unpractical pursuit, skill in languages is admired for a time, perhaps indeed enjoys an exaggerated popularity; but it passes away like a nine days’ wonder, and seldom finds an exact or permanent record. Hence, while the literature of every country abounds with memoirs of distinguished poets, philosophers, and historians, few, even among professed antiquarians, have directed their attention to the history of eminent linguists, whether in ancient or in modern times. In all the ordinary repositories of curious learning—Pliny, Aulus Gellius, and Athenæus, among the ancients; Bayle, Gibbon, Feyjoo, Disraeli, and Vulpius, among the moderns—this interesting chapter is entirely overlooked; nor does it appear to have engaged the attention even of linguists or philologers themselves.

The following Memoir, therefore, must claim the indulgence due to a first essay in a new and difficult subject. No one can be more sensible than the writer of its many imperfections;—of the probable omission of names which should have been recorded;—of the undue prominence of others with inferior pretensions; and perhaps of still more serious inaccuracies of a different kind. It is only offered in the absence of something better and more complete; and with the hope of directing to what is certainly a curious and interesting subject, the attention of others who enjoy more leisure and opportunity for its investigation.

The diversity of languages which prevails among the various branches of the human family, has proved, almost equally with their local dispersion, a barrier to that free intercommunion which is one of the main instruments of civilization. “The confusion of tongues, the first great judgment of God upon the ambition of man,” says Bacon, in the Introductory Book of his “Advancement of Learning,” “hath chiefly imbarred the open trade and intercourse of learning and knowledge.”[1] Perhaps it would be more correct to say that these two great impediments to intercourse have mutually assisted each other. The divergency of languages seems to keep pace with the dispersion of the population. Adelung lays it down as the result of the most careful philological investigations, that where the difficulties of intercourse are such as existed among the ancients and as still prevail among the less civilized populations, no language can maintain itself unchanged over a space of more than one hundred and fifty thousand square miles.[2]

It might naturally be expected, therefore, that one of the earliest efforts of the human intellect would have been directed towards the removal of this barrier, and that one of the first sciences to invite the attention of men would have been the knowledge of languages. Few sciences, nevertheless, were more neglected by the ancients.

It is true that the early literatures of many of the ancient nations contain legends on this head which might almost throw into the shade the greatest marvels related of Mezzofanti. In one of the Chinese stories regarding the youth of Buddha, translated by Klaproth, it is related that, when he was ten years old, he asked his preceptor, Babourenou, to teach him all the languages of the earth, seeing that he was to be an apostle to all men; and that when Babourenou confessed his ignorance of all except the Indian dialects, the child himself taught his master “fifty foreign tongues with their respective characters.”[3] A still more marvellous tale is told by one of the Rabbinical historians, Rabbi Eliezer, who relates that Mordechai, (one of the great heroes of Talmudic legend), was acquainted with seventy languages; and that it was by means of this gift he understood the conversation of the two eunuchs who were plotting in a foreign tongue the death of the king.[4] Nor is the Koran without its corresponding prodigy. When the Prophet was carried up to Heaven, before the throne of the Most High, “God promised that he should have the knowledge of all languages.”[5]

But when we turn to the genuine records of antiquity, we find no ground for the belief that such legends as these have even that ordinary substructure of truth which commonly underlies the fables of mythology. Neither the Sacred Narratives, nor those of the early profane authors, contain a single example of remarkable proficiency in languages.

It is true that in the later days of the Jewish people, interpreters were appointed in the synagogues to explain the lessons read from the Hebrew Scriptures for the benefit of their foreign brethren; that in all the courts of the Eastern monarchs interpreters were found, through whom they communicated with foreign envoys, or with the motley tribes of their own empire; and that professional interpreters were at the service of foreigners in the great centres of commerce or travel,[6] who, it may be presumed, were masters of several languages. The philosophers, too, who traversed remote countries in pursuit of wisdom, can hardly be supposed to have returned without some acquaintance with the languages of the nations among whom they had voyaged. Solon and Pythagoras are known to have visited Egypt and the East; the latter also sojourned for a considerable time in Italy and the islands; the wanderings of Plato are said to have been even more extensive. Nay, in some instances these pilgrims of knowledge extended their researches beyond the limits of their own ethnographical region. Thus, on the one hand, the Scythian sages, Anacharsis and Zamolxis, themselves most probably of the Mongol or Tartar tongue, sojourned for a long time in countries where the Indo-European family of languages alone prevailed; on the other, the merchants of Tyre were in familiar and habitual intercourse with the Italo-Pelasgic race; and the Phœnician explorers, in their well-known circumnavigation of Africa described by Herodotus, must have come in contact with still more numerous varieties both of race and of tongue. Nevertheless it may fairly be doubted whether these or similar opportunities among the ancients, resulted in any very remarkable attainments in the department of languages. The absence of all record furnishes a strong presumption to the contrary; and there is one example, that of Herodotus, which would almost be in itself conclusive. This acute and industrious explorer devoted many years to foreign travel. He visited every city of note in Greece and Asia Minor, and every site of the great battles between the Greeks and Barbarians. He explored the whole line of the route of Xerxes in his disastrous expedition. He visited in succession all the chief islands of the Egean, as well as those of the western coast of Greece. His landward wanderings extended far into the interior. He reached Babylon, Ecbatana, and Susa, and spent some time among the Scythian tribes on the shores of the Black Sea. He resided long in Egypt, from which he passed southwards as far as Elephantine, eastwards into Arabia, and westwards through Lybia, at least as far as Cyrene. And yet Dahlmann is of opinion that, with all his industry, and all the spirit of inquiry which was his great characteristic, Herodotus never became acquainted even with the language of Egypt, but contented himself with the service of an interpreter.[7]

In like manner, it would be difficult to shew, either from the Cyropædia, or the Expedition of Cyrus, that Xenophon, during his foreign travel, became master of Persian or any kindred Eastern tongue. Nor am I aware that there has ever been discovered in the writings of Plato any evidence of familiarity with the language of those Eastern philosophers from whose science he is believed to have drawn so largely.

It is strange that the two notable exceptions to this barrenness of eminent linguists which characterizes the classic times, Mithridates and Cleopatra, should both have been of royal rank. The former, the celebrated king of Pontus, long one of the most formidable enemies of the Roman name, is alleged to have spoken fluently the languages of all the subjects of his empire; an empire so vast, and comprising so many different nationalities as to throw an air of improbability over the story. According to Aulus Gellius,[8] he “was thoroughly conversant” (percalluit) with the languages of all the nations (twenty-five in number) over which his rule extended.[9] The other writers who relate the circumstance—Valerius Maximus,[10] Pliny,[11] and Solinus—make the number only twenty-two. Some commentators have regarded the story as a gross exaggeration; and others have sought to diminish its marvellousness by explaining it of different dialects, rather than of distinct languages. But there does not appear in the narrative of the original writers any reason whether for the doubt or for the restriction. Pliny declares that “it is quite certain;” and the matter-of-fact tone in which they all relate it, makes it clear that they wished to be understood literally. It was the king’s invariable practice, they tell us, to communicate with all the subjects of his polyglot empire directly and in person, and “never through an interpreter;” and Gellius roundly affirms that he was able to converse in each and every one of these tongues “with as much correctness as if it were his native dialect.”

The attainments of Cleopatra, although far short of what is reported of Mithridates, are nevertheless described by Plutarch[12] as very extraordinary. He says that she “spoke most languages, and that there were but few of the foreign ambassadors to whom she gave audience through an interpreter.” The languages which he specifies are those of the Ethiopians, of the Troglodytes (probably a dialect of Coptic), of the Hebrews, of the Arabs, the Syrians, the Medes, and the Persians; but he adds that this list does not comprise all the languages which this extraordinary woman understood.

Now the very prominence assigned to these examples, and the absence of all allusion to any other which might be supposed to approximate to them, may afford a presumption that they are almost solitary. Valerius Maximus, in his well-known chapter De Studio et Industria, cites the case of Mithridates as a very remarkable example “of study and industry.” It is highly probable therefore, that, if he knew any other eminent linguists, he would have added their names. Yet the only cases which he instances are those of Cato learning Greek in his old age, of Themistocles acquiring Persian during his exile, and of Publius mastering all the five dialects of Greece during the time of his Prætorship. In like manner, Aulus Gellius has no more notable linguist to produce, in contrast with Mithridates, than the old poet Ennius, who used to boast that he had three hearts,[13] because he could speak Greek, Latin, and his rude native dialect, Oscan. And Pliny, with all his love of parallels, is even more meagre:—he does not recite a single name in comparison with that of Mithridates.

The Romans, especially under the early Republic, appear to have been singularly indifferent or unsuccessful in cultivating languages; and the bad Greek of the Roman ambassadors to Tarentum, for their ridicule of which the Tarentines paid so dearly, is almost an average specimen of the accomplishments of the earlier Romans as linguists. Nor can this circumstance fail to appear strange, when it is remembered over how many different races and tongues the wide domain of Rome extended. The very multiplicity of languages submitted to her government would seem to have imposed upon her public men the necessity of familiarizing themselves, even for the discharge of their public office, with at least the principal ones among them. But, on the contrary, for a long time they steadily pursued the policy of imposing, as far as practicable, upon the conquered nationalities the Latin language, at least in public and official transactions.[14]

And, so far as regards the Eastern and Northern languages, this exclusion was successfully and permanently enforced at Rome. The slave population of the city comprised almost every variety of race within the limits of the Empire. The very names of the slaves who are introduced in the plays of Plautus and Terence—Syra, Phœnicium, Afer, Geta, Dorias, &c. (which are but their respective gentile appellatives)—embrace a very large circle of the languages of Asia, Africa, and Northern Europe. And yet, with the exception of a single scene in the Pænulus of Plautus, in which the well-known Punic speech of Hanno the Carthaginian is introduced,[15] there is nothing in either of these dramatists from which we could infer that any of the manifold languages of the slave population of Rome effected an entrance among their haughty masters. They were all as completely ignored by the Romans, as is the vernacular Celtic of the Irish agricultural servant in the midland counties of England.

But it was not so for Greek. From the Augustan age onwards, this polished language began to dispute the mastery with Latin, even in Rome itself.

“Græcia capta ferum cepit captorem, et artes

Intulit agresti Latio—”

applies to the language, even more than to the arts. In the days of the Rhetorician, Molon, (Cicero’s master in eloquence,) Greek had obtained the entrée of the Senate. In the time of Tiberius, its use was permitted even in forensic pleadings. With the emperors who succeeded,[16] the triumph of Greek was still more complete. From Pliny downwards, there is hardly an author of eminence in the Roman Empire who did not write in that language;—Pausanias, Dion, Galen, even the Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself, with all the traditionary Roman associations of his name.

It was so also with the Christian population and the Christian literature of Rome. Almost all the Christian writings of the first two centuries are in Greek. The early Roman liturgy was Greek. The population of Rome was in great part a Greek-speaking race. A large proportion of the inscriptions in the Roman Catacombs are Greek, and some even of the Latin ones are engraved in Greek characters. Nay, the early Christian churches in Gaul, Vienne, Lyons, and Marseilles, and the few remains of their literature which have reached us, are equally Greek.[17]

In a word, during the first two centuries of the Christian era, making due allowance for the difference of the periods, Greek and Latin held towards each other in Rome the same relation which we find between Norman-French and Saxon in England after the Conquest; and we may safely say that, during those centuries, a knowledge of both languages was the ordinary accomplishment of all educated men, and was shared by many of the lowest of the population.

Beyond this limit, however, we read of no remarkable linguists even among the accomplished scholars of the Augustan age. No one will doubt that the two Varros may fairly be taken as, in this respect, the most favourable specimens of the class. Now neither of them seems to have gone further than a knowledge of Greek. Out of the four hundred and ninety books which Marcus Terentius Varro wrote, there is not one named which would indicate familiarity with any other foreign language.

The Neo-Platonists of the second and third centuries, whose researches in Oriental Philosophy must have brought them into contact with some of the Eastern languages, may possibly form an exception to this general statement; but, on the whole, in the absence of positive and exact information on the subject, it may not unreasonably be conjectured that, among the Christian scholars of the second, third, and fourth centuries, we might find a wider range of linguistic attainments than among their gentile contemporaries. The critical study of the Bible itself involved the necessity of familiarity, not only with Greek and Hebrew, but with more than one cognate oriental dialect besides. St. Jerome, besides the classic languages and his native Illyrian, is known to have been familiar with several of the Eastern tongues; and it is not improbable that some of the earlier commentators and expositors of the Bible may be taken as equally favourable specimens of the Christian linguists.[18] Origen’s Hexapla is a monument of his scholarship in Hebrew, and probably in Syriac and Samaritan. St. Clement of Alexandria was perhaps even a more accomplished linguist; for he tells that of the masters under whom he studied, one was from Greece, one from Magna Græcia, a third from Cœle-Syria, a fourth from Egypt, a fifth an Assyrian, and a sixth a Hebrew.[19] And St. Gregory Nazianzen expressly relates of his friend St. Basil, that, even before he came to Athens to commence his rhetorical studies, he was already well-versed in many languages.[20]

From the death of Constantine, however, the study began rapidly to decline, even among ecclesiastics. The disruption of the Empire naturally tended to diminish the intercourse between East and West, and by consequence the interchange of their languages. It would appear, too, as if the barbarian conquerors adopted, in favour of their own languages, the same policy which the Romans had pursued for Latin. Attila is said to have passed a law prohibiting the use of the Latin language in his newly conquered kingdom,[21] and to have taken pains, by importing native teachers, to procure the substitution of Gothic in its stead. At all events, in whatever way the change was brought about, a knowledge of both Greek and Latin, which in the classic times of the Empire had been the ordinary accomplishment of every educated man, became uncommon and almost exceptional. Pope Gregory the Great, who, bitterly as he has been assailed as an enemy of letters, must be confessed to have been the most eminent Western scholar of his day, spoke Greek very imperfectly; he complains that it was difficult, even at Constantinople, to find any one who could translate Greek satisfactorily into Latin;[22] and a still earlier instance is recorded, in which a pope, in other respects a man of undoubted ability, was unable to translate the letter of the Greek patriarch, much less to communicate with the Greek ambassadors, except through an interpreter.[23]

More than one, indeed, of the early theological controversies was embittered through the misunderstandings caused between the East and West by mutual ignorance of each other’s language. Pelagius succeeded in obtaining a favourable decision from the Council of Jerusalem in 415, chiefly because, while his Western adversary, Orosius, was unable to speak Greek, the fathers of the Council were ignorant of Latin. The protracted controversy on the Three Chapters owed much of its inveteracy to the ignorance of the Westerns[24] of the original language of the works whose orthodoxy was impugned; and it is well known that the condemnation of the decree of the sixth council on the use of sacred images issued by the fathers of Francfort, was based exclusively on a strangely erroneous Latin translation of the acts of the council, through which translation alone they were known in Germany and Gaul.[25]

The foundation of the Empire of Charlemagne consummated the separation between the Greek and Latin races and their languages. The venerated names of Bede and of Alcuin in the Western Church, and the more questionable celebrity of the Patriarch Photius in the Eastern, constitute a passing exception. But it need hardly be added that they stand almost entirely alone; and it will readily be believed that, amid the Barbarian irruptions from without, and the fierce intestine revolutions, of which Europe was the theatre during the rest of the earlier mediæval period, even that familiarity with the Greek and oriental languages which we have described, entirely disappeared in the West.

The wars of the Crusades, and the reviving intellectual activity in which this and other great events of the second mediæval period originated, gave a new impulse to the study of languages. Frederic II., a remarkable example of the union of great intellectual gifts with deep moral perversity, spoke fluently six languages, Latin, Greek, Italian, German, Hebrew, and even Arabic.[26] The Moorish schools in Spain began to be visited by Christian students. In this manner Arabic found its way into the West; and the intermixture of learned Jews in the European kingdoms afforded similar opportunities for the cultivation of Hebrew, which were turned to account by many, especially among biblical scholars. On the other hand, notwithstanding the contempt for profane learning which breathes through the Koran, the Saracen scholars began to direct their attention to the learning of other creeds, and the languages of other races. Ibn Wasil, who came into Italy in 1250 as ambassador to Manfred, the son of Frederic II., was reported to be familiar with the Western tongues. The Spanish Moors, too, began sedulously to cultivate Greek. The works of Aristotle, of Galen, of Dioscorides, and many other Greek writers, chiefly philosophical, were translated into Arabic by Averroes, Ibn Djoldjol and Avicenna. And the Jewish scholars of that age were equally assiduous in the cultivation of Greek. The learned Rabbi Maimonides, born in Cordova in the early part of the 12th century, was not only master of many Eastern tongues, but was also thoroughly familiar with the Greek language.

It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that it was among the Moors or the Hebrews that the revival of the study of languages first commenced. Alcuin, in addition to the modern languages with which his sojourn in various kingdoms must have made him acquainted, was also familiar with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Hermann, the Dalmatian, the first translator of the Koran, was well acquainted with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic. The celebrated Raymond Lully, who was a native of Majorca, was able to lecture in Latin Greek, Arabic, and perhaps Hebrew;—an accomplishment especially wonderful in one who was among the most laborious and prolific writers of his age, and who left after him, according to some authorities, (though this, no doubt, is a great exaggeration), not less than a thousand[27] works on the most diversified subjects. At the instance of this eminent orientalist, the council of Vienne directed that professorships should be founded in all the great Universities, for the Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic languages.[28]

An example of, for the period, very remarkable proficiency in modern languages is recorded in the history of the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. Roderigo Ximenes,[29] Archbishop of Toledo in the early part of the thirteenth century, a native of Navarre, but a scholar of the University of Paris, was one of the representatives of the Spanish Church at that Council. A controversy regarding the Primacy of Spain had arisen between the Sees of Toledo and Compostella, which was referred for adjudication to the bishops there assembled. Ximenes addressed to the council a long Latin oration in defence of the claim of Toledo; and, as many of his auditory, which consisted both of the clergy and the laity, were ignorant of that language, he repeated the same argument in a series of discourses addressed to the natives of each country in succession; to the Romans, Germans, French, English, Navarrese, and Spaniards,[30] each in their respective tongues. Thus the number of languages in which he spoke was at least seven, and it is highly probable that he had others at his disposal, if his auditory had been of such a nature as to render them necessary.

The taste for the languages and literature of the East received a further stimulus from the foundation of the Christian principalities at Antioch and Jerusalem, from the establishment of the Latin Empire at Constantinople, and in general from the long wars in the East, to which the enthusiasm of the age attracted the most enterprising spirits of European chivalry. The pious pilgrimages, too, contributed to the same result. Many of the knights or palmers, on their return from the East, brought with them the knowledge, not only of Greek, but of more than one of the oriental languages besides. The long imprisonments to which, during the holy wars, and the Latin campaigns against the Turks, they were often subjected, supplied another occasion of familiarity with Arabic, Syriac, Turkish, or Persian.

The commercial enterprise of the Western Nations, and especially of the Venetians and Genoese, was a still more powerful instrument of the interchange of languages. Few modern voyagers have possessed more of that spirit of travel which is the best aid towards the acquisition of foreign tongues, than the celebrated Marco Polo. It is hard to suppose that he can have returned from his extensive wanderings in Persia, in Tartary, in the Indian Archipelago, and in China and Tibet, without some tincture of their languages. Still less can this be supposed of his countryman, Josaphat Barbaro, who sojourned for sixteen years among the Tartar tribes.[31] It was in the commercial settlements of the Venetians in the Levant that the profession of interpreters, of which I shall have to speak hereafter, and which has since become hereditary in certain families, was originated or brought to perfection.[32]

It is only, however, from the revival of letters, properly so called, that the history of linguistic studies can be truly said to commence.

The attention of Scholars, in the first instance, was chiefly directed towards the classical languages and the languages of the Bible. The Greek scholars who were driven to the West by the Moslem occupation of Constantinople brought their language, in its best and most attractive form, to the Universities of Italy. In the Council of Florence, in 1438, more than one Italian divine, especially Ambrogio Traversari, was found capable of holding discussions with the Greek representatives in their native tongue. In like manner, the Jews and Moors, who were exiled from Spain by the harsh and impolitic measures of Ferdinand and Isabella, deposited through all the schools of Europe the seeds of a solid and critical knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic and their cognate languages. The fruits of their teaching may be discerned at a comparatively early period in the biblical studies of the time. Antonio de Lebrixa published, in 1481, a grammar of the Latin, Castilian and Hebrew languages: and I need only allude to the mature and various oriental learning which Cardinal Ximenes found ready to his hand, in the very first years of the sixteenth century, for the compilation of the Complutensian Polyglot. Although some of the scholars whom he engaged, as for instance, Demetrius Ducas, were Greeks; and others, as Alfonzo Zamora or Pablo Coronell,[33] were converted Jews; yet, the names of Lopez de Zuniga, Nunez de Guzman, and Vergara[34] are a sufficient evidence of the success with which the co-operation of native scholars was enlisted in the undertaking.[35]

From this period the number of scholars eminent in the department of languages becomes so great, and the history of many among them presents so frequent points of resemblance, that it may conduce to the greater distinctness of the narrative to classify separately the most distinguished linguists of each among the principal nations.

§ I. LINGUISTS OF THE EAST.

Although the inquiry must of course commence with the East, the cradle of human language, unfortunately the materials for this portion of the subject are more meagre and imperfectly preserved than any other.

In the East indeed, the faculty of language appears, for the most part, in a form quite different from what we shall find among the scholars of the West. The Eastern linguists, with a few exceptions, have been eminent as mere speakers of languages, rather than scholars even in the loosest sense of the word.

As it is in the East that the office of Dragoman or “interpreter” first rose to the dignity of a profession, so all the most notable Oriental linguists have belonged to that profession.

A very remarkable specimen of this class occurs in the reign of Soliman the Magnificent, and flourished in the early part of the sixteenth century. A most interesting account is given of him, under his Turkish name of Genus Bey, by Thevet, in that curious repertory—his Cosmographie Universelle.[36] He was the son of a poor fisherman, of the Island of Corfu; and while yet a boy, was carried away by pirates and sold as a slave at Constantinople. Thence he was carried into Egypt, Syria, and other Eastern countries; and he would also seem to have visited most of the European kingdoms, or at least to have enjoyed the opportunity of intercourse with natives of them all. His proficiency in the languages both of the East and West, drew upon him the notice of the Sultan, who appointed him his First Dragoman, with the rank of Pasha. Thevet (who would seem to have known him personally during his wanderings,) describes him in his quaint old French, as “the first man of his day for speaking divers sorts of languages, and of the happiest memory under the Heavens.” He adds, that this extraordinary man “knew perfectly no fewer than sixteen languages, viz: Greek, both ancient and modern, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Moorish, Tartar, Armenian, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, German, and French.” Genus Bey, was, of course, a renegade; but, from a circumstance related by Thevet, he appears to have retained a reverence for his old faith, though not sufficiently strong to be proof against temptation. He was solicited by some bigoted Moslems to remove a bell, which the Christians had been permitted to erect in their little church. For a time he refused to permit its removal; but at last he was induced by a large bribe, to accede to the demand. Thevet relates that, in punishment of his sacrilegious weakness, he was struck with that loathsome disease which smote King Herod, and perished miserably in nine days from the date of this inauspicious act.

In Naima’s “Annals of the Turkish Empire,” another renegade, a Hungarian by birth, is mentioned, who spoke fourteen languages, and who, in consequence of this accomplishment, was employed during a siege to carry a message through the lines of the blockading army.[37]

A still more marvellous example of the gift of languages is mentioned by Duret, in his Trésor des Langues (p. 964)—that of Jonadab, a Jew of Morocco, who lived about the same period. He was sold as a slave by the Moors, and lived for twenty-six years in captivity in different parts of the world. With more constancy to his creed, however, than the Corfu Christian, he withstood every attempt to undermine his faith or to compel its abjuration; and, from the obduracy of his resistance, received from his masters the opprobrious name Alhanar, “the serpent” or “viper.” Duret says that Jonadab spoke and wrote twenty-eight different languages. He does not specify their names, however, nor have I been able to find any other allusion to the man.

It would be interesting, if materials could be found for the inquiry, to pursue this extremely curious subject through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and especially in the military and commercial establishments of the Venetians in the Morea and the islands. The race of Dragomans has never ceased to flourish in the Levant. M. Antoine d’Abbadie informed me that there are many families in which this office, and sometimes the consular appointment for which it is an indispensable qualification, have been hereditary for the last two or three centuries; and that it is very common to find among them men and women who, sufficiently for all the ordinary purposes of conversation, speak Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, English, German, and French, with little or no accent. This accomplishment is not confined to one single nation. Mr. Burton, in his “Pilgrimage to Medinah and Meccah,” mentions an Afghan who “spoke five or six languages.”[38] He speaks of another, a Koord settled at Medinah, who “spoke five languages in perfection.” The traveller, he assures us, “may hear the Cairene donkey-boys shouting three or four European dialects with an accent as good as his own;” and he “has frequently known Armenians (to whom, among all the Easterns, he assigns the first place as linguists) speak, besides their mother tongue, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Hindostanee, and at the same time display an equal aptitude for the Occidental languages.”[39]

But of all the Eastern linguists of the present day the most notable seem to be the ciceroni who take charge of the pilgrims at Mecca, many of whom speak fluently every one of the numerous languages which prevail over the vast region of the Moslem. Mr. Burton fell in at Mecca with a one-eyed Hadji, who spoke fluently and with good accent Turkish, Persian, Hindostani, Pushtu, Armenian, English, French, and Italian.[40] In the “Turkish Annals” of Naima, already cited, the learned Vankuli Mohammed Effendi, a contemporary of Sultan Murad Khan, is described as “a perfect linguist.”[41] Many similar instances might, without much difficulty, be collected; nor can it be doubted that, among the numerous generations which have thus flourished and passed away in the East, there may have been rivals for Genus Bey, or even for “the Serpent” himself. But unhappily their fame has been local and transitory. They were admired during their brief day of success, but are long since forgotten; nor is it possible any longer to recover a trace of their history. They are unknown,

Carent quia vate sacro.[42]

It would be a great injustice, however, to represent this as the universal character of the Eastern linguists. On the contrary, it has only needed intercourse with the scholars of the West in order to draw out what appears to be the very remarkable aptitude of the native Orientals for the scientific study of languages. Thus the learned Portuguese Jew, Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel (1604-1657), was not only a thorough master of the Oriental languages, but was able to write with ease and exactness several of the languages of the West, and published almost indifferently in Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, and English.[43] I allude more particularly, however, to those bodies of Eastern Christians, which, from their community of creed with the Roman Church, have, for several centuries, possessed ecclesiastical establishments in Rome and other cities of Europe.

The Syrians had been remarkable, even from the classic times,[44] for the patient industry with which they devoted themselves to the labour of translation from foreign languages into their own. Many of the modern Syrians, however, have deserved the still higher fame of original scholarship.

The Maronite community of Syrian Christians has produced several scholars of unquestioned eminence. Abraham Echellensis was one of the chief assistants of Le Jay, at Paris, in the preparation of his Polyglot. His services in a somewhat similar capacity at Rome are familiar to all Oriental scholars. But it is to the name of Assemani that the Maronite body owes most of its reputation. For a time, indeed, literature would seem to have been almost an inheritance in the family of Assemani. It has contributed to the catalogue of Oriental scholars no less than five of its members—Joseph Simon, who died in 1768; his nephews, Stephen Evodius and Joseph Lewis; Joseph Aloysius, who died at Rome in 1782; and Simon, who died at Padua in 1821. The first of them is the well-known editor of the works of St. Ephrem, and author of the great repertory of Oriental ecclesiastical erudition, the Bibliotheca Orientalis.

The Greeks, with greater resources, and under circumstances more favourable, are less distinguished as linguists. John Matthew Caryophilos, a native of Corfu, who was archbishop of Iconium and resided at Rome in the early part of the seventeenth century, was a learned Orientalist, and, besides several literary works of higher pretension, published some elementary books on the Chaldee, Syriac, and Coptic languages. But he has few imitators among his countrymen. Leo Allatius (Allazzi), although a profound scholar, and familiar with every department of the literature of the West, whether sacred or profane,[45] can hardly be considered a linguist in the ordinary sense of the word. The same may be said of the many Greek students, as, for instance, Metaxa, Meletius Syrius, and others, who, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, repaired to the universities of Italy, France, and even England.[46] It can hardly be doubted, of course, that many of them acquired a certain familiarity with the languages of the countries in which they sojourned, but no traces of this knowledge appear to be now discoverable. By far the most notable of them, Cyrillus Lucaris, the well-known Calvinistic Patriarch of Constantinople, spoke and wrote fluently Arabic, Greek, Latin, and Italian; but, if his latinity be a fair sample of his skill in the other languages, his place as a linguist must be held low indeed.[47] It should be added, however, that as polyglot speakers, the Greeks have long enjoyed a considerable reputation. The celebrated Panagiotes Nicusius[48] (better known by his Italianized name Panagiotti) obtained, despite all the prejudices of race, the post of First Dragoman of the Porte, about the middle of the seventeenth century; and, from his time forward, the office was commonly held by a Greek, until the separation of Greece from the Ottoman Empire.

Mr. Burton’s observation that no natives of the East seem to possess the faculty of language in a higher degree than the Armenians, is confirmed by the experience of all other travellers; and the commercial activity which has long distinguished them, and has led to their establishing themselves in almost all the great European centres of commerce, has tended very much to develope this national characteristic. A far higher spirit of enterprise has led to the foundation of many religious establishments of the Armenians in different parts of Europe, which have rendered invaluable services, not only to their own native language and literature, but to Oriental studies generally. Among these the fathers of the celebrated Mechitarist order have earned for themselves, by their manifold contributions to sacred literature, the title of the Benedictines of the East. The publications of this learned order (especially at their principal press in the convent of San Lazzaro, Venice,) are too well known to require any particular notice. Most of their publications regard historical or theological subjects; but many also are on the subject of language,[49] as grammars, dictionaries, and philological treatises. A little series of versions, the Prayers of St. Nerses in twenty-four languages, printed at their press, is one of the most beautiful specimens of polyglot typography with which I am acquainted. Among the scholars of the order the names of Somal, Rhedeston, Ingigean, Avedichian, Minaos, and, above all, of the two Auchers, are the most prominent. One of the latter is best known to English readers as the friend of Byron, his instructor in Armenian, and his partner in the compilation of an Anglo-Armenian grammar. The fathers of this order generally, however, both in Vienna and in Italy, have long enjoyed the reputation of being excellent linguists. Visitors of the Armenian convent of St. Lazzaro at Venice cannot fail to be struck by this accomplishment among its inmates. Besides the ordinary Oriental languages, most of them speak Italian, French, and often German. I have heard from M. Antoine d’Abbadie that, in 1837, Dr. Pascal Aucher spoke no less than twelve languages.

§ II. LINGUISTS OF ITALY.

The most prominent among the nations of the West at the period immediately succeeding the Revival of Letters, is of course Italy.

The first in order, dating from this period, among the linguists of Italy, is also in many respects the most remarkable of them all;—at least as illustrating the possibility of uniting in a single individual the most diversified intellectual attainments, each in the highest degree of perfection;—the celebrated Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, son of the Duke John Francis of that name.[50] He was born in 1463, and from his childhood was regarded as one of the wonders of his age. Before he had completed his tenth year, he delivered lectures in civil and canon law, not less remarkable for eloquence than for learning. While yet a boy he was familiar with all the principal Greek and Latin classics. He next applied himself to Hebrew; and, while he was engaged in that study, a large collection of cabalistic manuscripts, which were represented to him as genuine works of Esdras, turned his attention to the other Eastern languages, and especially the Chaldee, the Rabbinical dialect of Hebrew, and the Arabic. Unfortunately, the strange and fantastic learning with which he was thus thrown into contact gave a tinge to his mind, which appears to have affected all his later studies. His progress in languages, however, cannot but be regarded as prodigious, when we consider the poverty of the linguistic resources of his age. At the age of eighteen he had the reputation of knowing no fewer than twenty-two languages, a considerable number of which he spoke with fluency. And while he thus successfully cultivated the department of languages, he was, at the same time, an extraordinary proficient in all the other knowledge of his day. His memory was so wonderful as to be reckoned among the marvellous examples of that gift which are enumerated by the writers upon this faculty of the human mind. Cancellieri states that he was able, after a single reading, not only to recite the contents of any book which was offered to him, but to repeat the very words of the author, and even in an inverted order.[51] In 1486 he maintained a thesis in Rome, De omni Re Scibili. Much of the learning which it displayed was certainly of a very idle and puerile character; much of it, too, was the merest pedantry; but nevertheless it is undeniable that the nine hundred propositions of which it consisted, comprised every department of knowledge cultivated at that period. And it is impossible to doubt that, if Pico’s career had been prolonged to the usual term of human life, his reputation would have equalled that of the greatest scholars, whether of the ancient or the contemporary world. He was cut off, however, at the early age of thirty-one.

It is not unnatural to suppose that this circumstance, as well as the rank of Pico, and the singular precocity of his talents, may have led to a false or exaggerated estimate of his acquirements. But, even allowing every reasonable deduction on this score, his claim must be freely admitted to the character of one of the greatest wonders of his own or any other age, whether he be considered as a linguist or as a general scholar.

Marvellous, however, as is the reputation of Pico della Mirandola, perhaps the science of language owes more to a less brilliant but more practical scholar of the same period, Teseo Ambrosio, of the family of the Albonesi. He was born at Pavia, in 1469. His admirers have not failed to chronicle such precocious indications of genius as his composing Italian, Latin, and even Greek poetry, before he was fifteen; but he himself confesses that his proficiency in these studies dates from a considerably later time. He entered the order of Canons Regular of St. Augustine, and fixed his residence at Rome, where he devoted himself with great assiduity to Oriental studies, and acquired such a reputation, that when, in the Lateran Council of 1512, the united Ethiopic and Maronite Christians solicited the privilege of using their own peculiar liturgies while they maintained the communion of the Roman church, it was to him the task of examining those liturgies, and of ascertaining how far their teaching was in accordance with the doctrines of the Church, was entrusted by the Holy See. Teseo assures us that, at the time when he received this commission, he knew little more than the elements of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic. He set to work with the assistance of a native Syrian (who, however, was entirely ignorant of Latin); and, carrying on their communication by mutual instruction, he was soon able not only to master the difficulties of these languages, but to set on foot what may be regarded as (at least conjointly with the Complutensian Polyglot) one of the earliest systematic schemes for the promotion of Oriental studies. He had types cast expressly for his projects; and he himself prepared the Chaldee Psalter for the press, and repaired to his native city of Pavia for the purpose of having it printed. He died (1539) before it was completed;[52] but his types were turned to account by other scholars. It was with Teseo’s types that William Postel printed two out of the five Pater Nosters contained in his collection—the Chaldee and the Armenian.[53] And to him we owe a still greater boon—the first regular attempt at a Polyglot Grammar; which, however imperfectly, comprises the elements of Chaldee, Syriac, Armenian, and ten other languages.

The scholarship of Ambrogio was derived almost entirely from books. His countryman, Antonio Pigafetta, enjoyed among his contemporaries a different reputation, that of considerable skill as a speaker of foreign languages, acquired during his extensive and protracted wanderings. Pigafetta was born at Vicenza, towards the end of the fifteenth century. In the expedition undertaken, under the patronage of Charles V., for the conquest of the Moluccas, by the celebrated Fernando Magellan, the first circumnavigator of the globe, one of the literary staff was Pigafetta, who acted as historiographer of the expedition, and to whose narrative we are indebted for all the particulars of it, which have been preserved.

Marzari describes Pigafetta as a prodigy of learning; and, although this has been questioned by later inquirers,[54] there is no reason to doubt his acquirements in modern languages at least, and particularly his skill and success in obtaining information as to the languages of the countries which he visited. It is to him[55] we are indebted for the first vocabularies of the language of the Philippine and Molucca islands, the merit of which is recognized even by recent philologers.[56]

It may be permitted to class with the linguists of Italy, a Corsican scholar of the same period, Augustine, bishop of Nebia. It is difficult to pronounce definitively as to the extent of his attainments; but his skill in the ancient languages, at least, is sufficiently attested by the polyglot Bible which he published, (containing the Hebrew, Greek, Chaldee, and Arabic texts,) of which Sixtus of Sienna speaks in the highest terms; and if we could receive without qualification the statement of the same writer, we should conclude that Augustine’s familiarity with modern languages was even more extensive. Sixtus of Sienna describes him as “deeply versed in the languages of all the nations which are scattered over the face of the earth.”

Towards the close of the sixteenth century the study of languages in Italy assumed that practical character in relation to the actual exigencies of missionary life by which it has ever since been mainly characterized in that country. The Oriental press established at Florence by the Cardinal Ferdinand de Medici, under the superintendence of the great orientalist Giambattista Raimondi;[57] the opening at Rome of the College De Propaganda Fide; the foundation of the College of San Pancrazio, for the Carmelite Oriental Missions in 1662; the opening of similar Oriental schools in the Dominican, the Franciscan, Augustinian, and other orders, for the training of candidates for their respective missions in the East; and above all, the constant intercourse with the Eastern missions which began to be maintained, gave an impulse to Oriental studies, the more powerful and the more permanent, because it was founded on motives of religion; and although we do not meet among the missionary linguists that marvellous variety of languages which excites our wonder, yet we find in them abundant evidences of a solid and practical scholarship, whose fruits, if less attractive, are more useful and more enduring. Nearly all the linguists of Italy from the close of the sixteenth century, appear to have been either actually missionaries, or connected with the colleges of the foreign mission.

Thus, Antonio Giggei, one of the “Oblates of Mary,” taught Persian in a missionary college, at Milan, and, at a later period, taught Arabic in Florence. Giggei’s Thesaurus Linguæ Arabicæ,[58] is still much esteemed. He wrote besides, a Grammar of Chaldee and of Rabbinical Hebrew, which is still preserved in manuscript in the Ambrosian Library at Milan; and his translation of a Rabbinical commentary on the Proverbs of Solomon, published at Milan in 1620, is an evidence of his familiarity, not only with Biblical Hebrew, but with the language of the Talmud in all its successive phases.

In like manner, Clemente Galani, the eminent Armenian scholar, spent no less than twelve years as a missionary in Armenia. On his return to Rome, in 1650, he was such a proficient in the language that he was able, not only to write both in Armenian and Latin his well-known work on the conformity of the creeds of the Armenian and Roman Churches,[59] but also to deliver theological lectures to the Armenian students in Rome in their native tongue.[60]

Tommaso Ubicini was a Franciscan missionary in the Levant.[61] He was born at Novara, and entered young into the order of Friar-minors. He was named guardian of the Franciscan convent in Jerusalem; and, during a residence of many years, made himself master, in addition to Hebrew and Chaldee, of the Syriac, Arabic, and Coptic languages. The latter years of his life were spent in the convent of San Pietro in Montorio at Rome; where, besides publishing several works upon these languages, be taught them to the students of his order. His great work, Thesaurus Arabico-Syro-Latinus was not published till 1636, several years after his death.[62]

Ludovico Maracci, best known to English readers by the copious use to which Gibbon has turned his translation and annotations of the Koran, was one of the missionary “Clerks of the Mother of God.” He was born at Lucca in 1612, and first obtained notice by the share which he had in the Roman edition of the Arabic Bible, published in 1671. He taught Arabic for many years with great distinction in the University of the Sapienza at Rome. But his best celebrity is due to his critical edition of the Koran, and the admirable translation which accompanies it.[63] From this repertory of Arabic learning, Sale has borrowed, almost without acknowledgment, or rather with occasional depreciatory allusions, all that is most valuable in his translation and notes.

One of Maracci’s pupils, John Baptist Podestà, (born at Fazana early in the 17th century), is another exception to the general rule. Having perfected his Oriental studies in Constantinople, he was appointed Oriental Secretary of the Emperor Leopold at Vienna, and attained considerable reputation as Professor of Arabic in that university. He published a Grammar of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish; which, however, was severely, and, indeed, ferociously, criticised by his contemporary and rival, Meninski.

But Podestà’s contemporary, Paolo Piromalli, was trained in the school of the Mission. He was a native of Calabria, and became a member of the Dominican order. Piromalli was for many years attached to the Mission of his order in Armenia, and was eminently successful in reconciling the separated Armenians to the Roman Church, having even the happiness to number among his converts the schismatical patriarch himself. From Armenia, Piromalli passed into the Missions of Georgia and Persia. He afterwards went, in the capacity of Apostolic Nuncio, to Poland, with a commission of much importance to the Emperor from the Pope, Urban VIII. In the course of one of his voyages he was made prisoner by the Algerine corsairs, and carried as a slave to Tunis; but he was soon after redeemed and called to Rome, whence, after he had been entrusted with the revision of an Armenian Bible, he was sent back to the East, as Bishop of Nachkivan in 1655. He remained in this charge for nine years, and was called home as Bishop of Bisignano, where he died in 1667. Piromalli published two dictionaries, Persian and Armenian, and several other works upon these languages.[64]

The Augustinian order in Italy, also, produced a linguist, not inferior in solidity, and certainly superior in range of attainments, to any of those hitherto enumerated—Antonio Agostino Giorgi.[65] He was born at San Mauro, near Rimini, in 1711, and entered the Augustinian order at Bologna; but Benedict XIV., who, during his occupancy of the see of Bologna, had become acquainted with his merit, invited him to Rome after his elevation to the Papacy, and appointed him to a professorship in the Sapienza. Father Giorgi occupied this post with much distinction for twenty-two years, till his death, in 1797. His acquirements as a linguist were more various than those of any of the scholars hitherto named. Besides modern languages, he knew not only Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, and Syriac, but also Coptic and (what was at that period a much more rare accomplishment) Tibetan. On the last named language he compiled an elementary work for the use of missionaries, which, although it is not free from inaccuracies, deserves, nevertheless, the highest praise as a first essay in that till then untried language.

Simon De Magistris, one of the priests of the Oratory, (born at Ferrara in 1728) was for many years at the head of the Congregation of the Oriental Liturgies in Rome. He was not only deeply versed in the written languages of the East, but spoke the greater number of them with the same ease and fluency as his native Italian.[66]

Of the learned Dominican, Finetti, I am unable to offer any particulars. His treatise “On the Hebrew and its cognate Languages” is a sufficient evidence of his ability as an Orientalist; but it contains no indication of anything beyond the learning which is acquired from books.

The same may be said of the Oratorian, Valperga de Galuso. He was born at Turin in 1737, but lived chiefly in the convents of his order at Naples, Malta, and Rome. In addition, however, to his accomplishments as an Orientalist, Padre de Galuso had the reputation of being one of the most skilful mathematicians of his day. He died in 1815.

Our information regarding the two De Rossi’s, Ignazio, author of the Etymologicum Copticum, and Giambernardo, of Parma, is more detailed and more satisfactory.

Ignazio de Rossi was born at Viterbo in 1740, and entered the Jesuit society at a very early age. In the schools of Macerata, Spoleto, and Florence, he was employed in teaching the Humanities and Rhetoric until the suppression of the order in 1773; after which event he repaired to Rome, and received an appointment as professor of Hebrew in the University, which he held for thirty years, rejoining his brethren, however, at the first moment of their restoration under Pius VII.

As a general scholar, Father De Rossi was one of the first men of his day. His memory may be ranked among the most prodigious of which any record has been preserved. On one occasion, during the villeggiatura at Frascati, it was tried by a test in some respects the most wonderful which has ever been applied in such cases. A line being selected at pleasure from any part of any one of the four great Italian classics, Dante, Petrarca, Tasso, and Ariosto, De Rossi immediately repeated the hundred lines which followed next in order after that which had been chosen; and, on his companions expressing their surprise at this extraordinary feat (which he repeated several times), he placed the climax to their amazement by reciting in the reverse order the hundred lines immediately preceding any line taken at random from any one of the above-named poets.[67] His reputation as an Orientalist was founded chiefly upon his familiarity with Hebrew and the cognate languages. But he was also a profound Coptic scholar; and it is a subject of regret to many students of that language that his numerous MSS. connected therewith have been suffered to remain so long unpublished. He died in 1824.

Giovanni Bernardo de Rossi was a linguist of wider range. He was born at Castel Nuovo, in Piedmont, in 1742, and in his youth was destined for the ecclesiastical state. He began his collegiate studies at Turin, and manifested very early that taste for Oriental literature which distinguished his after life. Within six months after he commenced his Hebrew studies, he produced a long Hebrew poem. In addition to the Biblical Hebrew, he was soon master of the Rabbinical language, of Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic. He learned besides, by private study, most of the languages of modern Europe;—his plan being to draw up in each a compendious grammar for his own use. In this way he prepared grammars of the German, English, and Russian languages. In 1769, he obtained an appointment in the Royal Museum at Turin; but, being invited at the same time to undertake the much more congenial office of Professor of Oriental Languages in the new University of Parma, he gladly transferred himself to that city, where he continued to reside, as Professor of Oriental Literature, for more than forty years. During the latter half of this period, De Rossi maintained a frequent correspondence with Mezzofanti, upon the subject of their common studies.[68] From the terms in which such a scholar as Mezzofanti speaks of De Rossi, and the deference with which he appeals to his judgment, we may infer what his acquirements must have been. On occasion of the marriage of the Infante of Parma, Charles Emanuel, he published a polyglot epithalamium,[69]—a Collection of Hymeneal Odes in various languages—which even still is regarded as the most extraordinary of that class of compositions[70] ever produced by a single individual. It does not belong to my present plan to allude to the works of De Rossi, or to offer any estimate of his learning; but without entering into any such particulars, or attempting to specify the languages with which he was acquainted, it may safely be said that no Italian linguist from the days of Pico della Mirandola can be compared with him, either in the solidity or the extent of his linguistic attainments. De Rossi died in 1831.[71]

The fame of the linguists of Italy during the nineteenth century has been so completely eclipsed by that of Mezzofanti, that I shall not venture upon any enumeration of them, though the list would embrace such names as Rossellini, Luzatto, Molza, Laureani, &c. There are few of whom it can be said with so much truth as of Mezzofanti:—

Prœgravat artes

Infra se positas.

§ III. SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE LINGUISTS.

The catalogue of Spanish linguists opens with a name hardly less marvellous than that which I have placed at the head of the linguists of modern Italy—that of Fernando di Cordova;—one of those universal geniuses, whom Nature, in the prodigal exercise of her creative powers, occasionally produces, as if to display their extent and versatility. He was born early in the fifteenth century, and was hardly less precocious than his Italian rival, Pico della Mirandola. At ten years of age he had completed his courses of grammar and rhetoric. He could recite three or four pages of the Orations of Cicero after a single reading. Before he attained his twenty-fifth year, he was installed Doctor in all the faculties; and he is said by Feyjoo to have been thorough master (supo con toda la perfeccion) of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldee, and Arabic. Feyjoo adds, that he knew, besides, all the principal European languages.[72] He could repeat the entire Bible from memory. He was profoundly versed in theology, in civil and canon law, in mathematics, and in medicine. He had at his perfect command all the works of St. Thomas, of Scotus, of Alexander of Hales, of Galen, Avicenna, and the other lights of the age in every department of science.[73] Like the Admirable Crichton, too, he was one of the most accomplished gentlemen and most distinguished cavaliers of his time. He could play on every known variety of instrument; he sang exquisitely; he was a most graceful dancer; an expert swordsman; and a bold and skilful rider; and he was master of one particular art of fence by which he was able to defeat all his adversaries, by springing upon them at a single bound of twenty-three or twenty-four feet! In a word, to adopt the enthusiastic panegyric of the old chronicler on whose simple narrative these statements rest, “if you could live a hundred years without eating or drinking, and were to give the whole time to study, you could not learn all that this young man knew.”[74] The occasion to which this writer, quoting Monstrelet’s Chronicle,[75] refers was the Royal Fête at Paris in 1445; so that Fernando must have been born about 1425. Of his later history but little is known. He was sent as ambassador to Rome in 1469, and died in 1480.

A Portuguese of the same period, Pedro de Covilham, is mentioned by Damian a Goes in his curious book, De Ethiopum Moribus in terms which, if we could take them literally, should entitle him to a place among the linguists. During the reign of John II. of Portugal (1481-95) Covilham, who had already distinguished himself as an explorer under Alfonzo V., was sent, in company with Alfonzo de Payva, in search of the kingdom of Prester John, which the traditional notions of the time placed in Abyssinia. Payva died upon the expedition. Covilham, after visiting India, the Persian Gulf, and exploring both the coasts of the Red Sea, at length reached Abyssinia, where he was received with much distinction by the King. He married in the country, and obtained large possessions; but, in accordance with a law of Abyssinia[76] similar to that which still exists in Japan, prohibiting any one who may have once settled in the country ever again to leave it, he was compelled to adopt Abyssinia as a second home. When, therefore, he was recalled by John II., the King of Abyssinia refused to relinquish him, pleading “that he was skilled in almost all the languages of men,”[77] and that he had made to him, as his own adopted subject, large grants of land and other possessions. Covilham, after a residence of thirty-three years, was still alive in 1525, when the embassy under Alvarez de Lima reached Abyssinia.

Very early in the sixteenth century, I find a notice of a Spanish convert from Judaism, called in Latin “Libertas Cominetus” (Libertas being, in all probability, but the translation of his Hebrew patronymic,) whose acquirements are more precisely defined. He was born at Cominedo, towards the close of the fifteenth century, and renounced his creed about 1525. His fellow-convert Galatinus, an Italian Jew, and himself no mean linguist, describes Libertas in his work “De Arcanis Catholicæ Veritatis,” as not only deeply versed in Holy Writ, but master of fourteen languages.[78] The Biographical Dictionaries and other books of reference are quite silent regarding him.

The name of Benedict Arias Montanus, editor of the so-called “King of Spain’s Polyglot Bible,” is better known to Biblical students. He was born at Frexenal[79] in Estremadura in 1527 and studied in the university of Alcala, then in the first freshness of the reputation which it owed to the magnificence of the great Cardinal Ximenes. Montanus entered the order of St. James, and after accompanying the Bishop of Segovia to the Council of Trent, where he appeared with great distinction, returned to the Hermitage of Nuestra Señora de los Angelos near Aracena, with the intention of devoting himself entirely to study and prayer. From this retreat, however, he was drawn by Philip II., who employed him to edit a new Polyglot Bible on a more comprehensive plan than the Complutensian Polyglot. On the completion of this task, Philip sought to reward the learned editor by naming him to a bishopric; but Montanus had humility and self-denial enough to decline the honour, and died an humble chaplain, in 1598. The estimate formed by his contemporaries of Montanus’s attainments in languages falls little short of the marvellous. Le Mire describes him as omnium fere gentium linguis et literis raro exemplo excultus; but we may more safely take his own modest statement in the preface of his Polyglot, that he knew ten languages.[80]

The celebrated Father Martin Del Rio, best known perhaps to English readers, since Sir Walter Scott’s pleasant sketch, by his vast work on Demonology, was also a very distinguished linguist. Del Rio, although of Spanish parentage, was born at Antwerp in May 1551. His first university studies were made at Paris; but he received the Doctor’s degree at Salamanca, and has merited a place in Baillet’s Enfans Celebres, by publishing an edition of Solinus, with a learned commentary, before he was twenty years old.[81] Del Rio’s talents and reputation opened for him a splendid career; but he abandoned all his offices and all his prospects of preferment, in order to enter the Society of the Jesuits at Valladolid in 1580. According to Feyjoo,[82] Del Rio knew ten languages; and Baillet would appear to imply even more, when he says that he was master of at least that number. Del Rio died at Louvain in 1608.

One of Del Rio’s most distinguished contemporaries, the celebrated dramatic poet, Lope de Vega, although his celebrity rests upon a very different foundation, was also a very respectable linguist, so far, at least, as regards the modern languages. The extraordinary fecundity of this author, especially when we consider his extremely chequered and busy career as a secretary, a soldier, and eventually a priest, would seem to preclude the possibility of his having applied himself to any other pursuit than that of dramatic literature. The mere physical labour of committing to paper (putting composition out of view altogether) his fifteen hundred versified plays,[83] three hundred interludes and sacred dramas[84], ten epic poems, and eight prose novels, besides an infinity of essays, prefaces, dedications, and other miscellaneous pieces, would appear more than enough to occupy the very busiest human life. Yet notwithstanding all this prodigious labour, Lope de Vega contrived to find time for the acquisition of Greek, Latin, Italian, Portuguese, French, and probably English! Well might Cervantes call him “a Prodigy of Nature!”

Although the missionaries of Spain and Portugal are, as a body, less distinguished in the department of languages than those of Italy, yet there are some among them not inferior to the most eminent of their Italian brethren. The great Coptic and Abyssinian scholar, Antonio Fernandez, was a Portuguese Jesuit. He was born at Lisbon in 1566, and entered the Jesuit society as a member of the Portuguese province of the order. After a long preparatory training, he was sent, in 1602, to Goa, the great centre of the missionary activity of Portugal. His ultimate destination, however, was Abyssinia, which country he reached in 1604, in the disguise of an Armenian. He resided in Abyssinia for nearly thirty years, and was charged with a mission to the Pope Paul III. and Philip IV. of Spain, from the king, who, under the influence of the missionaries, had embraced the Catholic religion. Fernandez set out with some native companions in 1615; but they were all made prisoners at Alaba, and narrowly escaped being put to death; nor was he released in the end, except on condition of relinquishing this intended mission, and returning to Abyssinia. On the death of the king, who had so long protected them, the whole body of Catholic missionaries were expelled from Abyssinia by the new monarch in 1632; and Fernandez returned, after a most chequered and eventful career, to Goa, where he died, ten years later, in 1642. Of his acquirements in the Western languages, I am unable to discover any particulars, but he was thoroughly versed in Armenian, Coptic, and Amharic or Abyssinian, in both of which last named languages he has left several ritual and ascetic works for the use of the missionaries and native children.

The Spanish and Portuguese missionaries in America, too, (especially those of the Jesuit order) rendered good service to the study of the numerous native languages of both continents.[85] Most of the modern learning on the subject is derived from their treatises, chiefly manuscript, preserved by the Society.

Nor were the other orders less efficient. Padre Josef Carabantes, a Capuchin of the province of Aragon, (born in 1648) wrote a most valuable practical treatise for the use of missionaries, which was long a text book in their hands.

One of the Portuguese missionaries in Abyssinia, Father Pedro Paez, who succeeded Fernandez, and whose memory still lingers among the native traditions of the people,[86] not only became thorough master of the popular dialects of the various races of the Valley of the Nile, but attained a proficiency in Gheez, the learned language of Abyssinia, not equalled even by the natives themselves.[87] A Franciscan missionary at Constantinople about the same time, mentioned by Cyril Lucaris, is described by him as “acquainted with many languages;”[88] but I have not been able to discover his name.

By far the most eminent linguist of the Peninsula, however, is the learned Jesuit, Father Lorenzo Hervas-y-Pandura. He was born in 1735, of a noble family, at Horcajo, in la Mancha. Having entered the Jesuit society, he taught philosophy for some years in Madrid, and afterwards in a convent in Murcia; but at length, happily for the interests of science as well as of religion, he embraced a missionary career, and remained attached to the Jesuit mission of America, until 1767. On the suppression of the order, Father Hervas settled at Cesena, and devoted himself to his early philosophical studies, which, however, he ultimately, in a great measure, relinquished in order to apply himself to literature and especially to philology. When the members of the society were permitted to re-establish themselves in Spain, Hervas went to Catalonia; but he was obliged to return to Italy, and settled at Rome, where he was named by Pius VII. keeper of the Vatican Library. In this honourable charge he remained till his death in 1809.

Father Hervas may with truth be pronounced one of the most meritorious scholars of modern times. His works are exceedingly numerous; and, beside his favourite pursuit, philology, embrace almost every other conceivable subject, theology, mathematics, history, general and local, palæography; not to speak of an extensive collection of works connected with the order, which he edited, and a translation of Bercastel’s History of the Church, (with a continuation), executed, if not by himself, at least under his superintendence. Besides all the stupendous labour implied in these diversified undertakings, Father Hervas has the still further merit of having devoted himself to the subject of the instruction of the deaf-mute, for whose use he devised a little series of publications, and published a very valuable essay on the principles to be followed in their instruction.[89]

Our only present concern, however, is with his philological and linguistic publications, especially in so far as they evince a knowledge of languages. They form part of a great work in twenty-one 4to. volumes, entitled Idea dell’ Universo; and were printed at intervals, at Cesena, in Italian, from which language they were translated into Spanish by his friends and associates, and republished in Spain. It will only be necessary to particularize one or two of them—the Saggio Prattico delle Lingue, which consists of a collection of the Lord’s Prayer in three hundred and seven languages, together with other specimens of twenty-two additional languages, in which the author was unable to obtain a version of the Lord’s Prayer, all illustrated by grammatical analyses and annotations; and the Catalogo delle Lingue conosciute, e Notizia delle loro Affinità e Diversità.[90] In the compilation of these, and his other collections, it is true, Hervas had the advantage, not alone of his own extensive travel, and of his own laborious research, but also of the aid of his brethren; and this in an Order which numbered among its members, men to whose adventurous spirit every corner of the world had been familiar:—

“In Greenland’s icy mountains,

On India’s coral strand,

Where Afric’s sunny fountains

Roll down their golden sand.”

But he, himself, compiled grammars of no less than eighteen of the languages of America; which, with the liberality of true science, he freely communicated to William von Humboldt for publication in the Mithridates of Adelung. He was a most refined classical scholar and a profound Orientalist. He was perfectly familiar, besides, with almost all the European languages; and, wide as is the range of tongues which his published works embrace, his critical and grammatical notes and observations, even upon the most obscure and least known of the languages which they contain, although in many cases they have of course all the imperfections of a first essay, exhibit, even in their occasional errors, a vigorous and original mind.

The name of Father Hervas-y-Pandura is a fitting close to the distinguished line of linguistic “Glorias de España.”

§ IV. FRENCH LINGUISTS.

The University of Paris did not enter into the study of languages so early, or with so much zeal as the rival schools of Spain and Italy.

The first[91] great name in this department which we meet in the history of French letters, is that of the celebrated Rabbinical scholar, William Postel. This extraordinary man was born at Dolerie in 1510. Having lost both his parents at a very early age, he was left entirely dependent upon his own exertions for support; and, with that indomitable energy which often accompanies the love of knowledge, he began, from his very boyhood, a systematic course of self-denial, by which he hoped to realize the means of prosecuting the studies for which he had conceived an early predilection. Having scraped together, in the laborious and irksome occupation of a school-master, what he regarded as a sufficient sum for his modest wants, he repaired to Paris; but he had scarcely reached that city, when he was robbed by some designing sharpers, of the fruits of all his years of self-denial; and a long illness into which he was thrown by the chagrin and privation which ensued, reduced him to the last extremity. Even still, however, his spirit was unbroken. He went to Beauce, where, by working as a daily labourer, he earned the means of returning to Paris as a poor scholar. Presenting himself at the College of Saint Barbara, he obtained a place as a servant, with permission to attend the lectures; and having in some way got possession of a Hebrew grammar, he contrived, in his stolen half hours of leisure, to master the language so thoroughly, that in a short time his preceptors found themselves outstripped by their singular dependent.

His reputation as an Oriental scholar spread rapidly. When La Fôret’s memorable embassy to the Sultan was being organized by Francis I., the king was recommended to entrust to Postel a literary mission, somewhat similar to that undertaken during the reign of Louis Philippe, at the instance of M. de Villemain, one of the objects of which was to collect Greek and Oriental MSS. It was on his return from this expedition, (in which he visited Constantinople, Greece, Asia Minor, and part of Syria,) that Postel met Teseo Ambrosio at Venice, and published what may be said to have been the first systematic attempt as yet made to bring together materials for the philosophical investigation of the science of language—being a collection of the alphabets of twelve languages, with a slight account of each among the number.[92] He was soon after appointed Professor of Mathematics, and also of Oriental Languages, in the College de France; but the wild and visionary character of his mind appears to have been quite unsuited to any settled pursuit. He had conceived the idea that he was divinely called to the mission of uniting all Christians into one community, the head of which he recognized in Francis I. of France, whom he maintained to be the lineal descendant of Sem, the eldest of the sons of Noah. Under the notion that this was his pre-ordained vocation, he refused to accompany La Fôret on a second mission to the East, although he was pressed to do so by the king himself, and a sum of four thousand crowns was placed at his disposal for the purchase of manuscripts. He offered himself, in preference, to the newly founded society of the Jesuits; but his unsuitableness for that state soon became so apparent, that St. Ignatius of Loyola, then superior of the society, refused to receive him. After many wanderings in France, Italy, and Germany, and an imprisonment in Venice, (where his fanaticism reached its greatest height,) he undertook a second expedition to the East, in 1549, whence he returned in 1551, with a large number of valuable MSS. obtained through the French ambassador, D’Aramont, but wilder and more visionary than ever. He resumed his lectures in the College des Lombards, now the property of the Irish College in Paris. The crowds who flocked to hear him were so great, that they were obliged to assemble in the court, where he addressed them from one of the windows. His subsequent career was a strange alternation of successes and embroilments. The Emperor Ferdinand invited him to Vienna, as Professor of Mathematics. While there, he assisted Widmandstadt in the preparation of his Syriac New Testament. He left Vienna, however, after a short residence, and betook himself to Italy, in 1554 or 1555. He was put into prison in Rome, but liberated in 1557. In 1562 he returned to Paris. The extravagancies of his conduct and his teaching led to his being placed under a kind of honourable surveillance, in 1564, in the monastery of St. Martin des Champs, near Paris. Yet so interesting was his conversation that crowds of the most distinguished of all orders continued to visit him in this retreat till his death in 1581. Postel’s attainments in languages living or dead, were undoubtedly most extensive. Not reckoning the modern languages, which he may be presumed to have known, his Introduction exhibits a certain familiarity with not less than twelve languages, chiefly eastern; and he is said to have been able to converse in most of the living languages known in his time. Duret states, as a matter notorious to all the learned, that he “knew, understood, and spoke fifteen languages;”[93] and it was his own favourite boast, that he could traverse the entire world without once calling in the aid of an interpreter. In addition to his labours as a linguist, Postel was a most prolific writer. Fifty-seven of his works are enumerated by his biographer.

It is to this learned but eccentric scholar that we owe the idea of the well-known polyglot collections of the Lord’s Prayer. These compilations as carried out by later collectors, have rendered such service to philology, that, although many of their authors were little more than mere compilers, and have but slender claims to be considered as linguists, in the higher sense of the word, it would be unpardonable to pass them over without notice in a Memoir like the present. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, a Hungarian soldier named John Schildberger, while serving in a campaign against the Turks in Hungary, was made prisoner by the enemy; and on his return home, after a captivity of thirty-two years, published (in 1428) an account of his adventures. He appended to his travels, as a specimen of the languages of the countries in which he had sojourned, the Lord’s Prayer in Armenian, and also in the Tartar tongue. This, however, was a mere traveller’s curiosity: but Postel’s publication (Paris, 1558) is more scientific. It contains specimens of the characters of twelve different languages, in five of which—Chaldee, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Armenian, the Pater Noster is printed both in Roman characters and in those of the several languages. This infant essay of Postel was followed, ten years after, by the collection of Theodore Bibliander, (the classicized form of the German name Buchmann,) which contains fourteen different Pater Nosters. Conrad Gesner, in 1555, increased the number to twenty-two, to which Angelo Rocea, an Augustinian Bishop, added three more (one of them Chinese) in 1591. Jerome Megiser, in 1592, extended the catalogue to forty. John Baptist Gramaye, a professor in Louvain, made a still more considerable stride in advance. He was taken prisoner by the Algerine corsairs, in the beginning of the next century, and after his return to Europe, collected no fewer than a hundred different versions of the Pater Noster, which he published in 1622. But his work seems to have attracted little notice; for more than forty years later, (1668) a collection made by Bishop Wilkins, the learned linguist, to whom I shall hereafter return, contains no more than fifty.

In all these, however, the only object appears to have been to collect as large a number of languages as possible, without any attention to critical arrangement. But, in the latter part of the same century, the collection of Andrew Müller (which comprises eighty-three Pater Nosters) exhibits a considerable advance in this particular. Men began, too, to arrange and classify the various families. Francis Junius (Van der Yonghe) published the Lord’s Prayer in nineteen different languages of the German family; and Nicholas Witsen devoted himself to the languages of Northern Asia—the great Siberian family,—in eleven of which he published the Lord’s Prayer in 1692. This improvement in scientific arrangement, however, was not universal; for although the great collection of John Chamberlayne and David Wilkins, printed at Amsterdam in 1715, contains the Lord’s Prayer in a hundred and fifty-two languages, and that of Christian Frederic Gesner—the well-known Orientalischer und Occidentalischer Sprachmeister (Leipzic 1748)—in two hundred, they are both equally compiled upon the old plan, and have little value except as mere specimens of the various languages which they contain.[94]

It is not so with a collection already described, which was published near the close of the same century, by a learned Spanish Jesuit, Don Lorenzo Hervas y Pandura. It is but one of that vast variety of philological works from the same prolific pen which, as I have stated, appeared, year after year, in Cesena, originally in Italian, though they were all afterwards published in a Spanish translation, in the author’s native country. Father Hervas’s collection, it will be remembered, contains the Lord’s Prayer in no less than three hundred and seven languages, besides hymns and other prayers in twenty-two additional dialects, in which the author was not able to find the Pater Noster.

Almost at the very same time with this important publication of Hervas, a more extensive philological work made its appearance in the extreme north, under the patronage and indeed the direct inspiration, of the Empress Catherine II. of Russia. The plan of this compilation was more comprehensive than that of the collections of the Lord’s Prayer. It consisted of a Vocabulary of two hundred and seventy-three familiar and ordinary words, in part selected by the Empress herself, and drawn up in her own hand. This Vocabulary, which is very judiciously chosen, is translated into two hundred and one languages. The compilation of this vast comparative catalogue of words was entrusted to the celebrated philologer, Pallas, assisted by all the eminent scholars of the northern capital; among whom the most efficient seems to have been Bakmeister, the Librarian of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. The opportunities afforded by the patronage of a sovereign who held at her disposition the services of the functionaries of a vast, and, in the literal sense of the word, a polyglot empire like Russia, were turned to the best account. Languages entirely beyond the reach of private research, were unlocked at her command; and the rude and hitherto almost unnamed dialects of Siberia, of Northern Asia, of the Halieutian islanders, and the nomadic tribes of the Arctic shores, find a place in this monster vocabulary, beside the more polished tongues of Europe and the East. Nevertheless, the Vocabulary of Pallas (probably from the circumstance of its being printed altogether in the Russian character)[95] is but little familiar to our philologers, and is chiefly known from the valuable materials which it supplied to Adelung and his colleagues in the compilation of the well-known Mithridates.

The Mithridates of Adelung closes this long series of philological collections; but although in its general plan, it is only an expansion of the original idea of the first simple traveller who presented to his countrymen, as specimens of the languages of the countries which he had visited, versions in each language of the Prayer which is most familiar to every Christian, yet it is not only far more extensive in its range than any of its predecessors, but also infinitely more philosophical in its method. There can be no doubt that the selection of a prayer so idiomatical, and so constrained in its form as the Lord’s Prayer, was far from judicious. As a specimen of the structure of the various languages, the choice of it was singularly infelicitous; and the utter disregard of the principles of criticism (and in truth of everything beyond the mere multiplication of specimens), which marks all the early collections, is an additional aggravation of its original defect. But it is not so in the Mithridates of Adelung. It retains the Lord’s Prayer, it is true, like the rest, as the specimen (although not the only one) of each language; but it abandons the unscientific arrangement of the older collections, the languages being distributed into groups according to their ethnographical affinities. The versions, too, are much more carefully made; they are accompanied by notes and critical illustrations; and in general, each language or dialect, with the literature bearing upon it, is minutely and elaborately described. In a word, the Mithridates, although, as might be expected, still falling far short of perfection, is a strictly philosophical contribution to the study of ethnography; and has formed the basis, as well as the text, of the researches of all the masters in the modern schools of comparative philology.[96]

To return, however, to the personal history of linguists, from which we have been called aside by the mention of the work of Postel.

A celebrity as a linguist equally distinguished, and even more unamiable, than Postel’s, is that of his countryman and contemporary, the younger of the two Scaligers.

Joseph Justus Scaliger was born at Agen in 1544, and made his school studies at Bordeaux, where he was only remarkable for his exceeding dulness, having spent three years in a fruitless, though painfully laborious, attempt to master the first rudiments of the Latin language. These clouds of the morning, however, were but the prelude of a brilliant day. His after successes were proportionately rapid and complete. The stories which are told of him seem almost legendary. He is said to have read the entire Iliad and Odyssey in twenty-one days, and to have run through the Greek dramatists and lyric poets in four months. He was but seventeen years old when he produced his Œdipus. At the same age he was able to speak Hebrew with all the fluency of a Rabbi. His application to study was unremitting, and his powers of endurance are described as beyond all example. He himself tells, that even in the darkness of the night, when he awoke from his brief slumbers, he was able to read without lighting his lamp![97] So powerful, according to his own account, was his eye-sight, that like the knight of Deloraine:—

“Alike to him was tide and time,

Moonless midnight, and matin prime!”

After a brilliant career at Paris, he was invited to occupy the chair of Belles Lettres at Leyden, where the best part of his life was spent. Like most eminent linguists, Scaliger possessed the faculty of memory in an extraordinary degree. He could repeat eighty couplets of poetry after a single reading: he knew by heart every line of his own compositions, and it was said of him that he never forgot anything which he had learnt once. But with all his gifts and all his accomplishments, he contrived to render himself an object of general dislike, or at least of general dis-esteem. His vanity was insufferable; and it was of that peculiarly offensive kind which is only gratified at the expense of the depreciation of others. His life was a series of literary quarrels; and in the whole annals of literary polemics, there are none with which, for acrimony, virulence, and ferocity of vituperation, these quarrels may not compete. And hence, although there is hardly a subject, literary, antiquarian, philological, or critical, on which he has not written, and (for his age) written well, there are few, nevertheless, who have exercised less influence upon contemporary opinion. Scaliger spoke thirteen languages, in the study of which Baillet[98] says he never used either a dictionary or a grammar. He himself declares the same. The languages ascribed to him are strangely jumbled together in the following lines of Du Bartas:—

—————“Scaliger, merveille de notre age,

Soleil des savants, qui parle elegamment

Hebreu, Greçois, Romain, Espagnol, Allemand,

François, Italien, Nubien, Arabique,

Syriaque, Persian, Anglois, Chaldaique.”[99]

In his case it is difficult, as in most others, to ascertain the degree of his familiarity with each of these. To Du Bartas’s poetical epithet, elegamment, of course, no importance is to be attached; and it would perhaps be equally unsafe to rely on the depreciatory representations of his literary antagonists. One thing, at least, is certain, that he himself made the most of his accomplishment. He was not the man to hide his light from any overweening delicacy. He was one of the greatest boasters of his own or any other time. In one place he boasts that there is no language in which he could write with such elegance as Arabic.[100] In another he professes to write Syriac as well as the Syrians themselves.[101] And it is curiously significant of the reputation which he commonly enjoyed, that the wits of his own day used to say that there was one particular department of each language in which there could be no doubt of his powers—its Billingsgate vocabulary! There was not one, they confessed, of the thirteen languages to which he laid claim, in which he was not fully qualified to scold![102]

The eminent botanist, Charles Le Cluse, (Clusius), a contemporary of Scaliger, can hardly be called a great linguist, as his studies were chiefly confined to the modern European languages, with several of which he was thoroughly conversant; but he is remarkable as having contributed, by a familiarity with modern languages very rare among the naturalists of his day, to settle the comparative popular nomenclature of his science. He is even still a high authority on this curious branch of botanical study.

The reader who remembers the extraordinary reputation enjoyed among his contemporaries by the learned Nicholas Peiresc, may be disappointed at finding him overlooked in this enumeration: but, as of his extraordinary erudition he has left no permanent fruit in literature, so of his acquirements as a linguist no authentic record has been preserved. The same is true of his friend, Galaup de Chasteuil, a less showy, perhaps, but better read orientalist. Through devotion to these studies, quite as much as under the influence of religious feeling, Chasteuil made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and, in 1631, permanently fixed his abode in Palestine; and so thoroughly conversant did he become, not only with the language and literature, but also with the manners, usages and feelings of the Maronites of the Lebanon, that, on the death of their patriarch, despite the national predilections by which all Easterns are characterized, they desired to elect him, a Western as he was, head of their national church.[103] Lewis de Dieu, the two Morins—Stephen, the Calvinist minister, and John, the learned Oratorian convert—the two Cappels, Lewis and James, and even the celebrated D’Herbelot, author of the Bibliothèque Orientale, all belong rather to the class of oriental scholars than of linguists in the popular acceptation of the word. The two Cappels, as well as their adversaries, the Buxtorfs, are best known in connexion with the controversy about the Masoretic Points.

One of the writers named in a previous page, Claude Duret, although Adelung[104] could not discover any particulars regarding him, beyond those which are detailed in the title of his book, (where he is merely described as “Bourbonnais, President a Moulins,”) nevertheless deserves very special mention on account of the extensive and curious learning, not alone in languages, but also in general literature, history and science, which characterize his rare work, Thresor de l’Histoire des Langues de cet Univers.[105] This work is undoubtedly far from being exempt from grave inaccuracies; but it is nevertheless, for its age, a marvel, as well of curious learning and extensive research, as of acquaintance with a great many (according to one account, seventeen,) languages, both of the East and of the West.[106] How much of this, however, is mere book-scholarship, and how much is real familiarity, it is impossible, in the absence of all details of the writer’s personal history, to decide.

Although far from being so universal a linguist as Duret, the great biblical scholar, Samuel Bochart (born at Rouen in 1599) was much superior to him in his knowledge of Hebrew and the cognate languages, Chaldee, Syriac, Arabic, and even Coptic. His Hierozoicon and Geographia Sacra, as monuments of philological as well as antiquarian knowledge, have maintained a high reputation even to the present time, notwithstanding the advantages enjoyed by modern students of biblical antiquities and history.[107]

Bochart’s pupil and his friend in early life, (although they were bitterly alienated from each other at a later period, and although Bochart’s death is painfully associated with their literary quarrel[108]) the celebrated Peter Daniel Huet, can hardly deserve a place in the catalogue of French linguists; but he was at least a liberal and enlightened patron of the study.

Many of the French missionaries of the seventeenth century would deserve a place in this series, and among them especially Francis Picquet, who, after serving for several years as French consul at Aleppo, embraced a missionary life, and at last was consecrated Archbishop of Bagdad in 1674. Le Jay, the projector and editor of the well-known polyglot Bible which appeared in France a few years before the rival publication of Brian Walton, though he is often spoken of as the mere patron of the undertaking, was in reality a very profound and accomplished Orientalist. The same may be said of Rapheleng, the son-in-law of Plantin, and often described as his mere assistant in the publication of the King of Spain’s Polyglot Bible. Matthew Veysiere de la Croze, too, the apostate Benedictine, although a superficial scholar and a hasty and inaccurate historian, was a very able linguist.

But, as we descend lower in the history of this generation of French linguists, we find comparatively few names which, for variety of attainments, can be compared with those of Italy or Germany. Beyond the cultivation of the Biblical languages, little was done in France for this department of study during the rest of the seventeenth century. There seems but too much reason to believe that the reputation of the learned but pedantic Menage as a linguist, is extravagantly exaggerated. He was an accomplished classicist, and his acquaintance with modern languages was tolerably extensive. He was a good etymologist, too, according to the servile and unscientific system of the age. But his claims to Oriental scholarship appear very questionable. And in truth during this entire period, if it were not for the interest of the controversy above referred to, on the antiquity and authority of the Masoretic Points, it might almost be said that Oriental studies had fallen entirely into disuse in France. Even of those who took a part in that discussion, the name of Masclef (who knew Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Arabic, with perhaps some of the modern languages) is the only one which can approach the rank of the higher masters of the study. The three Buxtorfs (father, son, and grandson), Guarin, and even Girandeau, were mere Hebraists; patient and accurate scholars, it is true, but with few of the characteristics of an eminent linguist. La Bletterie can hardly claim even this qualified reputation.

There is one brilliant exception—the eminent historian and controversialist, Eusebius Renaudot. He was born at Paris in 1646. Having made his classical studies under the Jesuits, and those of Philosophy in the College d’Harcourt, he entered the congregation of the Oratory. But he very soon quitted that society; and, although he continued to wear the ecclesiastical dress, he never took holy orders. His life, however, was a model of piety and of every Christian virtue; and it was his peculiar merit that, while many of his closest friends and most intimate literary allies were members of the Jansenist party, Renaudot was inflexible in his devotion to the judgment of the Holy See. His first linguistic studies lay among the Oriental languages, the rich fruit of which we still possess in his invaluable Collection of Oriental Liturgies, and in the last two volumes of the Perpetuitè de la Foi sur l’Eucharistie, which are also from his prolific pen. But he soon extended his researches into other fields; and he is said to have been master of seventeen languages,[109] the major part of which he spoke with ease and fluency.

But Renaudot stands almost alone.[110] The only names which may claim to be placed in comparison with his, are those of the two Petis, François Petis, and François Petis de la Croix. The latter especially, who succeeded his father as royal Oriental interpreter, under Lewis XIV., and made several expeditions to the East in this capacity, was well versed, not only in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Tartar, but also in Coptic and Armenian. His translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments is the work by which he is best known; but his dissertations and collections on Oriental history are full of valuable learning. The eighteenth century in France was a period of greater activity. Etienne Fourmont, although born in 1683, belongs properly to the eighteenth century. He is often cited as an example of extraordinary powers of memory, having, when a mere boy, learnt by rote the whole list of Greek Roots in the Port Royal Treatise, so as to repeat them in every conceivable order. He soon after published in French verse all the roots of the Latin language. But it is as an Orientalist that he is chiefly remarkable. He was appointed to the chair of Arabic in the College Royal, and also to the office of Oriental interpreter in the Bibliothèque du Roi; and soon established such a reputation as an Orientalist, that he was consulted on philological questions by the learned of every country in Europe. He was thoroughly master of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, and was one of the first French scholars who, without having visited China,[111] attained to any notable proficiency in Chinese.

His nephew, Michael Angelo Deshauterayes, born at Conflans Ste. Honorine, near Pontoise, 1724, was even more precocious. At the age of ten, he commenced his studies under Fourmont’s superintendence. He thus became familiar at an early age with Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Chinese; so that in his twenty-second year he was appointed to succeed his uncle as Oriental Interpreter to the Royal Library, to which post, a few years later, was added the Arabic professorship in the College de France. In these employments he devoted himself to Oriental studies for above thirty years.

Another pupil of Fourmont, Joseph de Guignes, born at Pontoise in 1721, attained equal eminence as an Orientalist. At Fourmont’s death, he was associated with the last named linguist on the staff of the Royal Library. But De Guignes’ merit in the department of Oriental history and antiquities, has almost overshadowed his reputation as a mere linguist, although he was a proficient in all the principal Eastern languages, and in many of those of Europe. His History of the Huns, Turks, Moguls, and other Tartar nations, notwithstanding that many of its views are now discarded, is still regarded as a repertory of Oriental learning; and, while both in this and also in some others of his works, De Guignes is often visionary and even paradoxical,[112] he is acknowledged to have done more for Chinese literature in France, than any linguist before Abel Remusat; nor is there one of the scholars of the eighteenth century, who in the spirit, if not in the letter, of the views which he put forward, comes so near to the more enlarged and more judicious theories of the scholars of our own day, on the general questions of philology.

From the days of De Guignes the higher departments of linguistic science fell for a time into disrepute in France; but a powerful impulse was given to the practical cultivation of Oriental languages by the diplomatic relations of that kingdom with Constantinople and the Levant. The official appointments connected with that service served to supply at once a stimulus to the study and an opportunity for its practice. Cardonne, Ruffin,[113] Legrand, Kieffer, Venture de Paradis, and Langlés, were all either trained in that school, or devoted themselves to the study as a preparation for it.

Of these, perhaps John Michael Venture De Paradis is the most remarkable. His father had been French Consul in the Crimea, and in various cities of the Levant, and appears to have educated the boy with a special view to the Oriental diplomatic service. From the College de Louis le Grand, he was transferred, at the age of fifteen, to Constantinople, and, before he had completed his twenty-second year, he was appointed interpreter of the French embassy in Syria. Thence he passed into Egypt in the same capacity, and, in 1777, accompanied Baron de Tott in his tour of inspection of the French establishments in the Levant. He was sent afterwards to Tunis, to Constantinople, and to Algiers; and eventually was attached to the ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris, with the Professorship of Oriental Languages. His last service was in the memorable Egyptian expedition under Bonaparte, in which he fell a victim to fatigue, and the evil effects of the climate, in 1799.[114]

Lewis Matthew Langlés[115] was a Picard, born at Peronne, in 1763. From his boyhood he too was destined for the diplomatic service; and studied first at Montdidier, and afterwards in Paris, where he obtained an employment which afforded him considerable leisure for the pursuit of his favourite studies. He learned Arabic under Caussin de Perceval, and Persian under Ruffin. Soon afterwards, however, he engaged in the study of Mantchu, and in some time became such a proficient in that language, that he was entrusted with the task of editing the Mantchu Dictionary of Pere Amiot. From that time his reputation was established, at least with the general public. His subsequent publications in every department of languages are numerous beyond all precedent. He had the reputation of knowing, besides the learned languages, Chinese, Tartar, Japanese, Sanscrit, Malay, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. But it must be added that the solidity of these attainments has been gravely impeached, and that by many he is regarded more as a charlatan than as a scholar.

No such cloud hangs over the fame of, after De Guignes, the true reviver of Chinese literature, Abel Remusat.[116] He was born at Paris in 1788, and brought up to the medical profession; and it may almost be said that the only time devoted by him to his early linguistic studies was stolen from the laborious preparation for the less congenial career to which he was destined by his father. By a very unusual preference, he applied himself, almost from the first, to the Chinese and Tartar languages. Too poor to afford the expensive luxury of a Chinese dictionary, he compiled, with incredible labour, a vocabulary for his own use; and the interest created at once by the success of his studies, and by the unexampled devotedness with which they were pursued, were so great as to procure for him, at the unanimous instance of the Academy of Inscriptions, the favour, at that period rare and difficult, of exemption from the chances of military conscription. From that time forward he applied himself unremittingly to philological pursuits; and, although he was admitted doctor of the faculty of medicine, at Paris in 1813, he never appears to have practised actively in the profession. On the creation of the two new chairs of Chinese and Sanscrit, in the College de France, after the Restoration, Remusat was appointed to the former, in November, 1814; from which period he gave himself up entirely to literature. He was speedily admitted into all the learned societies both of Paris and of other countries; and in 1818 he became one of the editors of the Journal des Savans. On the establishment (in which he had a chief part,) of the Société Asiatique, in 1822, he was named its perpetual secretary; and, on the death of Langlés, in 1824, he succeeded to the charge of keeper of Oriental MSS. in the Bibliothèque du Roi. This office he continued to hold till his early and universally lamented death in 1832. Remusat’s eminence lay more in the depth and accuracy of his scholarship in the one great branch of Oriental languages, which he selected as his own—those of Eastern Asia—and in the profoundly philosophical spirit which he brought to the investigation of the relations of these languages to each other, and to the other great families of the earth, than in the numerical extent of his acquaintance with particular languages. But this, too, was such as to place him in the very first rank of linguists.

A few words must suffice for the French school since Remusat, although it has held a very distinguished place in philological science. The Société Asiatique, founded at Remusat’s instance, and for many years directed by him as secretary, has not only produced many eminent individual philologers, as De Sacy, Quatremere, Champollion, Renan, Fresnel, and De Merian; but, what is far more important, it has successfully carried out a systematic scheme of investigation, by which alone it is possible, in so vast a subject, to arrive at satisfactory results. M. Stanislas Julien’s researches in Chinese; M. Dulaurier’s in the Malay languages; Father Marcoux’s in the American Indian; Eugene Bournouf’s in those of Persia; the brothers Antoine and Arnauld d’Abbadie in the languages of East Africa, and especially in the hitherto almost unknown Abyssinian and Ethiopian families; Eugene Borè in Armenian;[117] M. Fresnel’s explorations among the tribes of the western shores of the Red Sea; and many similar successful investigations of particular departments, are contributing to lay up such a body of facts, as cannot fail to afford sure and reliable data for the scientific solution by the philologers of the coming generation, of those great problems in the science of language, on which their fathers could only speculate as a theory, and at the best could but address themselves in conjecture. Although I have no intention of entering into the subject of living French linguists, yet there is one of the gentlemen whom I have mentioned, M. Fulgence Fresnel, whom I cannot refrain from alluding to before I pass from the subject of French philology. His name is probably familiar to the public at large, in connexion with the explorations of the French at Nineveh; but he is long known to the readers of the Journal Asiatique as a linguist not unworthy of the very highest rank in that branch of scholarship. M. d’Abbadie,[118] himself a most accomplished linguist, informed me that M. Fresnel, although exceedingly modest on the subject of his attainments, has the reputation of knowing twenty languages. The facility with which he has acquired some of these languages almost rivals the fame of Mezzofanti. M. Arago having suggested on one occasion the desirableness of a French translation of Berzelius’s Swedish Treatise “On the Blow-pipe,” Fresnel at once set about learning Swedish, and in three months had completed the desired translation! He reads fluently Hebrew, Greek, Romaic, Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and what little is known of the Hieroglyphical language. He is second only to Lane as an Arabic scholar. Among the less known languages of which M. Fresnel is master, M. d’Abbadie heard him speak a few sentences of one, of which he may be said to have himself been the discoverer, and which is, in some respects, completely anomalous. M. Fresnel describes this curious language in the Journal Asiatique, July, 1838. It is spoken by the savages of Mahrak; and as it is not reducible to any of the three families, the Aramaic, the Canaanitic, or the Arabic, of which, according to Gesenius, the Ethiopic is an elder branch, M. Fresnel believes it to be the very language spoken by the Queen of Saba! Its present seat is in the mountainous district of Hhacik, Mirbât, and Zhafâr. Its most singular characteristic consists in its articulations, which are exceedingly difficult and most peculiar. Besides all the nasal sounds of the French and Portuguese, and that described as the “sputtered sound” of the Amharic, this strange tongue has three articulations, which can only be enunciated with the right side of the mouth; and the act of uttering them produces a contortion which destroys the symmetry of the features! M. Fresnel describes it as “horrible, both to hear and to see spoken.” Endeavouring to represent the force of one of these sounds by the letters hh, he calls the language Ehhkili.[119]

§ V. LINGUISTS OF THE TEUTONIC RACE.[120]

If we abstract from the Sacred Languages, the German scholars were slow in turning themselves to Oriental studies.

John Müller, of Königsberg, commonly known as Regiomontanus, although he had the highest repute for learning of all the German scholars of the fifteenth century, does not appear to have gone beyond the classical languages. Martin Luther, Reuchlin,[121] Ulrich Van Hutten, Hoogenstraet, were Hebraists and no more; and John Widmanstadt, when he wished to study Arabic, was forced to make a voyage to Spain expressly for the purpose.

The first student of German race at all distinguished by scholarship in languages, was Theodore Bibliander,[122] who, besides Greek and Hebrew, was also well versed in Arabic, and probably in many other Oriental tongues.[123] The celebrated naturalist, Conrad Gesner, though perhaps not so solidly versed as Bibliander, in any one language, appears to have possessed a certain acquaintance with a greater number. His Mithridates; de Differentiis Linguarum,[124] resembles in plan as well as in name, the great work of Adelung. The number and variety of the languages which it comprises is extraordinary for the period. It contains the Pater Noster in twenty-two of these; and, although the observations on many of the specimens are exceedingly brief and unsatisfactory, yet they often exhibit much curious learning, and no mean familiarity with the language to which they belong.[125] Gesner’s success as a linguist is the more remarkable, inasmuch as that study by no means formed his principal pursuit. Botany and Natural History might much better be called the real business of his literary life. Accordingly, Beza says of him, that he united in his person the very opposite genius of Varro and Pliny; and, although he died at the comparatively early age of forty-nine, his works on Natural History fill nearly a dozen folio volumes. Both Gesner and Bibliander fell victims, one in 1564, the other in 1565, to the great plague of the sixteenth century.

Jerome Megiser, who, towards the close of the same century compiled the more extensive polyglot collection of Pater Nosters already referred to, need scarcely be noticed. He is described by Adelung,[126] as a man of various, but trivial and superficial learning.

Not so another German scholar of the same age, Jacob Christmann, of Maintz. Christmann was no less distinguished as a philosopher than as a linguist. He held for many years at Heidelberg the seemingly incompatible professorships of Hebrew, Arabic, and Logic, and is described as deeply versed in all the ancient and modern languages, as well as in mathematical and astronomical science.[127]

It would be unjust to overlook the scholars of the Low Countries during the same period. Some of these, as for example, Drusius, and the three Schultens, father, son, and grandson, were chiefly remarkable as Hebraists. But there are many others, both of the Belgian and the Dutch schools, whose scholarship was of a very high order. Among the former, Andrew Maes (Masius,) deserves a very special notice. He was born in 1536, at Linnich in the diocese of Courtrai. In 1553 he was sent to Rome as chargé d’affaires. During his residence there, in addition to Greek, Latin, Spanish, and other European languages, with which he was already familiar, he made himself master, not only of Italian, but also of Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac. He is said[128] to have assisted Arias Montanus in the compilation of his Polyglot Bible; but of this no mention is made by Montanus in the preface. No doubt, however, can be entertained of his great capacity as an Orientalist; and Sebastian Munster used to say of him that he seemed to have been brought up among the Hebrews, and to have lived in the classic days of the Roman Empire. About the same period, or a few years later, David Haecx published his dictionary of the Malay languages, one of the earliest contributions to the study of that curious family. Haecx, though he spent his life in Rome, was a native of Antwerp.

John Baptist Gramaye, already named as a collector of Pater Nosters, acquired some reputation as one of the first contributors to the history of the languages of Africa, although his work is described by Adelung as very inaccurate. Gramaye was a native of Antwerp, and became provost of Arnheim and historiographer of the Low Countries. On a voyage from Italy to Spain, he fell into the hands of Algerine corsairs, who carried him to Algiers. There he was sold as a slave, and was detained a considerable time in Barbary. Having at length obtained his liberty, he published, after his return, a diary of his captivity, a descriptive history of Africa, and a polyglot collection of Pater Nosters, among which are several African languages not previously known in Europe.[129] Very little, however, is known of his own personal acquirements, which are noticeable, perhaps, rather on account of their unusual character, than of their great extent or variety.

Some of the linguists of Holland may claim a higher rank. The well-known Arabic scholar, Erpenius, (Thomas Van Erpen,) was also acquainted with several other Oriental languages, Hebrew, Chaldee, Persian, Turkish, and Ethiopic. His countryman and successor in the chair of Oriental languages at Leyden, James Golius, was hardly less distinguished. Peter Golius, brother of James, who entered the Carmelite Order and spent many years as a missionary in Syria and other parts of the East, became equally celebrated in Rome for his Oriental scholarship. In all these three cases the knowledge of the languages was not a mere knowledge of books, but had been acquired by actual travel and research in the various countries of the East.

John Henry Hottinger, too, a pupil of James Golius at Leyden, and the learned Jesuit, Father Athanasius Kircher, belong also to this period. The latter, who is well known for his varied and extensive attainments in every department of science, was moreover a linguist of no ordinary merit.[130] He was born at Geyzen, near Fulda, in 1602, and entered the Jesuit society in 1618, when only sixteen years old. No detailed account is given by his biographers (with whom languages were of minor interest,) of the exact extent of his attainments in the department of languages; but they were both diversified and respectable, and in some things he was far beyond the men of his own time. His Lingua Egyptiaca Restituta may still be consulted with advantage by the student of Coptic.

Most of these men, however, confined themselves chiefly to one particular department. The first really universal linguist of Germany is the great Ethiopic scholar, Job Ludolf, who was born at Erfurt, in 1624. Early in life he devoted himself to the study of languages; and his extensive travels—first as preceptor to the sons of the Duke of Saxe-Gotha, and afterwards as tutor to the children of the Swedish ambassador in Paris—coupled with his unexampled industry,[131] enabled him, not only to hold a high rank in history and general literature, but also to attain to a success as a linguist which had rarely been equalled before his time. He is said to have been master of twenty-five languages,[132] but as I have never seen any exact enumeration of them, I am inclined to allow for considerable exaggeration.

There is even more reason to suspect of exaggeration the popular accounts which have come down to us of a self-educated linguist of the same period—a Saxon peasant called Nicholas Schmid, more commonly known as Cüntzel of Rothenacker, from the name of the village where he was born, in 1606. This extraordinary man was the son of a peasant. His youth was entirely neglected. He worked as a common labourer on his father’s farm, and, until his sixteenth year, never had learned even the letters of the alphabet. At this age one of the farm-servants taught him to read, greatly to the dissatisfaction of his father, who feared that such studies would withdraw him from his work. Soon afterwards, a relative who was a notary, gave him a few lessons in Latin; and, under the direction of the same relative, he learned the rudiments of Greek, Hebrew, and other languages. During all this time, he continued his daily occupation as a farm-labourer, and had no time for his studies but what he was able to steal from the hours allotted for sleep and for meals; the latter of which he snatched in the most hurried manner, and always with an open book by his side. In this strange way, amid the toils of the field and of the farm-yard, Schmid is said to have acquired a store of knowledge the details of which border upon the marvelous, one of his recorded performances being a translation of the Lord’s Prayer into fifty-one languages![133]

One of the scholars engaged in the compilation of Walton’s Polyglot, Andrew Müller, has left a reputation less marvellous, but more solid. He was born about 1630, at Greiffenhagen in Pomerania. Müller, like Crichton, was a precocious genius. At eighteen he wrote verses freely in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. On the completion of his studies, he became pastor of Königsberg on the Warta; but the duties of that charge soon became distasteful to him, and, after a short trial, he resolved, at the invitation of Castell, to settle in England, and devote himself to literature. He arrived just as Brian Walton was making arrangements for the publication of his celebrated Polyglot Bible, and at once entered earnestly into the scheme. He took up his residence in the house of John Castell in the Strand, where, for ten years, he applied himself unremittingly to study. It is told of him that, in the ardour of study or the indifference of scholastic seclusion, he would not raise his head from his books to look out of the window, on occasion of Charles II.’s triumphal progress at the Restoration! Having received from Bishop Wilkins some information on the subject of Chinese, he conceived a most enthusiastic passion for that language. He obtained some types at Antwerp, and, through the instructions of the celebrated Jesuit, Father Kircher, and other members of the society, he was perhaps the first European scholar who, without actually visiting China, acquired a mastery of its language; as he is certainly one of the first who deserted the track of the old philologers, and attempted the comparative study of languages on principles approaching to those which modern science has made familiar. Soon after the completion of Walton’s Polyglot Müller returned to Germany. He was named successively Pastor of Bernau and Provost of Berlin in 1667, but resigned both livings in 1685, and lived thenceforth in retirement at Stettin. He died in 1694. Although a most laborious man and a voluminous writer, Müller’s views were visionary and unpractical. He professed to have devised a plan of teaching, so complete, that, by adopting it, a perfect knowledge of Chinese could be acquired in half a year, and so simple, that it could be applied to the instruction of persons of the most ordinary capacity. Haller states that he spoke no less than twenty languages.

A Burgomaster-linguist is a more singular literary phenomenon. We are so little accustomed to connect that title with any thing above the plodding details of the commerce with which it is inseparably associated, that the name of Nicholas Witzen, Burgomaster of Amsterdam, deserves to be specially commemorated, as an exception to an unliterary class. It was in the pursuit of his vocation as a merchant that Witzen acquired the chief part of the languages with which he was acquainted. He made repeated expeditions to Russia between the years 1666 and 1677, in several of which he penetrated far into the interior of the country, and had opportunities of associating with many of the motley races of that vast empire; Slavonians, Tartars, Cossacks, Samoiedes, and the various Siberian tribes; as well as with natives of Eastern kingdoms not subject to Russia.[134] Besides inquiries into the geography and natural history of those countries which lie upon the north-eastern frontier of Europe and the contiguous provinces of Asia, Witzen used every effort to glean information regarding their languages. He obtained, in most of these languages, not only versions of the Lord’s Prayer, but also vocabularies comprising a considerable number of words; both of which he supplied to his friend and correspondent, Leibnitz, for publication in his Collectanea Etymologica.[135] How far Witzen himself was acquainted with these languages it is difficult to determine; but he is at least entitled to notice as the first collector of materials for this particular branch of the study.

David Wilkins, Chamberlayne’s fellow-labourer in the compilation of the Collection of Pater Nosters referred to in a former page, may also deserve a passing notice. The place of his birth, which occurred about 1685, is a matter of some uncertainty. Adelung[136] thinks he was a native of Dantzig; by others he is believed to have been a native of Holland. The best part of his life, however, was spent in England; where, at Cambridge, he took the degree of Doctor of Divinity, in 1717. He was afterwards appointed Librarian of Lambeth and Archdeacon of Suffolk. His qualifications as Polyglot editor, at the time when he undertook to assist Chamberlayne, appear to have consisted rather in patient industry and general scholarship, than in any extraordinary familiarity with languages; though he afterwards obtained considerable reputation, especially by an edition of the New Testament in Coptic, in 1716.

With the illustrious name of Leibnitz we commence a new era in the science of languages. This extraordinary man, who united in himself all the most varied, and it might seem incompatible, excellencies of other men—a jurist and a divine, a mathematician and a poet, a historian and a philosopher—added to all his other prodigious attainments a most extensive and profound knowledge of languages. It is not, however, on the actual extent of his acquaintance with particular languages (although this too was most remarkable), that his fame as a scientific linguist rests. He was the first to recognize the true nature and objects of linguistic science, and to direct its studies to an object at once eminently practical and profoundly philosophical. It is not alone that, deserting the trivialities of the old etymologists, he laid down the true principles of the great science of comparative philology, and detected its full importance; Leibnitz may claim the further merit of having himself almost created that science, and given it forth, a new Minerva, in its full and perfect development. There is hardly a principle of modern philology the germ of which may not be discovered in his singularly pregnant and suggestive essays and letters; and, what is far more remarkable, he has often, with the instinctive sagacity of original genius, anticipated sometimes by conjecture, sometimes by positive prediction, analogies and results which the investigations of actual explorers have since realized.[137]

One of the most important practical services rendered by Leibnitz to science, was the organization of academies and other scientific bodies, by which the efforts of individuals might be systematically guided to one common end, and the results of their researches, whether in collecting facts or in developing theories, might, through the collision of many minds, be submitted to the ordeal of careful examination and judicious discussion. It is chiefly to him that science is indebted for the Royal Society of Berlin and the Academy of St. Petersburg. Both of these bodies, although embracing the whole circle of science, have proved most eminent schools of languages; and it is a curious illustration of that profound policy, in pursuance of which we see Russia still availing herself of the service of genius wherever it is to be found, that many of the ablest German linguists of the eighteenth century were, either directly or indirectly, connected with the latter institution.

Gerard Frederic Müller is an early example. He was born, at Herforden in Westphalia, in 1705, and was a pupil of the celebrated Otto Mencken. Mencken, having been invited to become a member of the new academy of St. Petersburg, declined the honour for himself, but recommended his scholar Müller in his stead.[138] Müller accordingly accompanied the scientific expedition which was sent to Siberia under the elder Gmelin, (also a German,) from 1733 to 1741. On his return, he was appointed keeper of the Imperial Archives, and Historiographer of Russia. Müller does not appear to have given much attention to Oriental languages; but he was more generally familiar with modern languages than most of the scholars of that period.[139]

Augustus Lewis Schlötzer, another German literary adventurer in the Russian service, and for a time secretary of Müller, was a more generally accomplished linguist. Unlike Müller, he was a skilful Orientalist; and he was versed, moreover, in several of the Slavonic languages with which Müller had neglected to make himself acquainted, before engaging in the compilation of his great collection of Russian Historians. For this he availed himself of the assistance of his secretary Schlötzer. Gottlieb Bayer of Königsberg, one of the earliest among the scholars of Germany, author of the Museum Sinicum, also occupied for some years a chair at St. Petersburg; but he is better known by his ferocious controversial writings, than by his philological works. A much more distinguished scholar of modern Germany, almost entirely unknown in England, is Christian William Buttner. He was born at Wolfenbüttel in 1716, and was destined by his father (an apothecary) for the medical profession; but, although he gave his attention in the first instance to the sciences preparatory to that profession, the real pursuit of his life became philology, and especially in its relation to the great science of ethnography. It was a saying of Cuvier’s, that Linnæus and Buttner realised by their united studies the title of Grotius’s celebrated work, “De Jure Naturæ et Gentium;”—Linnæus by his pursuit of Natural History assuming the first, and Buttner, by his ethnological studies, appropriating the second—as the respective spheres of their operations. In every country which Buttner visited, he acquired not only the general language, but the most minute peculiarities of its provincial dialects. Few literary lives are recorded in history which present such a picture of self-denial and privation voluntarily endured in the cause of learning, as that of Buttner. His library and museum, accumulated from the hoardings of his paltry income, were exceedingly extensive and most valuable. In order to scrape together the means for their gradual purchase, he contented himself during the greater part of his later life with a single meal per day, the cost of which never exceeded a silber-groschen, or somewhat less than three half-pence![140] It may be inferred, however, from what has been said, that Buttner’s attainments were mainly those of a book-man. In the scanty notices of him which we have gleaned, we do not find that his power of speaking foreign languages was at all what might have been expected from the extent and variety of his book-knowledge. But his services as a scientific philologer were infinitely more important, as well as more permanent, than any such ephemeral faculty. He was the first to observe and to cultivate the true relations of the monosyllabic languages of southern Asia, and to place them at the head of his scheme of the Asiatic and European languages. He was the first to conceive, or at least to carry out, the theory of the geographical distribution of languages; and he may be looked on as the true founder of the science of glossography. He was the first to systematise and to trace the origin and affiliations of the various alphabetical characters; and his researches in the history of the palæography of the Semitic family may be said to have exhausted the subject. Nevertheless, he has himself written very little; but he communicated freely to others the fruits of his researches; and there are few of the philologers of his time who have not confessed their obligations to him. Michaelis, Schlötzer, Gatterer, and almost every other contemporary German scholar of note, have freely acknowledged both the value of his communications and the generous and liberal spirit in which they were imparted.[141]

John David Michaelis[142] (1717-91) is so well known in these countries by his contributions to Biblical literature[143] that little can be necessary beyond the mention of his name. His grammar of the Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Arabic languages, sufficiently attest his abilities as an Orientalist; and, as regards that particular family of languages, his philological views are generally solid and judicious. But I am unable to discover what were his attainments in modern languages; and to the general science of comparative philology he cannot be said to have rendered any important original contribution.

The Catholic Missionaries of Germany, although of course less numerous than their brethren of Italy and the Spanish Peninsula, have contributed their share to the common stock of linguistic science. Many of the Jesuit Missionaries of Central and Southern America;—for example, Fathers Richter, Fritz, Grebmer, and Widmann—whose papers are the foundation of Humboldt’s Essay in the Mithridates, were of German origin. Father Dobritzhofer, whose interesting account of the Abipones has been translated into English[144], under Southey’s advice and superintendence, was a native of Austria; and the learned Sanscrit scholar, Father Paulinus de Sancto Bartholomeo, (although less known under his German name, John Philip Werdin) was an Austrian Carmelite, and served for above fourteen years in the Indian missions of his order.

A German philanthropist of a different class, Count Leopold von Berchtold (1738-1809) the Howard of Germany, deserves to be named, not merely for his devoted services to the cause of humanity throughout the world, but for his remarkable acquirements as a linguist. He spoke fluently eight European languages;[145] and, what is more rare, wrote and published in the greater number of them, tracts upon the great subject to which he dedicated his life. He died, at a very advanced age, of the plague, and has long been honoured as a martyr in the cause of philanthropy; but he has left no notable work behind him.

Very different the career of the great author of the Mithridates, John Christopher Adelung, who lived almost exclusively for learning. He was born in 1734, at Spantekow in Pomerania. In 1759, he was appointed to a professorship at Erfurt; but he exchanged it, after a few years, for a place at Leipsic, where he continued to reside for a long series of years. Although habitually of a gay and cheerful disposition, and a most agreeable member of society, he was one of the most assiduous students upon record, devoting as a rule no less than fourteen hours a day to his literary occupations.[146] His services to his native language are still gratefully acknowledged by every German etymologist, and his Dictionary, (although since much improved by Voss and Campe,) has been declared as great a boon to Germany, as the united labours of the Academy had been able to offer to France. Adelung’s personal reputation as a linguist was exceedingly high, but his fame with posterity must rest on his great work, the Mithridates, which I have already briefly described. The very origination of such a work, or at least the undertaking it upon the scale on which he has carried it out, would have made the reputation of an ordinary man. In the touching preface of the first volume, (the only one which Adelung lived to see published,) he describes it as “the youngest and probably the last child of his muse;” and confesses that “he has nurtured, dressed, and cherished it, with all the tenderness which it is commonly the lot of the youngest child to enjoy.”[147] It is indeed a work of extraordinary labour, and, although from the manner in which its materials were supplied, necessarily incomplete and even inaccurate in its details, a work of extraordinary ability. The first volume alone (containing the languages of Asia, and published in 1806,) is exclusively Adelung’s. Of the second, only a hundred and fifty pages had been printed when the venerable author died in his seventy-third year. These printed sheets, and the papers which he had collected for the subsequent volumes, he bequeathed to Dr. Severinus Vater, professor of theology at Königsberg, under whose editorship, with assistance from several friends, (and especially from the lamented William von Humboldt and Frederic Adelung,) the second volume, which comprises the languages of Europe with all their ramifications, appeared in 1809. The third, on the languages of Africa, and of America, (for which last the work is indebted to Humboldt,) appeared, in parts, between 1812 and 1816; and a supplementary volume, containing additions to the earlier portions of the work, by Humboldt, Frederic Adelung, and Vater himself, was published in 1817. It is impossible to overstate the importance and value of this great linguistic repertory. The arrangement of the work is strictly scientific, according to the views then current. The geographical distribution, the origin and history, and the general structural peculiarities of each, not only of the great families, but of the individual languages, and in many cases even of the local dialects, are carefully, though briefly described. The specimen Pater Noster in each language and dialect, is critically examined, and its vocabulary explained. To each language, too, is prefixed a catalogue of the chief philological or etymological works which treat of its peculiarities; and thus abundant suggestions are supplied for the prosecution of more minute researches into its nature and history. And for the most part, all this is executed with so much simplicity and clearness, with so true a perception of the real points of difficulty in each language, and with so almost instinctive a power of discriminating between those peculiarities in each which require special explanation, and those less abnormal qualities which a philosophical linguist will easily infer from the principles of general grammar, or from a consideration of the common characteristics of the family to which it belongs, that one may learn as much of the real character of a language, in a few hours, from the few suggestive pages the Mithridates, as from the tedious and complicated details of its professional grammarians.

Adelung’s associate in the Mithridates and its continuator, Dr. Severinus Vater, was born at Altenburg, in 1771; he studied at Jena and Halle, in both of which universities he afterwards held appointments as professor; at Jena, as extraordinary Professor of Theology in 1796, and at Halle, as Professor of Oriental Languages in 1800. Thence he was transferred, in 1809, to Königsberg in the capacity of Professor of Theology and Librarian; but he returned, in 1820, to Halle, where he continued to reside till his death, in 1826. Although Vater was by no means a very scientific linguist,[148] the importance of his contributions to the study of languages cannot be too highly estimated. Besides the large share which he had in the preparation of the Mithridates (the last three volumes of which were edited by him,) he also wrote well on the grammar of the Hebrew, Polish, Russian, and German languages. Nevertheless, his reputation is rather that of a scholar than of a linguist.

A few years after the author of the Mithridates appears the celebrated Peter Simon Pallas, to whom we are indebted for the great “Comparative Vocabulary” already described. He was born at Berlin in 1741, and his early studies were mainly directed to natural philosophy, which he seems to have cultivated in all its branches. His reputation as a naturalist procured for him, in 1767, an invitation from Catherine II. of Russia, to exchange a distinguished position which he had obtained at the Hague for a professorship in the Academy of St. Petersburg. His arrival in that capital occurred just at the time of the departure of the celebrated scientific expedition to Siberia for the purpose of observing the transit of Venus; and, as their mission also embraced the geography and natural history of Siberia, Pallas gladly accepted an invitation to accompany them. They set out in June, 1768, and after exploring the vast plains of European Russia, the borders of Calmuck Tartary, and the shores of the Caspian, they crossed the Ural Mountains, examined the celebrated mines of Catherinenberg, proceeded to Tobolsk, the capital of Siberia, and penetrated across the mountains to the Chinese frontier, whence Pallas returned by the route of Astrakan and the Caucasus to St. Petersburg. He reached that city in July, 1774, with broken health, and hair prematurely whitened by sickness and fatigue. He resumed his place in the Academy; and was rewarded by the Empress with many distinctions and lucrative employments, one of which was the charge of instructing the young grand-dukes, Alexander and Constantine. It was during these years that he devoted himself to the compilation of the Vocabularia Comparativa, which comprises two hundred and one languages; but, in 1795, he returned to the Crimea, (where he had obtained an extensive gift of territory from the Empress) for the purpose of recruiting his health and pursuing his researches. After a residence there of fifteen years, he returned to Berlin in 1810, where he died in the following year. It will be seen, therefore, that, prodigious as were his acquirements in that department, the study of languages was but a subordinate pursuit of this extraordinary man. His fame is mainly due to his researches in science. It is to him that we owe the reduction of the astronomical observations of the expedition of 1768; and Cuvier gives him the credit of completely renewing the science of geology, and of almost entirely re-constructing that of natural history. It is difficult, nevertheless,[149] to arrive at an exact conclusion as to the share which he personally took in the compilation of the Vocabulary; and still more so, as to his powers as a speaker of foreign languages; although it is clear that his habits of life as a traveller and scientific explorer, not only facilitated, but even directly necessitated for him, the exercise of that faculty, to a far greater degree than can be supposed in the case of most of the older philologers.

The career of Pallas bears a very remarkable resemblance to that of a more modern scholar, also a native of Berlin, Julius Henry Klaproth. He was the son of the celebrated chemist of that name, and was born in 1783. Although destined by his father to follow his own profession, a chance sight of the collection of Chinese books in the Royal Library at Berlin, irrevocably decided the direction of his studies. With the aid of the imperfect dictionary of Mentzel and Pere Diaz, he succeeded in learning without a master that most difficult language; and, though he complied with his father’s desire, so far as to pursue with success the preparatory studies of the medical profession, he never formally embraced it. After a time he gave his undivided attention to Oriental studies; and, in 1802, established, at Dresden, the Asiatisches Magazin. Like so many of his countrymen, he accepted service in Russia, at the invitation of Count Potocki, who knew him at Berlin; and he was a member of the half-scientific, half-political, mission to Pekin, in 1805, under that eminent scholar and diplomatist. He withdrew, however, from the main body of this expedition, in order to be able to pursue his scientific researches more unrestrainedly; and, after traversing eighteen hundred leagues in the space of twenty months, in the course of which he passed in review all the motley races of that inhospitable region, Samoiedes, Finns, Tartars, Monguls, Paskirs, Dzoungars, Tungooses, &c., he returned to St. Petersburg, in 1806, with a vast collection of notes on the Chinese, Mantchu, Mongul, and Japanese[150] languages. With a similar object, he was soon afterwards sent by the Academy, in September, 1807, to collect information on the languages of the Caucasus, a journey of exceeding difficulty and privation, in which he spent nearly three years. On his return to St. Petersburg, he obtained permission to go to Berlin for the purpose of completing the necessary engravings for his work; and he availed himself of this opportunity to withdraw altogether from the Russian service, although with the forfeiture of all his titles and honours. After a brief sojourn in Italy, he fixed his residence in Paris. To him the Société Asiatique may be said to owe its origin; and he acted, almost up to his death in 1835, as the chief editor of its journal—the well-known Journal Asiatique. In Paris, also, he published his Asia Polyglotta, and “New Mithridates.” Klaproth, perhaps, does not deserve, in any one of the languages which he cultivated, the character of a very deep scholar; but he was acquainted with a large number: with Chinese, Mongol, Mantchu, and Japanese, also with Sanscrit, Armenian, Persian, and Georgian;[151] he was of course perfectly familiar with German, Russian, French, and probably with others of the European languages.

The eminent historical successes of Berthold George Niebuhr, (born at Copenhagen in 1776), have so completely eclipsed the memory of all his other great qualities, that perhaps the reader will not be prepared to find that in the department of languages his attainments were of the highest rank. His father, Carsten Niebuhr, the learned Eastern traveller, had destined him to pursue his own career; but the delicacy of the youth’s constitution, and other circumstances, forced his father to abandon the idea, and saved young Niebuhr for the far more important studies to which his own tastes attracted him. His history, both literary and political, is too recent and too well known to require any formal notice. It will be enough for our purpose to transcribe from his life an extremely interesting letter from his father, which bears upon the particular subject of the present inquiry. It is dated December, 1807, when Niebuhr was little more than thirty years of age. “My son has gone to Memel,” writes the elder Niebuhr, “with the commissariat of the army. When he found he should probably have to go to Riga, he began forthwith to learn Russian. Let us just reckon how many languages he knows already. He was only two years old when we came to Meldorf, so that we must consider, 1st, German, as his mother tongue. He learned at school, 2nd, Latin; 3rd, Greek; 4th, Hebrew; and, besides in Meldorf he learned, 5th, Danish; 6th, English; 7th, French; 8th, Italian; but only so far as to be able to read a book in these languages; some books from a vessel wrecked on the coast induced him to learn, 9th, Portuguese; 10th, Spanish; of Arabic he did not know much at home, because I had lost my lexicon and could not quickly replace it; in Kiel and Copenhagen he had opportunities of practice in speaking and writing French, English, and Danish; in Copenhagen he learned, 11th, Persian, of Count Ludolph, the Austrian minister, who was born at Constantinople, and whose father was an acquaintance of mine; and 12th, Arabic, he taught himself; in Holland he learned, 13th, Dutch; and again, in Copenhagen, 14th, Swedish, and a little Icelandic; at Memel, 15th, Russian; 16th, Slavonic; 17th, Polish; 18th, Bohemian; and, 19th, Illyrian. With the addition of Low German, this makes in all twenty languages.”[152]

As this letter does not enter into the history of Niebuhr’s later studies, I inquired of his friend, the Chevalier Bunsen, whether he had continued to cultivate the faculty thus early developed. I received from him the following interesting statement:—“Niebuhr,” he says, “ought not to be ranked among Linguists, in contradistinction with Philologers. Language had no special interest for him, beyond what it affords in connection with history and literature. His proficiency in languages was, however, very great, in consequence of his early and constant application to history, and his matchless memory. I have spoken of both in my Memoir on Niebuhr, in the German and English edition of Niebuhr’s Letters and Life; it is appended to the 2nd volume of both editions. I think it is somewhere stated how many languages he knew at an early age. What I know is, that besides Greek and Latin, he learned early to read and write Arabic; Hebrew he had also learned, but neglected afterwards; Russian and Slavonic he learned (to read only,) in the years 1808, 1810. He wrote well English, French, and Italian; and read Spanish, and Portuguese. Danish he wrote as well as his mother tongue, German, and he understood Swedish. In short, he would learn with the greatest ease any language which led him to the knowledge of historical truth, when occupied with the subject; but language, as such, had no charm for him.”

Among the scholars who assisted Adelung and Vater in the compilation of the Mithridates, by far the most distinguished was the illustrious Charles William von Humboldt. He was born at Potsdam, in 1767, and received his preliminary education at Berlin. His university studies were made partly at Göttingen, partly at Jena, where he formed the acquaintance and friendship of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland, and, above all, of Herder, from whose well-known tastes it is highly probable that Humboldt’s mind received the strong philological bias which it exhibited during his life. Unlike most of the scholars who preceded him in this career, however, Humboldt’s life was spent amid the bustle and intrigue of diplomatical pursuits. He was sent to Rome as Prussian Minister in 1802, and, from that period until 1819, he was almost uniformly employed in this and similar public services. From his return to Berlin, in 1819, he lived almost entirely for science, till his death, which occurred at Tegel, near Berlin, in 1835. Humboldt is, in truth, the author of that portion of the third volume of the Mithridates which treats of the languages of the two continents of America; and, although a great part of its materials were derived from the labours of others—from the memoirs, published and unpublished, of the missionaries, from the works and MSS. of Padre Hervaz, and other similar sources—yet no one can read any single article in the volume without perceiving that Humboldt had made himself thoroughly master of the subject; and that, especially in its bearings upon the general science of philology, or the great question of the unity of languages and its kindred ethnological problems, he had not only exhausted all the learning of his predecessors, but had successfully applied to it all the powers of his own comprehensive and original genius. To the consideration, too, of this numerous family of languages he brought a mind stored with the knowledge of all the other great families both of the East and of the West; and although it is not easy to say what his success in speaking languages may have been, it is impossible to doubt either the variety or the solidity of his attainments both as a scientific and as a practical linguist. But Humboldt’s place with posterity must be that of a philologer rather than of a linguist. His Essay on the “Diversity of the Formation of Human Language, and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind,” published posthumously in 1836, as an Introduction to his Analysis of the Kawi Language, is a work of extraordinary learning and research, as well as of profound and original thought; analysing all the successive varieties of grammatical structure which characterize the several classes of language in their various stages of structural development, from the naked simplicity of Chinese up to the minute and elaborate inflexional variety of the Sanscritic family. M. Bunsen describes this wonderful work as “the Calculus Sublimis of linguistic theory,” and declares that “it places William von Humboldt’s name by the side of that of Leibnitz in universal comparative ethnological philology.”[153]

The school of Humboldt in Germany has supplied a long series of distinguished names to philological literature, beginning with Frederic von Schlegel, (whose Essay “On the Language and Literature of the Hindoos, 1808,” opened an entirely new view of the science of comparative philology), and continued, through Schlegel’s brother Augustus, Rask, Bopp, Grimm, Lepsius, Pott, Pfizmaier, Hammer-Purgstall (the so-called “Lily of Ten Tongues”), Sauerwein, Diez, Boehtlingk, and the lamented Castrén, down to Bunsen, and his learned fellow-labourers, Max Müller, Paul Boetticher, Aufrecht, and others.[154] For most of those, as for Schlegel, the Sanscrit family of languages has been the great centre of exploration, or at least the chief standard of comparison; and Bopp, in his wonderful work, the “Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, old Slavonic, Gothic, and German Languages,”[155] has almost exhausted this part of the inquiry. Others (still, however, with the same general view) have devoted themselves to other families, as Lepsius to the Egyptian, Rask to the Scythian, Boehtlingk to the Tartar,[156] Grimm to the Teutonic, Diez to the Romanic, and Castrén to the Finnic. Others, in fine, as Bunsen in his most comprehensive work, “Outlines of the Philosophy of Universal History applied to Language,” (the third volume of his “Christianity and Mankind”) have digested the entire subject, and applied the researches of all to the solution of the great problem of the science. Some of those whom I have named rather resembled the ancient heroes of romance and adventure, than the common race of quiet everyday scholars. The journeys of Rask, Klaproth, and Lepsius, were not only full of danger, but often attended with exceeding privation; and Alexander Castrén of Helsingfors was literally a martyr of the science. This enthusiastic student,[157] although a man of extremely delicate constitution, “left his study, travelled for years alone in his sledge through the snowy deserts of Siberia; coasted along the borders of the Polar Sea; lived for whole winters in caves of ice, or in the smoky huts of greasy Samoiedes; then braved the sand-clouds of Mongolia; passed the Baikal; and returned from the frontiers of China to his duties as Professor at Helsingfors, to die after he had given to the world but a few specimens of his treasures.”[158]

Rask and M. Bunsen, even as linguists, deserve to be more specially commemorated.

The former, who was born in 1787 at Brennekilde, in the island of Funen, traversed, in the course of the adventurous journey already alluded to, the Eastern provinces of Russia, Persia, India, Malacca, and the island of Ceylon, and penetrated into the interior of Africa. In all the countries which he visited he made himself acquainted with the various languages which prevailed; so that besides the many languages of his native Teutonic family, those of the Scandinavian, Finnic, and Sclavonic stock, the principal cultivated European languages, and the learned languages (including those of the Bible), he was also familiar with Sanscrit in all its branches; and is justly described as the first who opened the way to “a real grammatical knowledge of Zend.”[159] M. Bunsen’s great work exhibits a knowledge of the structural analysis of a prodigious number of languages, from almost every family. As a master of the learned languages, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, and (though he has cultivated these less), Arabic and Persian, he has few superiors. He speaks and writes with equal facility Latin, German, English, French, and Italian, all with singular elegance and purify; he speaks besides Dutch and Danish; he reads Swedish, Icelandic, and the other old German languages, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romaic; and he has also studied many of the less known languages, as Chinese, Basque, Finnic, and Welsh, together with several of the African and North American languages, but chiefly with a view to their grammatical structure, and without any idea of learning to read them.

Nevertheless, with all the linguistic learning which they undoubtedly possess, neither Humboldt nor the other members of his distinguished school fall properly within the scope of this Memoir. With all of them, even those who were themselves accomplished linguists, the knowledge of languages, (and especially of their vocabularies), is a subordinate object. They have never proposed the study to themselves, for its own sake, but only as an instrument of philosophical inquiry. It might almost be said, indeed, that by the reaction which this school has created against the old system of etymological, and in favour of the structural, comparison of languages, a positive discouragement has been given to the exact or extensive study of their vocabularies. Philologers, as a class, have a decided disposition to look down upon, and even to depreciate, the pursuit of linguists. With the former, the knowledge of the words of a language is a very minor consideration in comparison with its inflexions, and still more its laws of transposition (Lautverschiebung); Professor Schott of Berlin plainly avows that “a limited knowledge of languages is sufficient for settling the general questions as to their common origin;”[160] and beyond a catalogue of a certain number of words for the purpose of a comparative vocabulary, there is a manifest tendency on the part of many, to regard all further concern about the words of a language as old-fashioned and puerile. It it some consolation to the admirers of the old school to know, that, from time to time, learned philologers have been roughly taken to task for the presumption with which they have theorized about languages of whose vocabulary they are ignorant; and it is difficult not to regard the unsparing and often very amusing exposures of Professor Schott’s blunders which occur in the long controversy that he has had with Boehtlingk, Mr. Caldwell’s recent strictures[161] upon the Indian learning of Professor Max Müller, or Stanislaus Julien’s still fiercer onslaught on M. Panthier, in the Journal Asiatique,[162] as a sort of retributive offering to the offended Genius of neglected Etymology.

I shall not delay upon the Biblical linguists of Germany as Hug, Jahn, Schott, Windischmann, Vullers, &c., among Catholics, or the rival schools of Rosenmüller, Tholuck, Ewald, Gesenius, Fürst, Beer, De Lagarde, &c. Extensive[163] as is the range of the attainments of these distinguished men in the languages of the Bible, and their literature, this accomplishment has now become so universal among German Biblical scholars, that it has almost ceased to be regarded as a title to distinction. Its very masters are lost in the crowd of eminent men who have grown up on all sides around him.

Among the scholars of modern Hungary there are a few names which deserve to be mentioned. Sajnovitz’s work on the common origin of the Magyar and Lapp languages, though written in 1770, long before the science of Comparative Philology had been reduced to its present form, has obtained the praise of much learning and ingenuity. Gyarmathi, who wrote somewhat later on the affinity of the Magyar and Finnic languages (1799) is admitted by M. Bunsen[164] to “deserve a very high rank among the founders of that science.” But neither of these authors can be considered as a linguist. Father Dubrowsky, of whom I shall speak elsewhere, although born in Hungary, cannot properly be considered as a Hungarian. Kazinczy, Kisfaludy, and their followers, have confined themselves almost entirely to the cultivation of their own native language, or at least to the ethnological affinities which it involves.

I have only discovered one linguist of modern Hungary whom I can consider entitled to a special notice, but the singular and almost mysterious interest which attaches to his name may in some measure compensate for the comparative solitude in which it is found.

I allude to the celebrated Magyar pilgrim and philologer, Csoma de Körös. His name is written in his own language, Körösi Csoma Sandor; but in the works which he has published (all of which are in English), it is given in the above form. He was born of a poor, but noble family, about 1790, at Körös, in Transylvania; and, received a gratuitous education at the College of Nagy-Enyed. The leading idea which engrossed this enthusiastic scholar during life, was the discovery of the original of the Magyar race; in search of which (after preparing himself for about five years, at Göttingen, by the study of medicine and of the Oriental languages,) he set out in 1820, on a pilgrimage to the East, “lightly clad, with a little stick in his hand, as if meditating a country walk, and with but a hundred florins, (about £10), in his pocket.” The only report of his progress which was received for years afterwards, informed his friends that he had crossed the Balkan, visited Constantinople, Alexandria, and the Arabic libraries at Cairo; and, after traversing Egypt and Syria, had arrived at Teheran. Here, on hearing a few words of the Tibetan language, he was struck by their resemblance to Magyar; and, in the hope of thus resolving his cherished problem, he crossed Little Bucharia to the desert of Gobi; traversed many of the valleys of the Himalaya; and finally buried himself for four years (1827-1830), in the Buddhist Monastery of Kanam, deeply engaged in the study of Tibetan; four months of which time he spent in a room nine feet square, (without once quitting it), and in a temperature below zero! He quickly discovered his mistake as to the affinity of Tibetan with Magyar; but he pursued his Tibetan studies in the hope of obtaining in the sacred books of Tibet some light upon the origin of his nation; and before his arrival at Calcutta, in 1830, he had written down no less than 40,000 words in that language. He had hardly reached Calcutta when he was struck down by the mortifying discovery that the Tibetan books to which he had devoted so many precious years were but translations from the Sanscrit! From 1830 he resided for several years chiefly at Calcutta, engaged in the study of Sanscrit and other languages, and employed in various literary services by the Asiatic Society of Bengal. He published in 1834 a Tibetan and English Dictionary, and contributed many interesting papers to the Asiatic Journal, and the Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society. In 1842, he set out afresh upon the great pilgrimage which he had made the object of his life; and, having reached Dharjeeling on his way to Sikam in Tibet, he was seized by a sudden illness, which, as he refused to take medicine, rapidly carried him off. This strange, though highly gifted man, had studied in the course of his adventurous life, seventeen or eighteen languages, in several of which he was a proficient.[165]

The career of this enthusiastic Magyar resembles in many respects that of Castrén, the Danish philologer; and in nothing more than in the devotedness with which each of them applied himself to the investigation of the origin of his native language and to the discovery of the ethnological affinities of his race.

§ VI. LINGUISTS OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.

The names with which the catalogue of Italian and that of Spanish linguists open, find a worthy companion in the first name among the linguists of Britain.

With others the study of languages, or of kindred sciences, formed almost the business of life. But it was not so with the wonder of his own and of all succeeding generations—the “Admirable Crichton”; who, notwithstanding the universality of his reputation, became almost equally eminent in each particular study, as any of those who devoted all their powers to that single pursuit.

James Crichton was born in 1561, in Scotland. The precise place of his birth is uncertain, but he was the son of Robert Crichton of Eliock, Lord Advocate of James VI. He was educated at St. Andrew’s. The chief theatres of his attainments, however, were France and Italy. There is not an accomplishment which he did not possess in its greatest perfection—from the most abstruse departments of scholarship, philosophy, and divinity, down to the mere physical gifts and graces of the musician, the athlete, the swordsman, and the cavalier. His memory was a prodigy both of quickness and of tenacity. He could repeat verbatim, after a single hearing, the longest and most involved discourse.[166] Many of the details which are told of him are doubtless exaggerated and perhaps legendary; but Mr. Patrick Frazer Tytler[167] has shown that the substance of his history, prodigious as it seems, is perfectly reliable. As regards the particular subject of our present inquiry, one account states that, when he was but sixteen years old, he spoke ten languages. Another informs us that, at the age of twenty, the number of languages of which he was master exactly equalled the number of his years. But the most tangible data which we possess are drawn from his celebrated thesis in the University of Paris, in which he undertook to dispute in any of twelve languages—Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, Flemish, and Slavonic. I am inclined to believe that Crichton’s acquirements extended at least so far as this. It might seem that a vague challenge to dispute in any one of a number of foreign tongues was an empty and unsubstantial boast, and a mere exhibition of vanity, perfectly safe from the danger of exposure. But it is clear that Crichton’s challenge was not so unpractical as this. He not only specified the languages of his challenge, but there is hardly one of those that he selected which was not represented in the University of Paris at the time, not only sufficiently to test the proficiency of the daring disputant, but to secure his ignominious exposure, if there were grounds to suspect him of charlatanism or imposture. Unhappily, however, the promise of a youth so brilliant was cut short by an early death, in 1583, at the age of twenty-two years. Nor did Crichton leave behind him any work by which posterity might test the reality of his acquirements, except a few Latin verses printed by his friend, Aldus Manutius, on whose generous patronage, with all his accomplishments, he had been dependent for the means of subsistence during one of the most brilliant periods of his career.

A few years Crichton’s senior in point of time, although, from the precociousness of Crichton’s genius, his junior in reputation, was Lancelot Andrews, Bishop of Winchester. He was born in London in 1555, and, after a distinguished career in the university, rose, through a long course of ecclesiastical preferments, to the see of Winchester. Beyond the general praises of his scholarship in which all his biographers indulge, few particulars are preserved respecting his attainments. Among his contemporaries he was regarded as a prodigy. Wanley says[168] that “some thought he might almost have served as interpreter-general at the confusion of tongues;” and even the more prosaic Chalmers attributes to him a profound knowledge of the “chief Oriental tongues, Greek, Latin, and many modern languages.”[169]

John Gregory, who was born at Agmondesham in Buckinghamshire, in the year 1607, would probably have far surpassed Andrews as a linguist, had he not been cut off prematurely before he had completed his thirtieth year. He was a youth of unexampled industry and perseverance, devoting sixteen hours of the twenty-four to his favourite studies. Even at the early age at which he died he had mastered not only the Oriental and classical languages, but also French, Italian, and Spanish, and, what was far more remarkable in his day, his ancestral Anglo-Saxon. But he died in the very blossom of his promise, in 1646.

These, however, must be regarded as exceptional cases. The study of languages, it must be confessed, occupied at this period but little of public attention in England. It holds a very subordinate place in the great scheme of Bacon’s “Advancement of Learning.” In the model Republic of his “New Atlantis” only four languages appear, “ancient Hebrew, ancient Greek, good Latin of the School, and Spanish.”[170] Gregory’s contemporaries, the brothers John and Thomas Greaves, though both distinguished Persian and Arabic scholars, never made a name in other languages. Notwithstanding the praise which Clarendon bestows on Selden’s “stupendous learning in all kinds and in all languages,”[171] it is certain that the range of his languages was very limited. So, also, what Hallam says of Hugh Broughton as a man “deep in Jewish erudition,”[172] must be understood rather of the literature than of the languages of the East; and although Hugh Broughton’s namesake, Richard, (one of the missionary priests in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and an antiquarian of considerable merit, mentioned by Dodd[173]) was a learned Hebraist, there is no evidence of his having gone farther in these studies.

Indeed, strange as it may at first sight appear, the first epoch in English history really prolific in eminent scholars is the stormy period of the great Civil War. It is not a little remarkable that the most creditable fruit of English scholarship, Walton’s Polyglot Bible, was matured, if not brought to light, under the Republic.

The men who were engaged in this work, however, were, for the most part, merely book-scholars. Edmund Castell, born at Halley, in Cambridgeshire, in 1606, author of the Heptaglot Lexicon, which formed the companion or supplement of Walton’s Bible, is admitted to have been one of the most profound Orientalists of his day. This Lexicon comprises seven Oriental languages, Hebrew, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, and Persian; and, if we add to these the classical languages, we shall find Castell’s attainments to have been little inferior to those of any linguist before his time; even without reckoning whatever modern languages he may be supposed to have known. Castell, nevertheless, is one of the most painful examples of neglected scholarship in all literary history. Disraeli truly says that he more than devoted his life to his Lexicon Heptaglotton.[174] His own Appeal to Charles the Second, if less noble and dignified than Johnson’s celebrated preface to the Dictionary, is yet one of the most touching documents on record. He laments the “seventeen years during which he devoted sixteen or eighteen hours a day to his labour. He declares that he had expended his whole inheritance (above twelve thousand pounds), upon the work; and that he spent his health and eyesight as well as his fortune, upon a thankless task.” The copies of his Lexicon remained unsold upon his hands; and, out of the whole five hundred copies which he left at his death, hardly one complete copy escaped destruction by damp and vermin. “The whole load of learned rags sold for seven pounds!”[175]

I cannot find that either Castell or his friend (though by no means his equal as a linguist), Brian Walton possessed any remarkable faculty in speaking even the languages with which they were most familiar.

Another of Walton’s associates in the compilation of the Polyglot, as well as in other learned undertakings, Edward Pocock (born at Oxford in 1604,) appears to have given more attention to the accomplishment of speaking foreign languages. In addition to Latin, Greek, French, and probably Italian, he was well versed in Hebrew, Syriac, Ethiopic, and Arabic. During a residence of six years at Aleppo, as British chaplain, (1600-6), he had the advantage of receiving instructions from a native doctor, in the language and literature of Arabia; and he engaged an Arab servant for the sole purpose of enjoying the opportunity of speaking the language.[176] In a second journey to the East, undertaken a few years later, under the patronage of Laud, he extended his acquaintance with these languages. Two of Pocock’s sons, Edward and Thomas, attained a certain eminence in the same pursuit; but neither of them can be said to have approached the fame of their father.

The mention of Arabian literature suggests the distinguished names of Simon Ockley, the earliest English historian of Mahometanism, and of George Sale, the first English translator of its sacred book. Both were in their time Orientalists of high character; but both of them appear to have applied chiefly to Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, rather than to the Biblical languages. Both, too, may be cited among the examples of unsuccessful scholarship. It was in a debtor’s prison at Cambridge that Ockley found leisure for the completion of his great History of the Saracens; and it is told of the learned translator of the Koran, that too often, when he quitted his studies, he wanted a change of linen, and frequently wandered in the streets in search of some compassionate friend who might supply him with the meal of the day![177]

Another scholar of high repute at the same period, is Samuel Clarke. He was born at Brackley, in Northamptonshire, in 1623, and was a student at Merton College, Oxford, when the parliamentary commission undertook the reform of the University. The general report of the period represents him as a very profound and accomplished linguist; but the only direct evidence which remains of the extent of his powers, is the fact that he assisted Walton in the preparation of his Polyglot Bible, and also Castell in the composition of his Heptaglot Lexicon. He died in 1669.

Early in the same century was born John Wilkins, another linguist of some pretensions. Perhaps, however, he is better known by the efforts which he made to recommend that ideal project for a Universal Language which has occupied the thoughts of so many learned enthusiasts since his time, than by his own positive and practical attainments; although he published a Collection of Pater Nosters which possesses no inconsiderable philological merit. He was born in 1614, at Fawsley, in Northamptonshire; and at the early age of thirteen, he was admitted a scholar of Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took his degree in 1634. In the contest between the Crown and the Parliament, Wilkins became a warm partisan of the latter. He was named Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, by the parliamentary commission in 1648. Some years later, in 1656, he married Robina, sister of the Protector, and widow of Peter French; the Protector having granted him a dispensation from the statute which requires celibacy, as one of the conditions of the tenure of his Wardenship. In 1659, Richard Cromwell promoted him to the Mastership of Trinity College, Cambridge; from which, however, he was dispossessed at the Restoration. But his reputation for scholarship, seemingly through the influence of Buckingham,[178] outweighed his political demerits; and he was named successively Dean of Ripon and Bishop of Chester, in which latter dignity he died in 1670.

The unhappy deistical writer, John Toland, born in the County Donegal, in Ireland, in 1669, was one of the most skilful linguists of his day. His birth was probably illegitimate, and he was baptized by the strange name of James Junius,[179] which the ridicule of his schoolfellows caused him to change for that by which he is now known. During his early youth, he was a member of the Catholic religion; but his daring and sceptical mind early threw off the salutary restraints which that creed imposes, although, like Gibbon, only to abandon Christianity itself in abandoning Catholicity. His eventful and erratic career does not fall within the scope of this notice, and I will only mention that in the singular epitaph, which he composed for his own tomb, he speaks of himself as “linguarum plus decem sciens.” In several of these ten languages, as he states in his memorial to the Earl of Oxford,[180] he spoke and wrote with as much fluency as in English. Toland died at Putney, in 1722.

From this period the same great blank occurs in the history of English scholarship, which we have observed in almost all the contemporary literatures of Europe. Still a few names may be gleaned from the general obscurity.[181] It is true that what many persons may deem the most notable publication of the time, Chamberlayne’s Collection of Pater Nosters, (1715), was rather a literary curiosity than a work of genuine scholarship. But there are other higher, though less known, names.

The once notorious “Orator Henley,” whom the Dunciad has immortalized as the

“Preacher at once, and Zany of his age,”

was unquestionably a linguist of great acquirements. His “Complete Linguist,” consisting of grammars of ten languages, was published when he was but twenty-five years old; and throughout his entire career, eccentric as it was, he appears to have persevered in the same studies. John Henley was born at Melton Mowbray, in 1692, and graduated in the University of Cambridge. He took orders, and obtained some notoriety as a preacher; but his great theatre of display was his so-called “Oratory,” where he delivered orations or lectures on a variety of topics, religious, political, humorous, and even profane. It was on one of these occasions that he drew together a large congregation of shoemakers, by the promise of showing them “the best, newest, and most expeditious way of making shoes,” which he proceeded to illustrate by holding out a boot and cutting off the leg part! Henley died in 1756.[182]

What Henley was in the learned languages, the distinguished statesman Lord Carteret, afterwards Earl of Granville, was in the modern. With all his brilliant qualities as a debater, and all his great capacity for public affairs, Carteret combined the learning and the accomplishments of a finished scholar. Swift said of him that “he carried away from Oxford more Greek, Latin, and philosophy, than became a person of his rank.” He spoke and wrote French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and even Swedish; and one of the first causes of the jealousy with which Walpole regarded him, was the volubility with which he was able to hold converse in German with their common master, George the First.

But Henley and Carteret stand almost alone among the English scholars of the early half of the seventeenth century; and the first steady impulse which the study of languages received in England, may be chiefly traced to the attractions of the honourable and emolumentary service of the East India Company. What the diplomatic ambition of France in the Levant effected among the scholars of that country, the commercial enterprise of the merchant princess of England achieved in her Indian territory; and the splendid rewards held out to practical Oriental scholarship, gave an impulse to the study of Eastern languages on a more liberal and comprehensive scale.[183] It is in great part to this, that we are indebted for the splendid successes of Sir William Jones, of Marsden, of Colebrooke, of Craufurd, of Lumsden, of Leyden, and still more recently, of Colonel Vans Kennedy.

The first of these, William Jones, was the son of a school-master, and was born in London, in 1741. He was educated at Harrow, where he exhibited an early taste for languages,[184] and was especially distinguished in Greek and Latin metrical composition. In 1764, he entered the University of Oxford, where he learned Arabic from a Syrian whose acquaintance he chanced to form. To this he soon after added Persian; and in 1770, he performed the very unusual feat of translating the history of Nadir Shah into French. In the following year he published his Persian Grammar, which took the general public as much by surprise, by the beauty and eloquence of the poetical translations which accompanied the copious examples that illustrated it, as it excited the admiration of scholars by the simplicity and practical good sense of its technical details. He soon afterwards applied himself to the language and literature of China; which, however, he never made a profound study, as about this time (1770), feeling the precariousness of a purely literary profession, he took steps to have himself called to the English bar, and for the following twelve years devoted himself with all his characteristic energy, and with marked success, to its laborious and engrossing duties. During the same period he endeavoured unsuccessfully to obtain a seat in Parliament; but in 1783, he accepted the appointment of Judge in the supreme court at Calcutta, and repaired to India in the same year. His attention to the duties of his office, is said to have been most earnest and exemplary. But, in the intervals of duty, he travelled over a great part of India; mixed eagerly in native society; and had acquired a familiarity with the history, antiquities, religions, science, and laws of India, such as had never before been attained by any European scholar, when, unhappily for the science to which he was so thoroughly devoted, he was cut off prematurely in the year 1794, at the early age of forty-seven. During a life thus laborious, and in great part spent in pursuits utterly uncongenial with linguistic studies, Sir William Jones had nevertheless amassed a store of languages which had seldom, perhaps never, been equalled before his time. Fortunately too, unlike most of the linguists whom we have been enumerating, he himself left an autograph record of these studies, which Lord Teignmouth has preserved in his interesting Biography. In this paper, he describes the total number of languages with which he was in any degree acquainted to have been twenty-eight; but he further distributes these into classes according to the degree of his familiarity with each. From this curious memorandum, it appears that he had studied critically eight languages, viz:—English, Latin, French, Italian, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Sanscrit; eight others he had studied less perfectly, but all were intelligible to him with the aid of a Dictionary, viz:—Spanish, Portuguese, German, Runick, Hebrew, Bengali, Hindi, Turkish; twelve others, in fine, he had studied least perfectly; but he considered all these attainable; namely Tibetan, Pali, Palavi, Deri, Russian, Syriac, Ethiopic, Coptic, Welsh, Swedish, Dutch, and Chinese.[185]

Now, as Lord Teignmouth[186] describes him as perfectly familiar with Spanish, Portuguese, and German, three languages which he has himself placed on the list of languages, “less critically studied, but intelligible with the aid of a dictionary,” it may fairly be believed that this estimate is, to say the least, a sufficiently modest one; and that his acquaintance even with the languages of the third class was by no means superficial, we may infer from another memorandum preserved by Lord Teignmouth from which we find that he had studied the grammars of two at least of the number, namely: Russian and Welsh. His biographer, however, unfortunately enters into no details as to his power of speaking languages; but he is said by the writer of the notice in the Biographie Universelle to have spoken eight languages as perfectly as his native English.

In contrast with successes so brilliant as these, the comparatively humble career of the other British Orientalists named in conjunction with Sir William Jones, will appear tame and uninteresting. William Marsden was born in Dublin, 1754; and, after having completed the ordinary classical studies, was sent out to Bencoolen in the island of Sumatra, at the early age of sixteen. The extraordinary facility which he exhibited for acquiring the Malay languages led to his rapid advancement. He was named first under-secretary, and afterwards chief secretary of the Island; and, before his return in 1779, he had accumulated the materials for the exceedingly valuable work on Sumatra which he published in 1782. Marsden held several important appointments after his return,[187] and he employed every interval of his official duties in literary pursuits. He was a thorough master of Sanscrit, and all its kindred languages; but he must be described, nevertheless, rather as a book-learned, than a practical linguist. His Essay on the Polynesian or East Insular languages, tracing their connexion with each other, and their common relations with Sanscrit, is still a standard source of information on this interesting ethnological question.

Henry Thomas Colebrooke,[188] well known by his numerous contributions to Oriental literature, especially in the Asiatic Journal, was also an official of the East India Company, whose employment he entered, while still very young, as a civil servant. Colebrooke was well versed, not only in the Indian languages, but also in those of the Hebrew and cognate races; and his early education in France gave him a greater familiarity with French and other modern tongues than is often found to accompany the more profound linguistic studies.

Matthew Lumsden was born in Aberdeenshire in 1777, and went as a mere boy to India, where his brother had an appointment in the service of the Company. Lumsden’s knowledge of Hindostani and of Persian led to his being employed first as translator in the criminal court, and afterwards as professor in Fortwilliam College, where he remained till 1820. His skill in Persian and Arabic is attested by several publications upon both, chiefly elementary; but he can hardly be classed with the higher Orientalists, much less with linguists of more universal pretensions.

Lord Cockburn, in the lively section of his amusing “Memorials of his Own Time” which he devotes to the singular and unsteady career of John Leyden, says that M’Intosh, to whom “his wild friend” was clearly a source of great amusement, used to laugh at the affected modesty with which Leyden “professed to know but seventy languages.”[189] It is plain that M’Intosh considered this an extreme exaggeration; but there can be no doubt, nevertheless, that Leyden was a very extraordinary linguist. This strange man, whose name will perhaps be remembered by the frequent allusions to it in the early correspondence of Sir Walter Scott, was born of a very humble family at Denholm in 1775. Though his education was of the very lowest order, yet Scott relates that “before he had attained his nineteenth year, he confounded the doctors of Edinburgh by the portentous mass of his acquisitions in almost every department of knowledge.”[190] Having failed very signally in the clerical profession, to which he was brought up by his parents, he embraced that of medicine; and, after undergoing a more than ordinary share of the privations and vicissitudes of literary life such as it then existed, he went to Madras in 1803 in the capacity of assistant surgeon in the East India Company’s service. The adoption of this career decided the course of his after studies. He had learned, while yet a mere youth, preparing for the university, Hebrew and Arabic. He afterwards extended his researches into all the chief languages of the East, Sanscrit, Hindustani, and many other minor varieties of the Indian tongues. He was also thorough master of Persian. His career as Professor of Hindustani at Calcutta was more successful than that of any European scholar since Sir William Jones. Having also studied the Malay language, from which he made several translations, he was induced to accompany Lord Minto on the Java expedition in 1811, where he was cut off after a short illness in the same year, too soon, unhappily, to allow of his turning to full account the important materials which he had collected for the comparative study of the Indo-Chinese languages.

The well-known evangelical commentator, Dr. Adam Clarke, born in 1760, of very humble parentage, at Magherafelt, in the County of Londonderry, in the north of Ireland, and for a long course of years the most distinguished preacher of the Methodist communion, enjoyed a high reputation among his followers as a linguist; but his studies had been confined almost entirely to the Biblical languages. The same may be said of the Rev. Dr. Barrett, vice-provost of Trinity College, Dublin, who is known to Biblical students as the editor of the Palimpsest MS. of the Gospels, and of the celebrated Codex Montfortianus.

But there is more of curious interest in the career of a very extraordinary individual, Richard Roberts Jones, of Aberdarvan, in Carnarvonshire, who, if not for the extent of his attainments, at least for the exceedingly unfavourable circumstances under which they were acquired, deserves a place among examples of the “pursuit of knowledge under difficulties.” A privately printed memoir of this singular character, by Mr. Roscoe, who took much interest in him, and exerted himself warmly in his behalf, contains several most curious particulars regarding his studies and acquirements, as well as his personal habits and appearance. Mr. Roscoe first met him in 1806, and described him to Dr. Parr as “a poor Welsh fisher-lad, as ragged as a colt, and as uncouth as any being that has a semblance of humanity. But beneath such an exterior,” he adds, “is a mind cultivated, not only beyond all reasonable expectation, but beyond all probable conception. In his fishing boat on the coast of Wales, at an age little more than twenty, he has acquired Greek, Hebrew, and Latin; has read the Iliad, Hesiod, Theocritus, &c.; studied the refinements of Greek pronunciation; and examined the connection of that language with Hebrew.” An attempt was made to raise him to a position more befitting his acquirements. But his habits were of the rudest and most uncleanly. “He loved to lie on his back in the bottom of a ditch. His uncouth appearance, solitary habits, and perhaps weak intellect, made him an object of ridicule and persecution to the children of the district; and, he often carried an iron pot on his head to screen him from the stones and clods which they threw at him. He wore a large filthy wrapper, in the pockets and folds of which he stowed his library; and his face, covered with hair, gave him a strangely uncouth appearance; although the mild and abstracted expression of his features took from it much of its otherwise repulsive character.” Mr. Roscoe gives a very curious account of an interview between Dr. Parr and this strange genius, in 1815, in the course of which Jones “exhibited a familiarity with French, Italian, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee.” He described too, for Dr. Parr, his mode of acquiring a new language, which consisted in carefully examining its vocabulary, ascertaining what words in it corresponded with those of any language which he had previously learned, and having struck such words out of the vocabulary, proceeding to impress the remaining words upon his memory, as being the only ones which were peculiar to the new language which he sought to acquire. It may easily be believed that Jones’s irreclaimably uncouth and eccentric habits defeated the efforts made by his friends to place him in a condition more befitting his acquirements. Clothes with which their thoughtfulness might replace his habitual rags, in a few days were sure to present the same filthy and dilapidated appearance. When a bed was provided for him, he chose to sleep not upon, but under it; and all his habits bespoke at once weakness of mind and indisposition, or perhaps incapacity, to accommodate himself to the ordinary usages of other men.

Dr. Thomas Young, although his fame must rest chiefly upon his brilliant philosophical discoveries, (especially in the Theory of Light), and on his success in deciphering and systematizing the hieroglyphical writing of the Egyptians, as exhibited in the inscriptions of the Rosetta Stone and in the funereal papyri, cannot be passed over in a history of eminent British linguists. Young was born at Milverton in Somersetshire, in 1773. His mind was remarkably precocious. He had read the whole Bible twice through, besides other books, before he was four years old. In his seventh year he learnt Latin; and before he left school in his thirteenth year, he added to this Greek, French, and Italian. Soon after his return from school, he mastered Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, and Persian; and, in all those languages, as well as in his own, his reading (of which his journals have preserved a most minute and accurate record), was so various and so vast, as almost to exceed belief. Having embraced the medical profession, he passed two years in different German Universities, during which time he not only extended his knowledge of learned languages, but also became perfect master of German;—not to speak of various other acquisitions, some of them of a class which are seldom found to accompany scholastic eminence, such as riding two horses at the same time, walking or dancing on the tight rope, and various other feats of harlequinade! Of his skill in the ancient Egyptian language, as well as its more modern forms, in which he rivalled, and as his English biographer, Dr. Peacock, seeks to show,[191] surpassed, Champollion and Lepsius, it is unnecessary to speak: and it is highly probable that, having learned Italian while a mere youth,[192] he also made himself acquainted with Spanish, and perhaps Portuguese.

Dr. Pritchard, who may be regarded as the founder of the English school of ethnography, can hardly, notwithstanding, be strictly called a linguist. If we except the Celtic languages, and Greek, Latin, and German, most of his learning regarding the rest is taken at second-hand from Adelung and others. Nevertheless, the linguistic section of his “Researches into the Physical History of Mankind,” is a work of very great value. M. Bunsen pronounces it “the best of its kind; infinitely superior, as a whole, to Adelung’s Mithridates”;[193] and Cardinal Wiseman, in his masterly lecture “On the Natural History of the Human race,” not only gives Pritchard the credit of being “almost the first who attempted to connect ethnography with philology,” but even goes so far as to say that it will henceforth “be difficult for any one to treat of this theme without being indebted to Dr. Pritchard for a great portion of his materials.”[194]

Of the school of living British linguists I shall not be expected to speak at much length; but there are a few names so familiar to the scholars of every country that it would be unpardonable to pass them over entirely without notice.

The work just quoted, from the very time of its publication in 1836, established the reputation of Dr. (now Cardinal) Wiseman, still a very young writer, as a philologist of the first rank. His latest writings show that, through all the engrossing duties in which he has since been engaged, he has continued to cultivate the science of philology.[195] The Cardinal is, moreover, a most accomplished linguist. Besides the ordinary learned languages, he is master not only of Hebrew and Chaldee, but also of Syriac (of his scholarship in which his Horæ Syriacæ is a most honourable testimony), Arabic, Persian, and Sanscrit. In modern languages he has few superiors. He speaks with fluency and elegance French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Portuguese; and in most of these languages he has frequently preached or lectured extempore, or with little preparation.

The interesting discoveries of Colonel Rawlinson and of Dr. Hincks, and Dr. Cureton’s very important Syriac publications, have associated their names with the linguistic as well as the antiquarian memories of this age. Nor are there many English Orientalists whose foreign reputation is so high as that of Mr. Lane. But I am unable to speak of the attainments of any of these gentlemen in the other families of language.

By far the most noticeable names in the list of living linguists of British race are those of Sir John Bowring, now Governor at Hong-Kong, Professor Lee of Cambridge, and the American ex-blacksmith, Elihu Burritt. All three, beyond their several degrees of personal merit, possess a common claim to admiration, as being almost entirely self-educated. John (now Sir John) Bowring, as I learn from a Memoir published about three years since,[196] before he had attained his eighteenth year, had learned Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Dutch. He is said to have since added to his store almost every language of Europe;—Russian, Servian, Bohemian, Polish, Hungarian, Slovakian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Lettish, Finnish, and even Basque; and he is further described as familiar with all the provincial varieties of each; for instance, of the various offshoots of German, and of the several dialects of Spanish which prevail in Catalonia, Valencia and Galicia. Dr. Bowring’s later career brought him into familiarity with Arabic and Turkish; and his still more recent successes in China and in Siam and its dependencies are equally remarkable. It is not so easy to offer an opinion as to the degree of Sir John Bowring’s acquaintance with each of the languages which are ascribed to him. His interesting poetical translations from Russian, Servian, Bohemian, and other languages of Europe, are rather a test of elegant literary tastes than of exact linguistic attainments; nor am I aware to what more direct ordeal his various attainments have been subjected. It were to be wished that the Memoir from which these particulars are derived had entered more into detail upon this part of the subject. But, even making every allowance for possible exaggeration, it seems impossible to doubt the claim of Sir John Bowring to a place in the very highest rank of modern linguists.

Dr. Samuel Lee is perhaps even a still more extraordinary example of self-education. He was born in the very humblest rank in the village of Longnor in Shropshire, and, after having spent a short time in the poor-school of his native village, commenced life as a carpenter’s apprentice, when he was but twelve years old. In the few intervals of leisure which this laborious occupation permitted, Mr. Jerdan states[197] that, without the least assistance from masters, he taught himself Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldee; having contrived, from the hoardings of his scanty wages, to procure a few elementary books in these and other languages. On his marriage, however, he was forced to sell the little library which he had accumulated, in order to provide for the new wants with which he found himself encompassed: and for a time his struggle after learning was suspended; but his extraordinary attainments having begun to attract notice, he was relieved from the uncongenial occupation which he had hitherto followed, and appointed master of a school at Shrewsbury. In the more favourable position which he had thus obtained, he soon extended his reading to Arabic, Persian, and Hindustani. In 1813 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where it is worthy of note that he distinguished himself no less in science than in languages, and took his degree with much credit. He was afterwards appointed superintendent of the Oriental press of the British and Foreign Bible Society, for which body he has not only edited the Arabic, Persian, Coptic, Hindustani, Malay, and other versions of the Bible, but has also translated, or superintended the translation, of many tracts in these various languages. When Mr. Wheaton, an American traveller, (brother of the well-known American jurist of that name) visited Professor Lee, he found him acquainted with no less than “sixteen languages, in most of which he was able to write.”[198] Neither this writer, however, nor Mr. Jerdan, informs us as to the extent of Dr. Lee’s attainments in speaking foreign languages.

The list of linguists of the British race may be closed not unworthily with the still more remarkable name of Elihu Burritt, who, though born in America (in 1811,) is descended of an English family, settled in Connecticut for the last two centuries. The circumstances of Burritt’s father, who was a shoemaker, were so narrow, that the education of Elihu, the youngest of five sons, was entirely neglected. When his father died, Elihu, then above fifteen years old, had spent but three months at school; and, being altogether dependent on his own exertions for support, he was obliged to bind himself as an apprentice to the trade of blacksmith. Fortunately, however, an elder brother who was a schoolmaster, settled in the same town before the term of Elihu’s apprenticeship expired; and as the latter had carefully devoted each spare moment of his laborious life to reading every book that came within his reach, he gladly availed himself, as soon as he became his own master, of his brother’s offer to take him as a pupil for half a year, which was all the time he could hope to spare from his craft. During that time, brief as it was, Elihu “became well versed in mathematics, went through Virgil in the original, and read several French books.” Having thus laid the foundation, he returned to his trade, resolved to labour till he should have acquired the means of completing the work; and, in the strong passion for knowledge which devoured him, he actually engaged himself to do the work of two men, in order that, by receiving double wages, he might more quickly realize the desired independence. Yet, even while he was thus doubly tasked, and while his daily hours of labour were no less than fourteen, he contrived to give some time in the mornings and evenings to Latin, French, and Spanish; and he actually procured a small “Greek grammar, which would just lie in the crown of his hat, and used to carry it with him to read during his work—the casting of brass cow bells, a task which required no small amount of attention!”

With the little store which he thus toilfully accumulated, he betook himself to New Haven, the seat of Yale College, although without a hope of being able to avail himself of its literary advantages. Here too he worked almost unaided. He took lodgings at an inn frequented by the students, though too poor to enter the university; and in the course of a few months, by unremitting study, he read through the whole Iliad in Greek, and had made considerable progress in Italian and German, besides extending his knowledge of Spanish and French. Having obtained, soon afterwards, a commercial appointment, he was partially released, for a space, from the mechanical drudgery in which he was so long engaged; and, as he was thus enabled to devote a little more time to his favourite studies, he contrived to learn Hebrew, and made his first advance towards a regular course of Oriental reading. But this interval of rest was a brief one; after a very mortifying failure, he was at last compelled to return once more to the anvil, as his only sure resource against poverty. Still, nevertheless, he toiled on in his enthusiastic struggle for knowledge. Even while engaged in this painful drudgery, “every moment,” says Mrs. Howitt,[199] “which he could steal out of the four-and-twenty hours was devoted to study; he rose early in the winter mornings, and, while the mistress of the house was preparing breakfast by lamplight, he would stand by the mantel-piece, with his Hebrew Bible on the shelf, and his lexicon in his hand, thus studying while he ate; the same method was pursued at the other meals; mental and bodily food being taken in together. This severe labour of mind, as might be expected, produced serious effects on his health; he suffered much from headaches, the characteristic remedy for which were two or three additional hours of hard forging, and a little less study.”

An extract from his own weekly Diary, which Mrs. Howitt has preserved, tells the story of his struggle still more touchingly:—“Monday, June 18, headache; forty pages Cuvier’s Theory of the Earth, sixty-four pages French, eleven hours forging. Tuesday, sixty-five lines of Hebrew, thirty pages of French, ten pages Cuvier’s Theory, eight lines Syriac, ten ditto Danish, ten ditto Bohemian, nine ditto Polish, fifteen names of stars, ten hours forging. Wednesday, twenty-five lines Hebrew, fifty pages of astronomy, eleven hours forging. Thursday, fifty-five lines Hebrew, eight ditto Syriac, eleven hours forging. Friday, unwell; twelve hours forging. Saturday, unwell; fifty pages Natural Philosophy, ten hours forging. Sunday, lesson for Bible class.”

Through these and many similar difficulties, has this extraordinary man found his way to eminence. Without attempting to chronicle the stages of his progress, it will be enough to state that a writer of last year describes him as at present acquainted with eighteen languages, besides his native English, viz:—Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Ethiopic, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Danish, Irelandic, Esthonian, Bohemian, and Polish.[200] He is author of several works, and was for some time Editor of a Journal entitled “The Christian Citizen.”

As in the case of Dr. Lee, no attempt is made, in either of the biographies of Burritt which I have consulted, to define with exactness the degree of his knowledge of each among the various languages which he has learned; but if his proficiency in them be at all considerable, his position among linguists must be admitted to be of the very highest; and as he is still only in his forty-sixth year, it would be difficult to predict what may be the limit of his future successes.

§ VII. LINGUISTS OF THE SLAVONIC RACE.

The extraordinary capacity of the Slavonic races for the acquisition of foreign languages, has long been a subject of observation and of wonder. In every educated foreign circle Russians and Poles may be met, whom it is impossible to distinguish, by their language, or even by their accent, from the natives of the country: and this accomplishment is frequently found to embrace the entire range of the polite languages of Europe. In the higher native Russian society, it is rare to meet one who does not speak several languages, besides his own. Every candidate for public office in Russia, especially in connexion with foreign affairs, must be master of at least four languages, French, German, English, and Italian; and in the Eastern governments of the empire, are constantly to be found employés, who, to the ordinary stock of European languages, add an equal number of the dialects of the Asiatic races subject to the Czar.

In most cases, however, this facility in the use of foreign languages enjoyed by the natives of Russia and Poland, is chiefly conversational, and acquired rather by practice than by study; and, among the numbers who, during the last three centuries, must be presumed to have possessed this gift in an eminent degree, very few appear to have acquired a permanent reputation as scholars in the higher sense of the name.

Unfortunately, too, even were it otherwise, the materials for a history of Russian linguists are extremely scanty. Not one of those who have written upon Slavonic Literature, appears to have adverted to this as a distinct branch of scholarship; Slavonic scholars, too, have met but imperfect justice from the writers on general biography; and thus, especially for one to whom the native sources of information are inaccessible, the rare allusions which can be gleaned from the general history of Slavonic literature supply but an uncertain and imperfect guide,[201] even did opportunities present themselves for pursuing the inquiry.

It would be unpardonable, nevertheless, to pass the subject over in silence; and I can only renew in especial reference to this part of the memoir, the claim for indulgence with which I entered upon this Essay.

Christianity, and with it the first seeds of civilization, reached Russia from Constantinople; and it is not unlikely that the friendly and frequent intercourse which subsisted between the two courts under the first Christian Dukes of Muscovy, Vladimir and Jaroslav, may have led to a considerable interchange of language between the members of the two nations. The many foreign alliances, too, with Constantinople, Germany, Hungary, France, England, Norway, and Poland, which were formed by the children of Jaroslav, may, perhaps, have tended to familiarize his subjects, or at least his court, with some of the languages of Southern and Western Europe. But no record of this—the one bright period in early Russian history—has been preserved, from which any particulars can be gleaned.

The division of Jaroslav’s dominions between his sons at his death, (in 1054,) plunged the Russian nation into a series of civil wars and into the barbarism to which such wars lead, from which it did not begin to emerge till the sixteenth century; and, although a few translations (chiefly theological), from Greek and Latin, were made during this period, yet, from the interruption of all intercourse with foreign countries, it may be presumed that (with the exception, perhaps, of a few enterprising individuals, like the merchant Nikitin,[202] who, in the fifteenth century, traversed the entire East, and penetrated as far as Tibet,) the natives of an empire so completely isolated concerned themselves little about any language beyond their own.

Macarius, who was Metropolitan of Moscow in the middle of the sixteenth century, did something to promote the introduction of foreign letters into Russia,[203] and many translations, not only from the Greek and Latin fathers, but also from the classical writers, were made under his direction. A still greater impulse must have been given to this particular branch of study by the new policy introduced by the Czar Boris Feodorowitsch Godounoff, who not only invited learned foreigners to his court, but sent eighteen young nobles of Russia to foreign countries to study their arts, their literature and their languages.[204]

The results of this more liberal policy, however, had hardly begun to be felt, when the troubles which followed the well-known revolution of Demetrius the Impostor, revived for a time the worst forms of barbarism in the Empire.

The elevation (in 1613,) of the family of Romanoff to the throne, in the person of the Czar Michael, by restoring a more settled government, contributed to advance the cause of letters. The monk Beründa Pameva, published about this time a Slavo-Russian Lexicon, which exhibits in its etymologies an acquaintance with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.[205]

A school was founded at Moscow by the priest-monk Arsenius, for the study of Greek and Latin, in 1643, one of the scholars of which, Theodore Rtischtscheff, founded a society for translating works from foreign languages in 1649; and another school of still more wide-spread influence was opened in the Monastery of Saikonosspassk, in 1682. It is worthy of remark, nevertheless, that the first Russian grammar, that of Ludolf,[206] was printed, not at any native press, but in the University of Oxford.

One of the members of the Translation Society alluded to above, the monk Epiphanius Slawinezki, appears to have been regarded by his contemporaries as a linguist of notable attainments. He published a Greek, Latin, and Slavonic Dictionary, and commenced a Slavonic translation of the Bible from the original Greek, which was cut short by his death in 1676; but there is no reason to believe that he was acquainted with any of the Oriental languages; and the inference to be drawn from the reputation which he enjoyed on so slight a foundation, is far from creditable to the linguistic attainments of his time.

It is only from the reign of Peter the Great that the history of this, as of all other branches of Russian enlightenment, may be properly said to commence. Independently of the encouragement which Peter held out to foreign talent to devote itself to his service, the grand and comprehensive scheme of the academy which he planned under the direction of Leibnitz, contained a special provision for the department of languages.[207] And although it was not formally opened until after Peter’s death, by the Empress Catherine I. (1725), the influence of the policy in which it originated, had made itself felt long before. The Czar’s favourite, Mentschikoff, who from an obscure origin (1674-1729) built up the fortunes of what is now one of the greatest houses of Russia, was master of eight languages, most of which he spoke with perfect fluency. Demetrius Kantemir, (1673-1723), father of the celebrated poet of that name, deserves also to be noticed. He was descended of a Turkish family, and held the office of Hospodar of Moldavia; but he prized his literary reputation more than his rank. He appears to have been a scholar in the highest sense of the name, and was familiarly acquainted, not only with the living languages which are so easily acquired by his countrymen, but with several of the learned languages, both of the East and the West.[208] The poet, his son Antiochus Demetrjewitsch, is also described as “master of several languages, ancient and modern.”[209] The same may be inferred regarding the great traveller, Basilius Gregorowitsch Barskj, who was born at Kiew, in 1702. He must necessarily have acquired, during his long and adventurous wanderings in Europe and the East, a familiarity with many of the languages of the various countries through which he journeyed, although he was prevented from turning it to account upon his return to Russia by his premature death in 1747.[210]

Basilius Nikititsch Tatisscheff, one of the youths sent abroad by Peter the Great, for the purpose of studying in the foreign universities, enjoyed a considerable reputation as a linguist.[211] The History of Russia which he compiled, supposes a familiarity with several Asiatic, as well as European languages; but, as it is not improbable that part of the materials which he employed in this history were translated for his use by assistants engaged for the purpose, it may be doubted whether this can be assumed as a fair test of his own capabilities. The linguistic attainments of the celebrated poet Lemonossoff,[212] although considerable, form his least solid title to fame. His history is so full of interest, that its incidents, almost utterly unvarnished, have supplied the narrative of one of the most popular of modern Russian novels. Born (1711) in a rude fisher’s hut in the wretched village of Denissowka on the shore of the Frozen Ocean, he rose by his own unassisted genius not only to high eminence in science, but to the very first rank in the literature of his native country, of which he may truly be described as the founder; and, although he does not seem to have made languages a special study, he deserves to be noticed even in this department. He was perfect master of Greek, Latin, French, and German; and possessed with other ancient and modern languages, an acquaintance sufficient for all the purposes of study. The attainments of his contemporary, Basilius Petrowitsch Petroff, (1736) were perhaps more profound. He was a scholar of the celebrated convent of Saikonosspassk; and having attracted notice by an ode which he composed for the coronation of the Empress Catherine, he was employed, through the influence of Potemkin, at the English and several other European courts. Through the opportunities which he thus enjoyed, he became one of the best linguists of his day, and we may form an estimate of his zeal and perseverance from the circumstance of his having learned Romaic after his sixtieth year.[213] Gabriel, Archbishop of St. Petersburg, (1775-1801) and one of the most distinguished pulpit orators of Russia, is also mentioned as a very remarkable linguist.[214] His success, however, lay chiefly in modern languages.

The most eminent scholars engaged in the philological and ethnological investigations undertaken by the Empress Catherine II. were foreigners; as, for example, Pallas, and Bakmeister. Some, however, were native Russians, but few details are preserved regarding them. Of Sujeff, who accompanied Pallas in the expedition to Tartary and China, and who translated the journals of the expedition into Russian,[215] I have not been able to obtain any particulars. I have been equally unsuccessful as to the history of Theodore Mirievo de Jankiewitsch, the compiler of the alphabetical Digest of Pallas’s Comparative Vocabulary, described in a former page; but it can scarcely be doubted, from the very nature of his task, that he must have been a man of no ordinary acquirements as a linguist, at least as regards the vocabularies of language.

During the present century a good deal has been done in Russia for the cultivation of particular families of languages. The “Lazareff Institute,” founded at Moscow in 1813,[216] by an Armenian family from which it takes its name, comprehends in its truly munificent scheme of education not only the Armenian, Georgian, and Tartar languages, but also the several members of the Caucasian family.[217] An Oriental Institute[218] on a somewhat similar plan was established at St. Petersburg in 1823. Another was opened at the still more favourable centre of languages, Odessa, in 1829; and a fourth, yet more recently, at Kazan, the meeting point of the two great classes of languages which practically divide between them the entire Russian Empire.[219] Individual scholars, too, have taken to themselves particular branches of the study, some of them with very remarkable success. Timkoffsky, the well-known missionary in China,[220] and Hyacinth Bitchourin, who was head of the Pekin Russian Mission from 1808 to 1812, have contributed to popularize the study of Chinese.[221] Igumnoff of Irkutsch published a useful dictionary of the Mongol: Giganoff, and more recently Volkoff, a dictionary of the Tartar languages; of which Mirza Kazem-Beg, professor of the Turkish and Tartar languages at St. Petersburg, has compiled an excellent grammar. The same service has been rendered to the language of Georgia and its several dialects by David Tchubinoff.[222] The numerous philological writings of Goulianoff, too, and, more lately, Prince Alexander Handjeri’s Dictionnaire Français, Arabe, Persan, et Turc,[223] have established a European reputation.

The present Prefect Apostolic of the Arctic Missions, who is a convert from the Russian Church, is said to be a very extraordinary linguist. Even before he entered upon his missionary charge, in which, of course, the circle of his languages is much enlarged, he habitually heard confessions, at Paris, in six languages.

Perhaps also it may be permitted to enumerate among Russian linguists three eminent literary men who have long been resident at St. Petersburg, and who, although not natives of Russia, may now be regarded as naturalised subjects of the Empire—Senkowsky, Gretsch and Mirza Kazem-Beg.

The first is by birth a Pole;[224] but having early attained to much eminence as an Orientalist, and having travelled with some reputation as an explorer in Syria and Egypt, he obtained the Professorship of Oriental languages in the university of St. Petersburg, in which he has since distinguished himself by an important controversy with the celebrated Von Hammer. Senkowsky, since his residence in St. Petersburg, has made the Russian language his own, and is one of the most prolific writers in the entire range of modern Russian literature. His grammar of that language is among the most intelligible to foreigners that has ever been issued. With most of the languages of Europe, he is said to be perfectly familiar, and his attainments as an Orientalist are of the very highest rank. He is a corresponding member of the Asiatic Societies of most of the capitals of Europe, and publishes indifferently in Polish, Russian, German, and French.

Gretsch, the editor of the well-known St. Petersburg Journal, “The Northern Bee,” is perhaps less profound, but equally varied in his attainments. Although a German by birth, he writes exclusively in Russian, and is the author of the best and most popular extant history of Russian literature; of which Otto’s Lehrbuch der Russischen Literatur, although apparently an independent work, is almost a literal translation.[225]

Mirza Kazem-Beg is of the Tartar race, but a native of Astracan, where his father, a man of much reputation for learning, had settled about the commencement of the century. Soon after the establishment of the professorship of the Turkish and Tartar languages at Kazan, Kazem-Beg was selected to fill it; and, after some time, he was removed to the same chair in the University of Petersburg, which he still holds. Besides the ordinary learned languages, he is acquainted with the Hebrew, Chaldee, Arabic, Syrian, Persian, and Turkish, as well as those of the Tartar stock; and he is described as perfect master of the modern European languages, especially French, Italian, German, and English. The last named language he speaks and writes with great ease and elegance, and has even published some translations into it, as, for example, the “Derbend-Nâmeh.”[226]

The reputation of the Poles as linguists is equally high. So far back as the election of Henry de Valois, Choisnin, who accompanied Henry to Poland, says that of the two hundred Polish nobles who were then assembled, there were hardly two who did not speak, in addition to their native Polish, German, Italian, and Latin.[227] So universal was the knowledge of the last named language that, with perhaps a pardonable exaggeration, Martin Kromer alleges that there were fewer in Poland than in Latium itself who did not speak it.[228]

Nevertheless, few names present themselves in this department which have left any permanent trace in history. Francis Meninski, the learned author of the Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium,[229] was not only a profound scholar in most of the ancient and modern languages, but, from his long residence in the East, and from the office of Oriental Interpreter which he held, first in the Polish and afterwards in the Imperial service, must be presumed to have spoken them freely and familiarly. But Meninski was a native of Lorraine, and by some is believed to have been originally named Menin, and only to have adopted the Polish affix, ski, on receiving from the Diet his patent of naturalization and nobility.

Among the early Polish Jesuits were many accomplished classical and Oriental linguists, but in the absence of any particulars of their attainments, it would be uninteresting to enumerate them. In later times the names of Groddek and Bobrowski may be mentioned as philologers, if not as linguists. The learned Jesuit historian, John Christopher Albertrandy, also, possesses this among many other lilies to fame. He was a most laborious and successful collector of materials for Polish history, in search of which he explored the libraries of Italy, from whence he carried home, after three years of patient research, a hundred and ten folio volumes of extracts copied with his own hand! From Italy he proceeded to Stockholm and Upsala, where many important documents connected with the time of John III. and Sigismond III. are preserved: and here, being, from some unworthy jealousy, only permitted to inspect the desired documents on the condition of not making notes or copies in the library, his prodigious memory enabled him on his return each evening to his apartments, to commit to writing what he had read during the day, and the collection thus formed amounted to no fewer than ninety folio volumes![230] Albertrandy’s historical works are very numerous; and when his labours in this department are remembered, his success as a linguist will appear almost prodigious. Besides Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he knew most of the modern languages, French, English, Italian, German, and Russian, and spoke the majority of them with ease and propriety.

The well-known Polish General, Wenceslaus Rzewuski, devoted the later years of his busy and chequered career to literary, and especially to linguistic, pursuits. He is said to have spoken the learned tongues as well and as freely as his native Polish, and to have been master, moreover, of all the leading modern languages of Europe. The great Oriental Journal published at Vienna, Fundgruben des Orients, which is really what its title implies, a mine of Oriental learning, was for many years under his superintendence.

The Russo-Polish diplomatist, Count Andrew Italinski, is another example of the union of profound scholarship with great talents for public affairs. Born in Poland about the middle of the eighteenth century, Italinski visited in the successive stages of his education, Kiew, Leyden, Edinburgh, London, Paris, and Berlin, and acquired the languages of all those various countries. Being eventually appointed to the Russian embassy in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, he became even more perfect in Italian. In addition to all these languages, he was so thoroughly master of those of the East, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, &c., as to challenge the admiration even of the Easterns themselves.[231]

It is perhaps right to add that the eminent Orientalist of St. Petersburg, Senkowsky, although a Russian by residence and by association, is not only, as I have already stated, of Polish birth, but is, moreover, one of the most popular writers in his native language.

Our notice of Bohemian linguists must be even more meagre.

The early period of Bohemian letters presents no distinguished name. From the extraordinary activity which the Bohemians exhibited in translating the Bible in the fifteenth century, it might be supposed that the study of Greek and Hebrew had already taken root in the schools of Prague. But out of the “thirty-three copies in Bohemian of the entire Bible, and twenty-two of the New Testament,”[232] which are still extant, translated during that period, not one was rendered from the original languages. Blakoslav, the first translator of the Bible from Greek (in 1563) is said to have been a man of “profound erudition.” The same is said of George Strye a few years later; and the Jesuits Konstanj, Steyer, and Drachovsky, are also entitled to notice.

John Amos Komnensky, also, better known by his Latinized name, Comenius, a native of Komna in Moravia, (1592-1671) deserved well of linguistic science, not only by his own acquirements, but by his well-known work, the Janua Linguarum Reserata, which has had the rare fortune of being translated not only into twelve European languages, but into those of several Oriental nations besides. The Janua Linguarum, however, though it attracted much attention at the time, has long been forgotten.

It would be still more unpardonable to overlook the celebrated philologer, Father Joseph Dobrowsky, who, although born in Raab, in Hungary, was of a Bohemian family, and devoted himself especially to the literature and language of his nation. He had just entered the Jesuit society at Brunn at the moment of the suppression of the order. Repairing to Prague, he applied himself for a time to the study of the Oriental languages, but eventually concentrated all his energies on the history and language of Bohemia. His works upon Bohemian history and antiquities fill many volumes; and his Slavonic Grammar may be regarded as a classical work, not only in reference to his native language, but to the whole Slavonian family. Father Dobrowsky survived till the year 1829, engaged until the very time of his death in active projects for the cultivation of the language and literature of the country of his adoption.

But probably the most remarkable name among Bohemian linguists is that of Father Dobrowsky’s friend, the poet Wenceslaus Hanka, born at Horeneyes in 1791. Hanka’s love of languages was first stirred while he was tending sheep near his native village, by the opportunity which he had of learning Polish and Servian from some soldiers of these races being quartered upon his father’s farm. When he grew somewhat older, his parents, in order to save him from the chances of military conscription, (from which, in Bohemia, scholars are exempted) sent him to school; and he afterwards entered the University of Prague, and subsequently that of Vienna. On the foundation of the Bohemian Museum at Prague, he was appointed its librarian, through the recommendation of Father Dobrowsky; and from that time he devoted himself almost entirely to the antiquities, literature, and language of his native country. Besides his own original compositions, Hanka’s name has obtained considerable celebrity in connexion with the controversy about the genuineness of the early Bohemian poems known under the title of “Kralodvor,”—a controversy which, although it has ended differently, was for a time hardly less animated than those regarding the Ossian and Rowley MSS. in England. Notwithstanding the variety of Hanka’s pursuits, and his especial devotion to his own language, his acquisitions in languages have been most various and extensive. He is described in the “Oesterreichische National Encyclopædie” as “master of eighteen languages.”[233]

With the Slavonic race our Catalogue of Linguists closes. Many particulars regarding the eminent names which it comprises are, of necessity, left vague and undetermined. I should have especially desired to distinguish, in all cases, between mere book knowledge of languages and the power of writing, or still more of speaking, them. But unfortunately the accounts which are preserved regarding these scholars hardly ever enter into this distinction. Even Sir William Jones, though he carefully classified the languages which he knew, did not specify this particular; and in most other instances, the narrative, far from particularizing, like that of Jones, the extent of the individual’s acquaintance with each language, even leaves in uncertainty the number of languages with which he was acquainted in any degree.

The very distribution, too, which I have found it expedient to follow—according to nations—has had many disadvantages. But it seemed to be upon the whole the most convenient that could be devised. A distribution into periods, besides that it would have been difficult to follow out upon any clear and intelligible principle, would have been attended with the same disadvantages which characterize that according to nations; while the more strictly philosophical distribution according to ethnographical or philological schools, would have in great measure failed to illustrate the object which I have chiefly had in view. Several of the most eminent of the modern ethnographical writers, and particularly Pritchard, disavow all claim to the character of linguists; and the qualifications of many even of those whose pretensions seem the highest, have, when submitted to a rigid examination, proved far more than problematical.