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French Latinists under Louis the Fourteenth.

WHATEVER be said of the making of Latin verses considered as a means of education, it will hardly be denied that it is an exercise very pleasurable to the initiated. It in truth happily combines some of the most seemingly discordant of intellectual pleasantnesses. There is the same sort of satisfaction as in working out an interesting equation; as great accuracy of rule; as little room for vague self-approbation in face of facts that do not warrant it; as hearty a pleasure when what has been looked for is caught at last; while over and above this there is the charm which an equation lacks, the charm of dealing with thoughts, of having for subject-matter things of grace and beauty, with sometimes the additional zest of forcing the dead old tongue to lend itself to the treatment of subjects modern and strange to it, of grafting on the astonished old stock novas frondes et non sua poma. We should be very far from ranking verse-making very high among intellectual exercises; it is certainly amongst the most agreeable. In England at the present day it is however quite out of favour with the many, and yet at the same time it is perhaps more in honour with the small class of "myste" than it ever was with any class of men elsewhere. It is not, to be sure, worshipped by them as men once worshipped it, but it is better understood and more perfectly practised, and in consequence there is a tendency among scholars of this class to look down on former verse-writing, particularly as practised abroad, and to believe that not only as poetry, but also in point of scholarship, the productions of former days were very poor stuff, and the erudition wide-spread rather than deep.

This is, however, we think, far too severe a judgment. The Latinists of former days flew at game far too high for them. They made of verse-writing a serious occupation, instead of what it should be, an intellectual diversion. They carried their admiration of the practice to an absurd height. They overdosed the world with its productions, and the world has in revenge forgotten them, relegated their works to the dust of its top shelves, and so made it possible that after the lapse of years they should

be considered deficient in that which they cultivated and honoured beyond all things of this world-and sometimes of Heaven besides. The ascendancy of Latin verse is in truth a forgotten or but partially remembered chapter of history, and by no means an uninteresting one, revealing as it does a state of mind and taste so immeasurably removed from ours.

In England, said now to be the one country of the earth where it is honoured at all,* verse making never received its full honours. English literature developed early, and so won the affections of the nation as to tolerate no rival. Accordingly, during the days when the chief wit or writer of the day was here as elsewhere a sort of demigod, he was always a writer of English. Dryden, Addison, and Pope, feared no rival in the shape of a Latin versifier. In school and college indeed Latin verse was honoured as it is honoured still, but beyond the limits of school and college the Muse seldom strayed. Sir T. More, Crashaw, Milton, Addison, Gray, and other exceptional cases occur to the mind, but those most ready to sneer at the practice never charged it on an extensive class. Witness the pedagogue's lament in the "Dunciad :

Pity the charm works only in our wall,

Lost, lost, too soon in yonder house or hall.
There truant Wyndham every Muse gave o'er,
There Talbot sunk and was a wit no more,
How sweet an Ovid Murray was our boast,
How many Martials were in Pulteney lost. +

How different was the state of things abroad! Italy, which has a patriotic connection with the Latin tongue, went fairly Latinmad at the renaissance, crowned successful bards by the hands of its senates with laurel crowns, and almost worshipped Petrarch for his now forgotten epic. Nor did the passion speedily die out. Till the universal upturning of all things at the end of the last century it was exceeding vigorous, and still in fact flourishes not a little ; while amongst the votaries it has given to verse-writing are men of all ranks up to the Papacy. Yet it was not in Italy that Latin verse reached its highest honour. It was, Mr. Farrar

* Essays on a Liberal Education.

+ iv. 165-70. Scotland showed more honour to Latin verse than England. The Delicia Poetarum Scotorum, published in 1637, contains poems by thirty-seven authors, and it may be satisfactory to Scotchmen to know that the chief of them, George Buchanan, was spoken of in France as "Poetarum nostri sæculi facile princeps," on the title-page to an edition of his works at Paris.

Urban VIII. was the author of a volume of Latin poems, some at least of which were first published during his Pontificate.

thinks, in Portugal:* we should rather say in France. In behalf of the former country witnesses can be called in the shape of "seven quarto volumes that enshrine the remains of fifty-nine poets;" but on the other hand we may bring forward a list now before us, which, dealing only with the age of Louis XIV., and with the more illustrious poets in it, yet names a hundred and five. Nor is this all. Latin verse ambitioned in France, and for a time seemed to gain, a position not thought of elsewhere. It claimed to reign not along with, but instead of, vernacular poetry; to be not a garden plant, but the material of forests; not an accomplishment, but the staple of a literature. In France, then, we may best study its reign, and here too we find a useful guide ready to hand to aid us to shape the disjecta membra of our subject into something of a whole, namely, the Abbé Vissac in his "Latin Verse in France during the age of Louis XIV.,"+ a work valuable not only for its classification of the literature, and for its catalogues of authors and of their works, but also for numberless little anecdotes and facts that serve as straws to show how the wind blew; to let us see not only what the writers wrote, but also what the public thought of it; without a knowledge of which point we should but half understand the subject.

Scholastic institutions then, in the days of Louis XIV. were, of course, almost without exception, given over to the Muses. Latin verse was the object of daily practice, of ambition, and admiration. The best maker of verses was the cock of the school; when a verse author of repute came on a visit a holiday was granted to look at him; whenever the school or college appeared in public it was in verse; for recreation the pupils. witnessed Latin plays; all the great events of contemporary history they sang in Latin. And almost every event was thought great enough to set Hippocrene a-running. A victory, a truce, the birth of a prince, or the the death of a princess, called forth epinicia, genethliaca, epicedia, throughout the length and breadth of the land. And besides such occasions there were local events of the same complexion to furnish their matter to local Muses, the creations, the deaths, the visits of Bishops, or the events. in the family of the local Seigneur. To be ready for any of these, boys had to be constantly practised in all the varieties of song

* Essays on a Liberal Education, p. 237.

+ De la poésic Latine en France au siècle de Louis XIV. Paris, Aug. Durand. 1862.

Just as in England Campion welcomed Mary to the throne in the name of the schools of London.

which they severally required. They were to be ready at any moment to undertake, besides the species above incidentally mentioned, Propemptica, Soteria, Inauguralia, Noniæ, Pompæ Funebres, Epithalamia, and Epitaphs, to say nothing of Eclogues, Idyls, Elegies, Satires, Odes, Epigrams, and such poetic diversions as Echo, Cento, or Versus Monosyllabi, Correlativi, Leonini, Serpentini, Retrogradi, and Cancri. And the juvenilis nisus musa were put before the public not only by declamation at exhibitions, and commemorations, and other great occasions, but more widely and enduringly by being printed and published. Not mere selections from the productions of a long series of years, as our Arundines Cami or Musa Etonenses, but all the productions on some set occasions; all the addresses of welcome to this Prince-Bishop, or of lament for that defunct warrior, were sent out; or sometimes, again, the verse performances of such a class in such a year. There must have been at least some good verse where such a course was possible.

The colleges which took the lead in all this were those of the Jesuits, and unquestionably the dominion of Latin verse in France was owing very specially to the number of institutions there belonging to this Order. Its members were strictly enjoined not to be satisfied to act as grindstones to their pupils' wit, but to aim at excellence in composition themselves and to fire by imitation. Accordingly they set to work with what was soon a traditionary spirit amongst them, to make themselves scholars and poets; and they were further enjoined not to spare printer'sink in making known the fruit of their labours. They had also almost wholly in their hands an important class of literature, the dramatic. It was in their schools chiefly, if not solely, that the boys were recreated on great occasions with Latin plays, composed for them by their masters, and generally afterwards published.

In school and college, then, the making of Latin verse ran little chance of being forgotten, but school and college do not accurately mirror the world of men. No; but in this case the world differed from school and college, not by being behind-hand in zeal for Latin verse, but by claiming to be before them in Latinity. The men of school and college were in the phraseology of the time "inhabitants of Lower Latium ;" the upper and serener regions were reserved for those whose taste was not degraded by the drudgery of teaching. It was loudly proclaimed in fact that the triumph of good taste and good scholarship required the total expulsion from Parnassus of the pedagogue element. When

such language was possible there must have been a wide-spread and well-known body of Latinists throughout the land. In fact, on the said Parnassus every rank was, as in Italy, represented. Of the Clergy there were Bishops and Cardinals, while Priests both Secular and Regular published by scores. Physicians were great poets-they claimed an hereditary right to be so; for was not Esculapius the son of Apollo? Lawyers begged permission to vary the dry pursuits of Themis with the sweet inspirations of the Muses. Men of letters of course fell in with so literary a stream; Chancellors and Presidents swelled the tide,-till one who defended the cause of Latin verse during its decline in the eighteenth century, dared to deny that during the age preceding the author of any one work likely to be immortal had been free from at least the ambition of making verses.

The writers then were legion; and their writing was but the result of previous reading. They were brimming over with Virgil and Horace, Ovid and Martial; they knew them by heart, and spoke in their words not only when composing, but in the ordinary occurrences of life. One having fallen asleep during Tenebræ in Holy Week, when he awoke and found it at an end, exclaimed with Martial that this was truly the sleep, “qui faciat breves tenebras." In the same poet another offered to find a verse suitable to whatever subject was named to him; and when his challenge was taken he fulfilled his promise on the spot. A third consoled himself during a long Ash Wednesday sermon by muttering with Virgil

Hi motus animorum atque hæc certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt ; *

while a doctor of the anti-tobacco belief sustaining his opinions in public thesis glided naturally into Horace and mythology: "Illi robur et æs triplex circa pectus erat qui tabaci fumum voluit experiri," after which he went on to denounce the weed, as "cicutis nocentius," the pouch as Pandora's box, the pipe as a tube of Styx.

This being their frame of mind, verse-writing became easy, and accordingly on all occasions they wrote verses. The departure of a friend, or his return from a journey, his sickness or his recovery, a birth or a death, an invitation to dinner, or the giving of a reproof-all alike furnished occasion for an Ode, an Idyl, or an Epigram; Eclogues too, and Elegies and Fables flowed from their ready pens for no other reason than that their flowing Georg. iv. 87-8.

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