Endowed with this faculty, the value of which is inestimable to those who are engaged in the acquisition of knowledge, and which received continual improvement from the incessant exercise which his imperious desire of learning imposed upon it, it is not surprizing that while still a youth, he was ranked among the most skilful Greek scholars of Europe.

In this important branch of literature, which is at present perhaps too little valued (I mean the profound knowledge of the most beautiful language which has ever been spoken by men, and in which many works of first-rate merit have been transmitted us) the first rank is due to those learned critics, who multiply copies, whe purify them from the stain with which time and ignorance have disfigured them, who explain their difficulties, and facilitate the use of them to others. M. de Villoison, from the entrance of his career, was ambitious of these first honours. Having familiarized himself with printed works, and appropriated their treasures, he sought new stores in manuscripts. He found in the library of St. Germain-des pres, a collection of inedited Greek lexica, among which that of Homer by Apollonius, seized and fixed his attention. He formed the project of publishing it, which he executed in 1773. The work was preceded by ample prolegomena, and accompanied by a multitude of notes and observations, the extensive and profound erudition of which, extremely rare even in laborious men who have grown old in study, appears like a prodigy in a young man, at the age of twenty-two.

This remarkable attainment announced a worthy successor of Casaubon, Salmasius, and those learned and indefatigable critics, whose labours, knowledge, and sagacity have, so to speak, restored life to the great writers of antiquity, and to antiquity itself. The academy of inscriptions and belles letters, to which the editor submitted his work before it was printed, had testified their applause with a sort of enthusiasm, and had with eagerness admitted him as a member, during the preceding year, after having solicited and obtained in his behalf a dispensation of age, without which he could not be elected. The reason assigned is extremely honourable to him; "that having anticipated the age of profound knowledge, it was just that he should enjoy its advantages earlier than other men; and that he should outstrip them in the career of honours, as he had in that of learning."

This distinction, which stands singly in the annals of the academy, was universally approved. All the journals were full of the praises of the young academician, and the flattering hopes which his first production inspired. His brilliant success kindled new ardour in his mind. He redoubled his efforts to maintain and augment the premature honours with which his first literary achievement had been crowned, and he neglected nothing which could contribute to this object. To the slow, difficult and doubtful method of publishing works of considerable extent, he joined the more ready, expeditious, and certain plan of epistolary correspondence. He connected himself with the greater part of his learned contemporaries, both French and foreigners. He submitted to them difficulties which struck him, and which did not ap

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pear to him to have been before considered. He added his own so Jutions. He communicated interesting observations, relative to works in which he knew his correspondents to be engaged, and when those works were published, gratitude required the mention of his name with just applause; his letters were published in journals: learned societies vied with each other in associating him to their members; his celebrity rapidly diffused itself: his opinion acquired fresh weight every day, and soon became an important authority in all that concerned the Greek language.

It is proper to remark that this correspondence, by which he perhaps served literature as effectually as by his published works, and which would have consumed almost all the time of a man of learning, with a memory less faithful, never diverted him from his ordinary studies. He bestowed on it only the time which would have been otherwise destined to his leisure or repose, and if on the one hand he lavished his riches with profusion, he sought on the other, to replace the expense with usury, that future demands might be answered, and the store from which they were supplied, remain unexhausted. It may easily be conceived, that with this readiness of communication, he was not deficient in contributions to the academy which had adopted him; but he soon perceived that it was necessary to employ his treasures with order and a sort of economy, in order to obtain its applause; and that this society, composed of men of great learning in different branches, would attach only that value to erudition, which it should merit by its utility, reserving its principal esteem for the uses to which it may be directed by taste and judgment. This discovery abated by degrees the academic ardour of M. de Villoison, whose turn of mind, and sentiments in matters of erudition, did not perfectly accord with the principles of the academy. After having read some memoirs, which did not obtain all the marks of approbation which he expected, and finding that they were stripped of a part of the learned pomp with which his memory had invested them, and were dismissed to appear under a modest form, by extracts, in the literary history, he suffered several years to elapse without any further communication, and employed his time in preparing an edition of the pastoral of Longus, which Amyot has rendered so happily into our language, with all the simplicity and native graces which we admire in the original.

M. de Villoison poured out his erudition in torrents in this wonderful work. Not content with furnishing such notes as were necessary for the elucidation of the text, he collected a multitude of passages from more ancient Greek authors, which Longus appeared to him to have imitated in turn of phraseology or in particular expressions, and which he placed in comparison with correspondent passages of that author. This labour produced such a mass of observations, all indicating profound philological knowledge, that Longus, adapted to be a little book for the pocket, would have formed an enormous volume for the shelves of a library, had not one of the colleagues of M. de VilJoison, who loved both Longus and the editor, and whom the academy

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had deputed to examine the work, before it should be committed to the press, prevailed on him to retrench half of his remarks. Perhaps half of the remainder might have been spared, without any injury to Longus, and without diminishing the merit of the edition. It was however received with sufficient favour when it appeared in 1778, and no fault could be found with any thing but its superfluity of erudition, a charge which did no injury to that species of reputation of which M. de Villoison was ambitious. He was not however fully satisfied with its success, and thought with reason that he should labour more carefully for the cause of letters, and his own fame, if he could discover and publish some valuable work, not before given to the world. He had examined the libraries of France for this purpose ineffectually, and he formed the project of going to Venice, to search the library of St. Mark, to which he knew that Cardinal Bessarion, one of the first Greeks who rekindled in the West the torch of letters, had left his numerous manuscripts. He set out in 1781, under the patronage of the king, who appointed that the expences of his journey and residence (to which no limits were fixed) should be defrayed by the government.

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The researches of M. de Villoison were not fruitless. He soon discovered several inedited works of the rhetoricians and philosophers, and especially grammarians, which he deemed worthy of publication. He immediately resolved to publish some of these pieces, either entire, or in extracts, and formed the collection which was printed the same year, in two volumes in 4to, under the title of 66 Anecdota Græca." The first of these volumes contains the Ionia, a miscellany compiled by the empress Eudoxia, who professed a warm admiration for philosophy and letters, to which she owed her elevation; whose father, from whom she received her education, was a philosopher; and who nevertheless usurped the throne from her own children, and was herself precipitated from it by her avarice. duced without doubt by the literary reputation of this princess, by the beauty of the manuscript, which is now deposited in the imperial library, and by the praises bestowed on the Ionia by writers, who perhaps had never read it, M. de Villoison neglected to consult his memory, and discovered too late that this vaunted work contained very little which had not been transmitted to us by more ancient conipilers, and could add but little to the knowledge previously possessed. To recompense his learned readers, he gave in the second volume some opuscula of Jamblichus, Porphyry, Procopius of Gaza, Choricius, Diomede, Herodian the grammarian, &c. and many ancient scholia, passages and fragments, which had not been before collected, together with many bibliographical, grammatical, and palæographical notes, which add great value to the publication.

It might even

This part of his work will long merit consultation. have been perused with some degree of interest, if the author had bestowed as much pains on the choice and disposition of his materials, as on the research and collection. We may however reasonably attribute some part of the imperfections which are to be discovered in

this work of M. de V.'s, to the employment furnished by a discovery of greatly superior importance, which he made while engaged in the Anecdota. He found in the library of St. Mark, a manuscript of Homer, which he judged to be of the 10th century, and consequently anterior by two centuries to the commentator Eustathius, and which may have been transcribed from a manuscript much more ancient. This precious volume, which does not appear to have been before examined, contained the whole Iliad, accompanied by a great number of scholia, the whole of which he would gladly have perused in the same moment. But what struck him at first view most powerfully, was the observation of the margins, filled with asterisks, obelisks, and the various marks employed by the ancient grammarians to distinguish the verses of Homer, which they judged to be supposititious, corrupted, or transposed, and those whose genuineness was universally recognised. He found that these different signs were the result, not only of the observations of the most able writers, but of a comparison of the ancient copies of Homer, published at Massilia, Chios, Cyprus, Crete, Sinope, and Argos, and of which the more valuable were indicated in the margin of the manuscript. He experienced fresh satisfaction when he perceived that the scholia were an abridgment of those of Zenodotus, Aristophanes, Aristarchus, Cretes, Mallotes, Ptolemy of Ascalon, and several other celebrated grammarians, who had consecrated their labours to the purification of the text of Homer; that they presented the most compleat and interesting critical history of that text which has descended to us; that they contained citations from a considerable number of works now lost; and furnished many elucidations, relative usages, manners, mythology, and geography, though grammatical questions were their principal subject. He hastened to announce his discovery to the learned part of Europe, and succeeded in communicating even to the coolest minds, a portion of the enthusiasm by which he was seized. The hopes which he excited, were not disappointed. They were fully justified by the publication of the work, which appeared in 1788, accompanied by learned prolegomena, consisting of observations often new and cu rious, and in almost every instance necessary to his subject, and in which his various and profound erudition leaves no obscurity without elucidation, and difficulty without solution.

This precious edition of the Iliad, the place of which no preceding edition can supply, and which is to be regarded as one of the most valuable presents made by erudition to literature during the last century, assures to M. de Villoison a never-failing title to its gratitude. Accordingly the learned of all countries vied with each other in their applauses, and no discordant voice troubled the unanimous concert of praise, as flattering as it was merited. The satisfaction which this brilliant success must have given to M. de V. was not however long unmixed. He could not see without sentiments of pain the spirit of system abusing his discoveries to attack the glory of the father of poetry; and perverting the critical marks affixed to a great number of verse in the Iliad, in support of the daring position, that parts of

this poem, even entire books, were the work of ancient rhapsodists, and the first editors; and that the Iliad and Odyssey, consisting of nearly 30,000 verses, had descended to posterity by means of oral tradition, and were not committed to writing till several centuries after the age of Homer. M. de Villoison could not hear with patience of these bold and absurd systems; and the idea that he had unintentionally furnished the basis on which they were constructed, and the weapons by which their authors pretended to defend them, troubled him so much, that he almost repented of having published his work. More than once he was tempted to combat this literary impiety, but was restrained by the fear of giving it greater importance, and of propagating it by endeavouring to crush it; and he justly thought it better to leave the care of Homer's fame to the admiration of past and future ages.

M. de Villoison had advanced but a little way in printing the Iliad, when he yielded to the invitation of the duke and duchess of SaxeWeimar, who honoured him with their particular esteem, and quitting Venice, repaired to their capital. On his arrival at Weimar, he could think of no better way of paying his court to his illustrious patrons than by forming a collection of various readings and emendations of the text of several Greek authors, in the form of letters, addressed to various celebrated persons. It was natural that the work of a learned Greek scholar should appear under the auspices of a prince who had testified so much esteem for him; but it occasioned some surprize, to see a Frenchman in the 18th century, as a flattering mark of homage, address a young princess, who did not pique herself on the knowledge of Latin, and still less of Greek, in a long Latin epistle, full of quotations, and critical disquisitions, devoted entirely to an examination of the Dionysiacs of Nonnus, and no less foreign to her in its object than its language. This collection was printed at Zurich in 1783, under the title of Epistolæ Vimarien

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To the study of the profane writers, M. de Villoison had joined at intervals that of the sacred books. He had learned Hebrew, and was acquainted with all the writings extant in the language of Moses. Having found in the library of St. Mark a very liberal translation of part of the old testament, made by a Jew in the ninth century, he laboured during his stay at Weimar, to put it into a state fit for publication, and on his return to France in 1784, he remained some time at Strasburg for the purpose of having it printed there under his own inspection. The notes which he added, are commonly short, substantial, and useful; and the preface is at once learned, judicious, instructive, and confined within proper bounds. At the end of this preface he announces his approaching departure for Greece, the tour of which the government had just authorized him to make. Scarcely indeed had he reached Paris, when he had the resolution to snatch himself a second time from the arms of a young, interesting, and virtuous woman (Madle. Caroline de Newkart) whom he had married a