poets. It has been reckoned that Athenæus quotes above fifteen hundred lost works, and the writers whom he mentions amount to about seven hundred, among which number are included many of whom we should never otherwise have known even the names. There are two French translations of Athenæus, neither of which, however, enjoys much reputation. One, published in a quarto volume in 1680, is by the old doer of all work in that line, Michel de Marolles; on the title-page of a copy of whose version of Martial's Epigrams Menage wrote "Epigrams against Martial." The author of the other, which is in five volumes quarto, Paris, 1785-91, was Lefebre de Villebrune, who was more famous for the quantity than the quality of his scholarship. We understand that a series of translations from Athenæus appeared some years ago in a London periodical publication called 'The Monthly

Mirror.'

Here also we may mention the nine books of Valerius Maximus, entitled De Dictis et Factis Memorabilibus Antiquorum' (Of the Memorable Sayings and Doings of the Ancients), which are, however, of earlier date, having been composed in the early part of the first century of our era, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, to whom they are dedicated. This work appears to be a compilation of anecdotes from elder writers, executed with little exactness; but, as many of the author's sources of information are now lost, his excerpts and abridgments are of considerable value. Valerius Maximus was one of the favourite authors of the middle ages; perhaps, indeed, he was, of all the Roman writers who remained in repute in those dark times, the one nearest to being a classic, at least in date. He writes, however, so unclassically that, notwithstanding the dedication to the immediate successor of Augustus which fronts his book, it has been doubted if he could really have lived quite so close upon the Augustan age. Be this as it may, his bad style and his amusing stories together made him, as we have said, very popular with the reading public of what we call the dark ages. He was accordingly, as might have been expected, one of the first of the ancient

authors put to press after the invention of printing; an edition of his work having been produced at Mentz in 1471, and another at Venice in the same year. Many more editions followed before the expiration of the century.

The Various or Miscellaneous History of Claudius Elianus is another of these ancient collections of remarkable stories. Ælian, who is supposed to have flourished in the third century, was an Italian by birth, being a native of the town of Præneste, not far from Rome; but his work is written in Greek, and in what is considered to be remarkably pure and even elegant Greek. He has been designated for this excellence the honey-tongued Elian. Many of his stories, however, are much more amusing to read than easy to be believed; and upon the whole, like Gellius and Macrobius, and some of the other compilers we have already noticed, his work is more valued for the quotations in which it abounds from older writers now lost, than for what the author has put into it of his own. There is an old English translation of Elian, which appeared in a quarto volume in 1576, under the title of Elian's Registre of Hystories, by Abraham Fleming,' a person by whom our early literature was enriched with many other translations from the learned tongues.

As Macrobius has been called the ape of Aulus Gellius, so Pliny's ape is a like title of honour that has been conferred upon C. Julius Solinus, who probably lived about a century before him, and who is the compiler of a confused miscellany of facts and remarks on all sorts of subjects, to which he originally gave the name of Collectanea Rerum Memorabilium,' but afterwards that of 'Polyhistor,' by which the work is commonly known. As in point of fact Solinus has taken the greater part of his matter from Pliny's Natural History without acknowledgment, he seems very well to deserve the nickname that has been bestowed upon him, or one still stronger. The 'Polyhistor,' however, has been made the subject of a commentary much more ponderous than itself by the great French scholar, Saumaise (in Latin, Salmasius),

whose edition of the work appeared in two volumes, folio, at Paris, in 1629. The term Polyhistor, by the bye, which may be translated the Manifold Historian, has been assumed as the title of one of the ablest and most useful among the critical compendiums of modern times-the comprehensive, accurate, and admirably digested general survey of literature of D. G. Morhof.

John Stobæus, who flourished in the fifth century, is another, and one of the most valuable of these compilers of commonplace books. In his 'Eclogues,' or Collections, which are written in Greek, and which consist chiefly of stories in illustration of the several moral qualities, he has preserved many curious facts, which are not to be found elsewhere. To his books of moral examples two eclogues of facts and observations in physics are subjoined. The whole work is often referred to under the various names of Stobæus's 'Amalthea's Horn,' his "Apophthegms and Principles' (Aropleyμara na、 YñoOnza), his Anthology,' his Florilegium,' his commonplace Book ('Loci Communes Sententiarum '), &c. The work might, without much impropriety, be called Stobæus's Book of Table-talk.

Another celebrated ancient miscellany, of a somewhat similar description, though composed on a different plan, and certainly forming a much more honourable monument of the talent of the author, is the 'Bibliotheca,' or Library, of the learned and able Photius, the Patriarch of Constantinople in the ninth century. This remarkable work--often also entitled the ' Myriobiblon,' or Many Books in One, as the term may be translated-is, in fact, a journal or record of the books perused by the author, embracing in general a summary of the contents of each, and a critical estimate of its value. As many of the works which Photius reviews are now lost, his Library has been the means of preserving a considerable number of historical facts which would otherwise have perished. "By the confession even of priestly hatred," says Gibbon, no art or science, except poetry, was foreign to this universal scholar, who was deep in thought, indefatigable in reading, and eloquent in diction. Whilst he

executed the office of protospathaire, or captain of the guards, Photius was sent ambassador to the Caliph of Bagdad. The tedious hours of exile, perhaps of confinement, were beguiled by the hasty composition of his Library, a living monument of erudition and criticism. Two hundred and four-score writers,- historians, orators, philosophers, theologians,-are reviewed without any regular method; he abridges their narrative or doctrine, appreciates their style and character, and judges even the fathers of the church with a discreet freedom which often breaks through the superstition of the times."

Such miscellaneous collections as those we have been mentioning seem, indeed, to have formed nearly all the popular literature of the middle ages. Every sort of writing ran very much into this compilation of extracts and examples; even critical commentaries and lexicons became, to a great extent, books of table-talk. "The scholars of the present day," says Gibbon in another passage in which he describes the literary condition of the twelfth century, 66 may still enjoy the benefit of the philosophical commonplace book of Stobæus, the grammatical and historical lexicon of Suidas, the Chiliads of Tzetzes, which comprise six hundred narratives in twelve thousand verses, and the commentaries on Homer of Eustathius Archbishop of Thessalonica, who from his horn of plenty has poured the names and authorities of four hundred writers.' The work of Tzetzes, in particular, is nothing else than a miscellany of anecdotes, related in that strange, jolting doggrel called political

verse.

Numerous Latin collections of the same kind also sprang up soon after this time for the use of the Western world. One of the most famous of these was the 'Speculum Historiale,' or Mirror of History, of Vincent of Beauvais, or, as his name is often Latinized, Vincentius Bellovacensis. He was a French Dominican friar, who flourished in the thirteenth century; and he appears to have compiled his collection of true histories principally for the use of the preachers of that age, who, he tells us, for want of better stories wherewith to enliven their

sermons, were generally in the habit of having recourse for that purpose to the fables of Esop. Vincent of Beauvais's book has been several times printed. "Among the Harleian manuscripts in the British Museum," says Warton, in his History of English Poetry, we find a very ancient collection of two hundred and fifteen stories, romantic, allegorical, religious, and legendary, which were evidently compiled by a professed preacher for the use of monastic societies. . . . . In the year 1389 a grand system of divinity appeared at Paris, afterwards translated by Caxton under the title of the COURT OF SAPYENCE, which abounds with a multitude of historical examples, parables, and apologues, and which the writer wisely supposes to be much more likely to interest the attention and excite the devotion of the people than the authority of science and the parade of theology.' "Many obsolete collections of this sort," the writer adds, "still remain, both printed and manuscript, containing narratives, either fictitious or historical,

'Of kings and heroes old,

Such as the wise Demodocus once told

In solemn songs at King Alcinous' feast.'"

But of all these collections the most popular seems to have been that entitled the Gesta Romanorum ;' literally, the Doings of the Romans. The meaning of this title will be understood from the following statement of Warton, who, in a learned and amusing dissertation, has given a complete analysis of this curious compilation :"This work is compiled from the obsolete Latin chronicles of the later Roman, or rather German story, heightened by romantic inventions from legends of the saints, Oriental apologues, and many of the shorter fictitious narratives which came into Europe with the Arabian literature, and were familiar in the ages of ignorance and imagination. The classics are sometimes cited for authorities; but these are of the lower order, such as Valerius Maximus, Macrobius, Aulus Gellius, Seneca, Pliny, and Boethius. To every tale a moralization is subjoined, reducing it into a Christian or moral lesson."