¹ See the quotations from German teachers prefixed to the S cripta Selecta, Teubner ed., two vols, Leipzic, 1887; Reinach, Cornélie ou le Latin sans Larmes, Preface.

² Passage quoted by Izora Scott, Controversies over the Imitation of Cicero, N. Y. 1910.

³ Essays, Oxford, 1889, I. 124-131.

⁴ C. Dejob, Marc-Antoine Muret, Paris, 1881. Upon this accurate and useful work I have depended almost wholly for the facts of Muret's life.

⁵ In an article, “ ‘Attic’ Prose in the Seventeenth Century” (Studies in Philology, April 1921) I discussed the theory of this Anti-Ciceronian movement of 1575-1660, and especially its relations to its classical models and authorities. An object of the present study is to show its relations with the movement of ideas in its age. An article, “Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon,” in Schelling Anniversary Papers (1923), carries the history into the generation following Muret. Another study, “Juste Lipse et le Mouvement Anti-Cicéronien” (Revue du Seizième Siècle, July 1914), now calls for revision at several points.

⁶ The best studies of the Libertine movement will be found in Strowski, Pascal et son Temps, vol. 1; Perrens, Les Libertins en France au XVI^e Siècle, Paris, 1899; Charbonnel, La Pensée Italienne au XVI^e Siècle ei le Courant Libertin, Paris, 1919. The roots of this movement in pure philosophy lie too deep for our present purpose, but may be studied in Charbonnel. Muret's real interest was in popular philosophy and practical culture. It should be added here that all the “strong wits” were not professed libertines. In the best of them—Montaigne, Lipsius, Sir Thomas Browne, etc.—skepticism and stoicism intermingle in always varying relations.—Such catalogues as I speak of in the text will be found in Lipsius' Institutio Epistolica and often in his letters, and in Naudé, Bibliografia Politica, p. 25, Syntagma de Studio Liberali, pp. 77-80. (References are to a volume called Grolii et Aliorum Dissertationes, Amsterdam 1645.) Compare the famous gallery of portraits in a room in Gui Patin's Paris house, described by him in a letter of 1650, December 1 (see below, p. 307).

Accounts of the rise of rationalism during the sixteenth century and after will be found in the Introduction to M. Villey's Les Sources et L'évolution des Essais de Montaigne, and in C. Nisard's Histoire de la Lilt. Fr. (esp. I. 428 ff., and II. 66-70), which seems to me to give a better account of the relation of ideas to letters in the period than any of the later works.

⁷ See a letter addressed to Muret in 1578 by the German “Nation” at Padua (Ep. 75 in vol. II of Leipzic ed. 1629; ed. Frotscher, II. 212); also a letter of a former colleague at Padua, dated 1564 (ed. Leipzig 1629, I., Epp. 1, 45).

⁸ The Arte of Rhetorique, ed. Oxford 1909, p. 5.

⁹ The following words of a rhetorician to a philosopher are worthy of being pondered by all who are interested in education: “Now, what you write about ideas I am very loth to question, seeing that you are a learned man and have great reputation. But how can you think that there is an idea of style innate in your mind? As for me, I can only declare that I saw no form of style, no image of discourse in my mind until I had formed one there by attentively reading the ancients for many years and by practising long. Before I did this, I used to look into my mind and seek as from a mirror some shape from which I could fashion what I wished. But there was no image there. And when I tried to write, I was borne along at random without law or principle of judgment. None of those things that you mention, no idea, no image, guided me.” (Bembo to Pico, Rome, Calends of January, 1513.)

¹⁰ Works, ed. Giles, London 1864, III. 211. The rhetorical tendency of all learning is admirably illustrated in the introductory discourse of Lorenzo Valla's Elegantiae Linguae Latinae. “Who,” he asks, “are the men who have been great philosophers, orators, jurists, in short great authors? Why, only those who have striven to speak well…. If we will only strive heroically enough, the Roman speech, and along with it every branch of learning, will revive and flourish in its old splendor.”

¹¹ See Croll, “Juste Lipse et le Mouvement Anti-Cicéronien,” p. 211. Even in the eighties, Lipsius' two letters to Montaigne show caution and concealment.

¹² “As in the study of theology we follow the divine Thomas Aquinas, and in philosophy Aristotle, so in the humanities Cicero must be regarded as our peculiar and pre-eminent leader…But some, misguided by a willful and self-formed taste, have gone astray, preferring a style totally different from that of Cicero; such an erratic course is quite at variance with the genius of our institutions and hostile to the spirit of prompt obedience” (Qu. by W. S. Monroe, Comenius, N. Y. 1900, pp. 7-8).

¹³ Best described in his De Disciplinis, 1531.

¹⁴ The excellent work of L. Clément on Henri Estienne (Paris 1899) has a brief discussion of the influence of law-Latin on the French and modern-Latin vocabulary, and the ideas on this subject derived by Estienne from Budé. Concerning Cujas' influence in the movement for freer vocabulary, see below. Budé's Forensia (1544), his Notes on the Pandects, and his De Studio Litterarum (1527) will have to be studied carefully by any one who should wish to consider the subject.

¹⁵ The following references will be useful in the investigation of the part played by Plautus in the Anti-Ciceronian triumph:—H. Estienne, De Plauli Latinilate (appended to his De Latinitate Suspecta, 1575); Lipsius, Quaestiones Epistolicae (1574), introd. epistle; Sir Thomas Browne, letter addressed Amico Opus Arduum Meditanti, Works, ed. Wilkins, IV, 291-3; Naudé, De Studio Liberali; Balzac, letter (in Latin) in his Epp. Sel., published with Vavasseur's De Ludicra Dictione, Leipzic 1722.

¹⁶ I have used the Teubner volume of Scripta Selecta wherever possible. For material not there included, I refer to the two volumes of Orations, Letters, and Poems, published at Leipzic in 1629, “juxta edüionem postremam Ingoldsiadianam.” The publication of Muret's works after his death seems to have been in the hands of German Jesuits. Unfortunately the modern edition of Muret's collected works, ed. by Frotscher, has not been available.

¹⁷ Scripta Selecta, Orat. I, II; ed. Leipzic 1629, I, Orat. ii, iii. The following is a period from the 1555 oration: A quibus ego quoniam ita dissentio, ut ex omnibus, qui se aliquid docere profitentur, horum vel gravissimum munus esse contendam, neque ullos esse, qui aut laborum plus perferant, aut majores in republica pariant fructus, doctrinae denique a nullo hominum genere majorera aut copiam requiri aut varietatem arbitrer: constitui hodierno die, Patres amplissimi vosque ceteri viri ornatissimi, earn mihi ad dicendum materiam sumere, et nobilissimam studiorum partem, quantum id quidem in me positum erit, a contemptu atque ab intolerabili eruditorum hominum insolentia vindicare.

¹⁸ Bembo, who had died seven years before, had been official historiographer of Venice.

¹⁹ Dejob (Chap. 6) has strangely distorted the meaning of Muret's Venetian utterances in a mistaken effort to find a consistency in his career. The only consistency to be found is a progressive change.

²⁰ Dejob, pp. 48-50

²¹ See Scaligerana II; also an unpublished biography of Muret by Colletet, used by Dejob (p. 47).

²² The best description of the effect of the Catholic revival upon the arts is in Marcel Reymond, De Michel-Ange à Tiepolo, Paris 1912, Chapters 1 and 2.

²³ So, for instance, Norden, Die Antike Kunstprosa, and 779, n. 1, where many Jesuit rhetoricians are cited; and Borinski, B. Gracian u.d. Hofliteratur in Deutschland, Halle a.S., 1894, p. 54.

²⁴ See Arturo Graf, H Fenomeno del Secentismo, in Nuova Antologia CXIX (1905), 372 ff. Graf himself thinks that Jesuitism had little to do with Secentismo.

²⁵ See Caussin, De Eloq. Sacra et Humana, Paris 1619 (largely an attempt to correct the prevailing Anti-Ciceronianism of the seventeenth century), and Vavasseur, De Novo Dicendi Genere, an oration of 1636, in his Opera Omnia, Amsterdam 1709 (devoted, like Vavasseur's other rhetorical works, to the same purpose). Both writers had a considerable part in correcting the errors of secentismo and establishing the dominion of “good taste,” though their use of the Latin language has concealed their true importance from most modern critics.

²⁶ See a passage from Bouhours, Entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène, quoted in Croll, “ ‘Attic’ Prose in the Seventeenth Century,” p. 99; also quotations from a Louvain Jesuit on same page.

²⁷ Scripta Selecta, Orat. iv-vi; ed. Leipzic 1629, I. Orat. 7-9.

²⁸ See a letter from Martinus Belliviceius, a former colleague of Muret's at Padua (ed. Leipzic 1629, I, Epp. I, 45.)

²⁹ Ed. Leipzic 1629, I. Orat. 15: “On the history of his intellectual pursuits, and the necessity of uniting eloquence and the other subjects of study with jurisprudence.”

³⁰ Ed. Leipzic 1629, I. Orat. 15-18. These orations, and the oration of November 1565 described below, the most significant of all in the history of his ideas, written in an un-Ciceronian style and with a spirit and zest which he had not displayed before, are not included in the Scripta Selecta by which Muret is now chiefly known; (the omission of course gives a disproportionate value to the perfunctory orations of 1564 and 1565 (March) and the commanded discourse of 1575 on “the excellence of literary studies.”

³¹ Ed. Leipzic, I. Orat. 10, “On the knowledge of oneself, and on all the faculties of the human mind.”

³² It could be said without much exaggeration that the whole subject-matter of Book I and II of Aristotle's Rhetoric is propositions (), or Commonplaces; for propositions are the elements of logic or dialectic; and Aristotle's purpose is to establish rhetoric in an intimate, insoluble connection with dialectic. It is for this reason that his treatise was taken as the foundation of Anti-Ciceronian theory in the seventeenth century. (On this point, see “ ‘Attic’ Prose, etc.” p. 103-4).—The passages on which Muret particularly depends, in the passage quoted, are I, ch. 3, sect. 8-9, and perhaps II, ch. 21 (on the maxim, or ).

³³ The second Book (De Augmentis VI), 3, where the discussion is extended by the addition of fifty pages meant to supplement Aristotle's Rhetoric I, chs, 6 and 7. See also the passage on Civil Knowledge touching Negotiation or Business (De Augmentis VIII, 1 and 2), where Bacon employs an extraordinary number of English names to describe what in the Latin version are called axiomata, aphorisma, or sententiae: sentences politic, axioms, aphorisms, cautions, precepts, positions (cp. Aristotle's , I, 2, 21, and elsewhere); all of these and their Latin equivalents being in effect renderings either of Aristotle's or of his . Of course almost all of Bacon's own works illustrate the method of writing by aphorisms or “commonplaces.”

³⁴ Ed. Leipsic 1629. I, Orat. 17.

³⁵ Ibid., Orat. 18.

³⁶ See above, pp. 269-270.

³⁷ In the Preface to his Quaestiones Epistolicae (1574). On the significance of this see Croll, “Juste Lipse, etc.” p. 211.

³⁸ Ed. Leipzic 1629, I, Epp. 45, p. 322-3.

³⁹ Op. cit., p. 242.

⁴⁰ Through the honorable dismissal of an old Professor, Cesareo Cosentino, whose noon-hour lectures had long been the scene of notable undergraduate disorder.

⁴¹ A letter written to a former pupil indicates the spirit in which Muret went at his new task. After relating the circumstances of his appointment, he says that the additional money has prevailed with him. He will return for a time to those congerrones of his youth, Horace and Cicero—et mihi quodammoio repuerascere videbor. He adds that those who had expected to hear him continue his exposition of the Pandects are raising a tumult. (Scripla Selecta, II. 65.)

⁴² Scripta Selecta, Orat. VII; ed. Leipzic 1629, I. Orat. 21.

⁴³ See Aristotle's Rhetoric, Book I, ch. 2., § 7, and I, ch 4, § S. Bacon frequently refers to this doctrine of Aristotle's.

⁴⁴ Ed. Leipzic 1629, I. Orat. 22. (January 1572 O. S. 1573 N. S.). The others mentioned are Orations 19 and 20. (December 1571 and May 1572.)

⁴⁵ Concerning this phase of libertine thought, see Janet, Histoire de la Science Politique, Book III, ch. 2, L'école de Machiavel; Charbonnel, R., La Pensée Italienne au XVI^e Siècle et le Courant Libertin (Paris 1919), Chapter IV, pp. 389-437. (Perrens, Les Libertins en France, Paris 1899, does not deal much with political ideas.) Fra Paolo, Lipsius, Scioppius, Naudé, Gracian are good representatives. Bacon, in spite of what is said of him above, was strikingly Machiavellian, and Descartes somewhat less so.

⁴⁶ See Janet, as above, pp. 95-98; Charbonnel, p. 53, p. 58, pp. 617-620; Naudé, Considerations politiques sur les Coups d'état (1639), III. 379-392.

⁴⁷ Bacon's opinion is exactly representative: “For although it [the Art of Eloquence[ is inferior to wisdom…, yet with people it is the more mighty” (Adv. of Learning II, Rhetoric); see also his letter to Fulke Greville (signed with Essex' name), advising him about his studies.

⁴⁸ A single sentence will illustrate: “O Catherine, Queen-mother, most blessed of women, who, after she had by her admirable foresight and anxious care preserved for so many years his kingdom for her son, her son for his kingdom, at last beheld this son effectively a king.” (O felicissimam Catharinam, regismatrem, quae, cum tot annos admirabile prudentia parique sollicitudine regnum filio, filium regno conservasset, turn demum secure regnantem filium adspexit. Scripta Selecta I. 197.) The sentence shows exactly the truth of the paradox that a style planned to express acuteness and subtlety of thought falls into a tumor and violence far worse than the Ciceronian emptiness when it is used for the purposes of oratory. The vices of sermon-style in the reign of Louis XIII and in seventeenth-century England are to be accounted for in this way.

⁴⁹ For a fuller statement of the relations between seventeenth-century and first-century literature, see “ ‘Attic’ Prose in the Seventeenth Century,” pp. 120-127.

⁵⁰ The fact that Muret was Montaigne's house-tutor for a time, when Montaigne was a boy, probably has no especial relevance.

⁵¹ See the orations for these courses, ed. Leipzic 1629, II. Orat. 4 and 5; not in Scripta Selecta.

⁵² Ed. Leipzic 1629, II. Orat. 6, Ingressurus Explanare M. T. Ciceronis libros de Officiis.

⁵³ Ed. Leipzic 1629, II. Orat. 3 (misdated 1585).

⁵⁴ Ed. Leipzic 1629, II. Orat. 12; Scripta Selecta, Orat. II. Similar sketches, possibly influenced by Muret's, will be found in Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Book One, “the first distemper of learning” (his sketch of the causes of Ciceronianism in the sixteenth century, with the interesting supplement to it in De Aug., noting the rise of the Anti-Ciceronian movement and the imitation of Seneca and Tacitus since 1600), and at greater length, in Barclay's Satyricon, ed. Leyden 1674, pp. 90-95.

⁵⁵ Of course this late term does not appear in Muret, Bacon, or Barclay.

⁵⁶ This association of Ovid with the writers of the Silver Age is interesting; in the seventeenth century Ovid and Sallust were generally recognized as the only Augustans who displayed the traits of style of the succeeding century, and were therefore worthy to rank with Tacitus, Seneca, and Lucan as models of “Attic” style.

⁵⁷ XV, 2; in Scripta Selecta, Chap. 58.

⁵⁸ Institutio Epistolica, esp. the concluding chapter. Barclay (Satyricon, pp. 96-7) gives a similar method of teaching as his own. In fact, it may be considered the typical Anti-Ciceronian method.

⁵⁹ Ruhnken, quoted in Scripta Selecta II, p. 203, n. 3. It was Scioppius, in his De Stilo Historico, p. 64, who originally expressed the idea. (See also his De Rhetoricarum Exercitationum Generibus).

⁶⁰ This oration (ed. 1629, II. Oration 14) is dated November 4, 1580 (the day following his first Tacitus oration, II, 13, in ed. 1629) in the early, and hence also in the modern, editions; but for a number of reasons it seems to me likely that it was delivered in March 1581, at the opening of a second term of reading in the Annals, probably in the Second Book. In November 1581 he continued with the Third Book, thus completing a triennium in one author: his favorite method, as he has recorded. As regards the disorders in his classroom, Norden attributes them to Jesuit instigation; but Norden has falsely read the Jesuit literary doctrine as uniformly Augustan and Ciceronian: see above p. 6-7. At this time Muret's most intimate friends and some of his favorite former pupils were important members of the Order.

⁶¹ E.g., in the essays of Bacon, Malvezzi, and Gracian.

⁶² An excellent Tacitean “point”: Dum se bonos haberi putant, boni fiunt.

⁶³ Iidem si turpitudinem suam palam esse videant, jam famae securi, quae palam dici vident, palam quoque faciunt, et famam dum bonam desperaat, malam negligunt.

⁶⁴ The idea of a style meant for readers, as contrasted with hearers, was new and anticipates Attic theory of the seventeenth century. See ‘ “Attic’ Prose in the Seventeenth Century,” p. 95, n. 18.

⁶⁵ On Bacon and Tacitus see my article: “Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon” (Schelling Anniversary Papers, 1923).

⁶⁶ Scripta Selecta, Orat. 17; ed. 1629, II. Orat. 16. See also his letter concerning the collection and publication of his own letters (ed. 1629, I. Epp. I, 1; Scripta Selecta, Ep. 1). Those who may wish to study the new literary significance of the letter at the beginning of the seventeenth century will find interesting points in the following: Lipsius, Institutio Epistolica (Works 1675, vol. II), esp. pp. 1083-6; Estienne Pasquier, Lettres, Book I, 1 (Oeuvres ed. Amsterdam 1723, vol. II), citing Erasmus, Budé, and Politian as models; also, Book X, Letter 12, citing Cyprian, Jerome, and (chiefly) Seneca; a very interesting letter of Donne (Gosse's Life and Letters, I, 122-3), and another extraor dinary one, I, 168; Hall, Dedic. of his Decades of Epistles; Bacon, Dedic. of the second (1612) ed. of his Essays. In all of these the novelty of the letter as a literary genre is insisted on or implied. As an intimate and “moral” form, like the essay, it was in fact new, and was associated in all minds with the “Attic” tendency. See a passage in Fournel's De Malherbe à Bossuet, p. 54.

⁶⁷ There is no way of explaining Scaliger's various opinions about Muret except by assuming a constant interplay of malice and intelligent admiration in his mind. Thus he says that Muret could write excellent prose style (it is clear that he means Ciceronian excellence), if only he had not chosen sometimes to write in different modes; yet there are sayings in the Scaligerana that show how well he understood Muret's later sylistic aims and how much he admired his later style. Thus Scaligerana II (1668), p. 235-6: Muretus oplime percepit mentem Aristotelis in Rhetoricis, and Quid elegantius ejus oratione de Tacito et liis?

⁶⁸ See above, note 59.

⁶⁹ Another interesting parallel in the criticism of Lipsius:— D. Nisard (himself a Ciceronian of the old school) commends the style of Lipsius' first work as the best he ever wrote (see his excellent work, Lipse, Scaliger, Casaubon, Paris 1852.) Lipsius' conversion by Muret followed soon after its publication and he always looked on it as a youthful error.

The world is slow to think a man repents;

And this old world is mainly in the—wrong.

⁷⁰ I, 23.

⁷¹ Quoted by Charbonnel, La Pensée Ital. et le Courant Libertin, p 102.

⁷² Erasmus, Rabelais, Aretino, Machiavelli, Bruno, Hobbes were among others similarly honored. See Charbonnei, p. 696.

⁷³ See Patin's letter to Falconet, Dec. 2, 1650.

⁷⁴ Observe the interesting characterization of him by Bernays, quoted by Dejob, p. 400, n.: “Muret was a complete virtuoso in the art of smiling; his patronizing compliments, his contempt, his frivolity, and in his later years, his melancholy also, express themselves in the smile, and conceal themselves behind it; but just because he is always smiling he never laughs.”