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Hopelessly out of date. But I could never feel that. I have a deep affection for Graevius and Gronovius and the rest, and if I knew as much as they did, I should be well satisfied to rest under the young man's disdain. The zeal of learning is never out of date; the example were there no more burns before one as a sacred fire, for ever unquenchable.
It is also to be regretted that Wanley did not secure the prayers of Solyman and the celebrated Saxon Spieghel. Of the eighty-four other MSS., two have a special historical interest: the Cicero and the Quintilian , both of which can be traced to the Cathedral library at Cologne. Graevius borrowed the Cicero in 1663 from the authorities, but never returned it.
Graevius himself was by no means irreproachable in the matter of restoring borrowed books; Buchels, a Latin scholar and bibliograph of some merit, had a suspicious tendency to appropriate his master's goods; and Zamboni, had he lived in these days, would certainly have been prosecuted for criminal bankruptcy, if, indeed, the greater part of the transaction were not considered too dishonest to risk exposure.
Fracastorius, De Sympathia et Antipathia, Lib. i. cap. 23. See also Vincentius Alsarius, De Invid. et Fasc. Vet., in Graevius, Thes. Rom. Antiq.
So I waited on him downstairs, which he took as a piece of ceremony; but indeed it was to see him out of the house without stealing something." One of the most important negotiations chronicled by Wanley relates to the purchase of the Graevius MSS. in 1724-25.
Johann Graevius was a German classical scholar, born in 1632, and chiefly known by his Thesaurus Antiquitatum Romanorum, and his Antiquitatum et Historianum Italia, in 45 volumes. His library, one of the most remarkable in Europe, was sold at his death in 1703 to the elector, Johann Wilhelm, for 6000 Reichsthaler.
Spanheim, whose knowledge of the Roman medals was unrivalled, imitated, not unsuccessfully, the noble conciseness of those ancient legends which he had assiduously studied; and he was assisted by Graevius, who then filled a chair at Utrecht, and whose just reputation had drawn to that University multitudes of students from every part of Protestant Europe.
I diligently read, almost always with my pen in my hand, the elaborate treatises of Nardini, Donatus, &c., which fill the fourth volume of the Roman Antiquities of Graevius. 2. I next undertook and finished the Italia Antiqua of Cluverius, a learned native of Prussia, who had measured, on foot, every spot, and has compiled and digested every passage of the ancient writers.
But there is far more than meets the eye, and the letters contain almost beyond doubt the disguised and detailed account of how the elector was robbed of his manuscripts, and how Zamboni defrauded the fraudulent librarian Buchels. Indeed the whole history of the Graevius manuscripts seems to be one of peculation, until they came into Lord Oxford's possession.
A. C. Clark, but until he identified it as one of the books that had formed part of the Graevius collection, very little attention had been paid to it. There is no trace of it before the sixteenth century, beyond the fact that its first collator was Modius of Cologne, who was allowed to use the Cathedral library, to which the Cicero then belonged.
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