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HISTORY OF PRINTING.
and curious books, his pedantry, sparkling with rude wit and sbapeless elegance, miscellaneous matter, intermixture of agreeable tales and illus- trations, and perhaps, above all, the singularities of his feelings, clothed with an uncommon quaintness of style, have contributed to render it, even to modern readers, a valuable repertory of amusement and information." Burton classes the pleasures of study among those exercises or recreations of the mind which pass within doort. Looking about " this world of books," he ex- claims " I could even here live and die with such meditations, and take more delight and true content of mind in them, than in all thy wealth and courts. There is a sweetness, which as Circe's cup, bewitcheth a student ; be cannot leave off, as well may witness those many labo- rious hours, days, and nights, spent in their Tolumnious treatises. So sweet is the delight of study. The last day is miorit discimdut. Heinsius was mewed up in the library of Ley- den all the year long, and that which, to my thinking, should have bred a loathing, caused in him a greater liking, ' I no sooner,' saith he, ' come into the library, but I bolt the door to me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy. In the very lap of eternity, among so many divine souls I take my seat with bo lofty a spirit, and sweet content, that I pity all our great ones, and rich men, that know not this happiness.' "
Such is the incense of a votary who scatters it on the altar, less for ceremony than for the devotion. — Ifltraeli.
Rantzau, the founder of the great library at Copenhagen, whose days are dissolved in the
Sleasures of reading, discovers his taste and ar- our in the following elegant effusion : —
Golden Toloines ! richest trasores I Objects of delicious pleasures t You mf eyes rejoicing please, You mf hands in rapture seiae I Brilliant wits and musing sages. Lights who beam'd through many ages. Left to your conscious leaves their story. And dared to trust you with their glory i And now their hope of fame achieved. Dear volumes, you have not deceived I
Burton* has drawn a fearful picture of the abject condition of men of learning before they had a public to rely upon. "Rhetoric only serves them to curse their bad fortunes ; and many of them, for want of means, are driven to hard
- Robert Barton was born at Undley in Leicestershire,
Feb. e, 1978. He was educated at Oxford, and was pre- sented to the vicarage of St. Thomas in that university, and next to the rectory of Seagrave in his native county. He led a studious and solitary life in his college, till he at length became oppressed with melancholy, ana resolved to write a booli upon that subject with the view of curing Mmnir. He died in IIIS»-40 ; and in his epitajdi, in the cathedral of Oxford, he is described as having lived and died by melancholy.
William Barton was an Oder brother of the above, and (o eminent antlqnaiy ; wa* bora in Leicestershire in IS7S, and edacated at Oxford, fixsn whence he removed to the Inner Temple, London, and was called to the bar. He died In l(4S.
shifts. From grasshoppers they turn humble bees and wasps, plain parasites, aiid make tke muses mules, to satisfy their hunger-stined families, and get a meals meat"
1621, Sept. 25. Died, Mary Sidney, countea of Pembroke, who was not only an ingenioiu poet, but a great encourager of letters, which enabled her to make an illustrious appeanoct among the literati of her time.f She was bun about the middle of the sixteenth centuiy, the daughter of sir Henry Sidney, knigbt, and dster of sir Philip Sidney. About the yeu 1576, she married Henry, lord Pembroke. M her genius inclined her to poetry, she translated many of the psalms into English verse; ud was the author of many other works. She sur- vived her husband twenty years ; and bariag lived to a good old age, died at her house m Aldersgate-street, London. She was buried is Salisbury cathedral. Her character may U fairly judged from the following epitaph:
Underneath this sable hearae Lies the subject of all verse, Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother. Death, ere thou hast slain another. Fair and learned, good as she. Time shall throw a dart at thee.
Another patroness of letters was Lucy Ha^ rington, countess of Bedford. This remarkable lady was, like the former, a patroness of talent, at a period when the female mind was geneiall; circumscribed within the bounds of domestic duties. She was herself a poet, and the wann friend of genius in every class of society. She died in the year 1628.
Elizabeth Jane Weston was, without doubt, the most learned lady of her time, but of whom very few particulars are known. She was born about the beginning of queen Elizabeth's reign, and is supposed by Fuller to have beai a branch of the ancient family of Weston, of Sutton, in the county of Surry. She appears to have left England at an early age,accompaiijing her father, and settled at Prague, in Bo- hemia, where she afterwards married a gentle- man of the name of Leon, who held an appoiot- ment in the emperor's court. She was greallji skilled in languages, particularly the Latin ; ber compositions abounding in such elegance of dic- tion, and correctness of style, as to merit the encomiums of the erudite Scaliger, May, and other celebrated men. Mr. Evelyn has placed her in his Numismata, among learned women; and Famabv ranks her with sir Thomas More, and the best liatin poets of the sixteenth centuij.
- The Connteaa of Pembroke's Arcadia. LaadOD:
printed for William Ponsonby. 4to., 16D0. A eoicm and copious account of this romance is given in Zoock's Life of Sir Philip Sidney, and a f;ood analysis of tbelt^ is in Dunlop's Hinlory of Fiction. It was severely «■• Burcd by Horace Walpole, afterwards earl of Orfont 1^ romance has been translated into Italian, French, DutA and other langiiages.
The Ooantees of Pembroke's Arcadia, now the diM time published, with sundry new addition* of the laBt author. Edinburgh : printed by Robert Waldep«* 1599, foUo.
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