ectures on Homer, and to have been not a pennyworth the wiser at the
end. Erasmus, who also learned of the Spartan, confessed that his tutor
only 'stammered in Greek,' and that he seemed to have neither the desire
nor the capacity for teaching. It is interesting to see how these
students made the best of their bad materials. 'I have given my whole
soul to Greek,' wrote Erasmus, 'and as soon as I get any money I shall
buy books first, and then some clothes.' Budaeus was known as 'the prodigy
of France,' and even Scaliger allowed that his country would never see
such a scholar again; and it is rather surprising that Erasmus should
have compared his style unfavourably with that of Badius, the printer
from Brabant.

Budaeus was the first to apply the historical method to the explanation of
the Civil Law: with the assistance of Jean Grolier he brought out a very
learned treatise on ancient weights and measures; and in publishing his
commentaries on the Greek language he was said to have raised himself to
'a pinnacle of philological glory.' One of the stories about his devotion
to books may have been told of others, but is certainly characteristic of
the man. A servant rushes in to say that the house is on fire; but the
scholar answers, 'Tell my wife: you know that I never interfere with the
household.' He was married twice over, he used to say, to the Muse of
philology as well as to a mortal wife; but he confessed that he would
never have got far with the first, if the second had not commanded in the
library, always ready to look out passages and to hand down the necessary
books.

When Charles VIII. seized the royal library at Naples, a few of the best
MSS. escaped his scrutiny, and these were sold by the dispossessed King
to the Cardinal D'Amboise. A new school of illuminators at Rouen provided
the Cardinal with a number of other splendid volumes. He lived till the
year 1510, and was able to collect a second library of printed books. He
divided the whole into two portions at his death, the French books
passing to a relation and afterwards to the family of La Rochefoucauld,
and the rest forming the foundation of a fine library long possessed by
the Archbishops of Rouen.

The Archbishop Juvenal des Ursins died in the middle of the fifteenth
century. He is celebrated as a lover of good books, though only a single
example of his choice survived into the present generation. It was a
magnificent missal on vellum, filled with th