Thou,
and Casaubon; but his memory, perhaps, has been best preserved by the
ardent friendship of Peiresc. He was visited at Padua by the young
philosopher in whose mind he found a reflection of his own; and it was
generally agreed that the lamp of learning had passed into safe hands
when it was yielded by Pinelli to the student from Provence. Nicolas
Fabry de Peiresc belonged to an ancient family established near Aix. His
father had been selected by Louis XII. to share the education of the
Princess Renee. A man of learning himself, he spared no expense in the
boy's instruction, who became celebrated even in his childhood for the
strength of his precocious intellect. The most eminent professors in
Italy combined to exalt 'the ripe excellence of his unripe years'; and
when Pinelli died it was said that Peiresc had taken the helm of
knowledge and was guiding the ship as he pleased. He explored at leisure
the riches of Florence and Rome, and afterwards watched the rise of the
'Ambrosiana' at Milan. A letter from Joseph Scaliger, who ruled literary
Europe like a King, from his chair at Leyden, sent Peiresc off to Verona,
where he hunted up evidence in support of the wild story that the
Scaligers were the representatives of the Ducal line of La Scala.

Julius Caesar Scaliger, the father of the great philologist, had amused
the world by claiming to be the son of Benedetto and Berenice della
Scala, to have been a page of the Emperor Maximilian, and to have fought
in the Battle of Ravenna; and he pretended that he had become a
Cordelier, so as to rise to the Papal throne and expel the Venetians from
his dominions. Peiresc was by no means a believer in this extraordinary
romance; but he did his best to collect the coins, epitaphs, and
pedigrees, which might please his learned correspondent. Crossing the
Alps, we are told, 'he viewed the Lake of Geneva and made a tour through
a multitude of books'; and returned to Aix with a library and cabinet of
gems, 'thinking to himself that he would never see such plenty again.'
When he visited Paris in 1605, his first object, he said, was to see the
illustrious De Thou, to thank him for his kind letters, and to enquire
for messages from Scaliger. 'I cannot express,' he repeats, 'how joyfully
he entertained me.' De Thou took down his books for the visitor, and
showed him the records under lock and key that contained the secrets of
his history, 'opening his very heart, and brimful of a wonderfu