s no other existence. Sacred biography,
in particular, has great obligations to them. The earliest work on that
subject we owe to the care which the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus
bestowed on the literary education of his son; an example which, at the
distance of about six hundred years, was successfully rivalled by the
elegant edition of the Delphin Classics, published under the aspics of
Lewis XIV. But the Greek emperor had this advantage over the French
monarch, that he himself was the author of some of the works published
for the use of his son. In the first (published by Lerch and Reisch at
Leipsic, in 1751) he described the ceremonial of the Byzantine court;
the second (published by Banduri, in his _Imperium Orientale_) is a
geographical survey of the provinces, or, as he calls them, the
_Themata_ of the empire; the third, which some ascribe to the emperor
Leo, his father, describes the prevailing system of military tactics;
the forth delineates the political relations and intercourse of the
court of Byzantium with the other states. His Geoponics (published by
Nicholas Niclas at Leipsic, in 1731, in two volumes, 8vo.) were written
with a view of instructing his subjects in agriculture. By his
direction, a collection of historical examples of vice and virtue was
compiled in fifty-three books, and _Simeon Metaphrastes_, the great
logothete, or chancellor of the empire, composed his Lives of the
Saints. Several of them were published, with a Latin translation, by the
care of Lipoman, the bishop of Verona. Cardinal Bellarmin accuses
Metaphrastes of giving too much loose to his imagination. "He inserts,"
{025} says the cardinal, "such accounts of conversations of the martyrs
with their persecutors, and such accounts of conversions of bystanders,
as exceed belief. He mentions many and most wonderful miracles on the
destruction of the temples and idols, and on the death of the
persecutors, of which nothing is said by the ancient historians." We
next come to _Jacobus de Voragine_, a Dominican friar and archbishop of
Genoa, in 1292. His _Golden Legend_ was the delight of our ancestors
during the ages which preceded the revival of letters. The library of no
monastery was without it. Like the essays of Montaigne, it was to be
found on the shelf of every private person; and, for a long time after
the invention of printing, no work more often issued from the press.
After enjoying the highest degree of reputation, it lost mu