25. The antiquities of Greece and Rome, though they did not occupy so great a relative space in the literature of this period as of the sixteenth century, were, from the general increase of erudition, not less frequently the subject of books than before. This field indeed is so vast, that its harvest had in many parts been scarcely touched, and in others very imperfectly gathered by those we have already commemorated, the Sigonii, the Manutii, the Lipsii, and their fellow-labourers in ancient learning. The present century opened with a great work, the Corpus Inscriptionum by Gruter. A few endeavours had long before been made[37] to collect the ancient inscriptions, of which the countries once Roman, and especially Italy, were full. The best work hitherto was by Martin Smetius of Bruges, after whose death his collection of inscriptions was published at Leyden in 1588, under the superintendence of Dousa and Lipsius. [37] See p. 160. |Assisted by Scaliger.| 26. Scaliger first excited his friend Gruter to undertake the task of giving an enlarged edition of Smetius.[38] He made the index for this himself, devoting the labour of the entire morning for ten months (a summo mane ad tempus cœnæ) to an occupation from which so little glory could accrue. “Who,” says Burman, “would not admire the liberal erudition and unpretending modesty of the learned of that age, who, worn as they were by those long and weary labours of which they freely complain in their correspondence with each other, though they knew that such occupations as these could gain for them no better name than that of common clerks or mere drudges, yet hesitated not to abandon for the advantage of the public those pursuits which a higher fame might be expected to reward? Who in these times would imitate the generosity of Scaliger, who, when he might have ascribed to himself this addition to the work of Smetius, gave away his own right to Gruter, and declined to let his name be prefixed either to the index which he had wholly compiled, or to the many observations by which he corrects and explains the inscriptions, and desired, in recompence for the industry of Gruter, that he alone should pass with posterity as the author of the work?”[39] Gruter, it is observed by Le Clerc, has committed many faults: he often repeats the same inscriptions, and still more frequently has printed them from erroneous copies; his quotations from authors, in whom inscriptions are found, sometimes want exactness; finally, for which he could not well be answerable, a vast many have since been brought to light.[40] In consequence of the publication of Gruter’s Inscriptions, the learned began with incredible zeal to examine old marbles for inscriptions, and to insert them in any work that had reference to antiquity. Reinesius collected as many as make a respectable supplement.[41] But a sort of æra in lapidary learning was made by Selden’s description, in 1629, of the