After Scaliger took up his abode at Agen, his chief employment was the cultivation of learning; his chief passion, the acquisition of fame. In this he succeeded to the extent of his wishes; and we need seek no stronger proof of the ascendancy which he gained over his contemporaries, than the general acceptation of the wonderful story which we have just told. De Thou said of him, that the age did not furnish his equal, nor antiquity his superior; and Lipsius classed him with Homer, Hippocrates, and Aristotle, and named him ‘the miracle and glory of his age.’ Unquestionably he possessed a vast fund of knowledge, was an excellent Latin scholar, and wrote extremely well in Latin prose. Of Greek his knowledge probably was much less; he did little for Greek literature, and appears not to have taught his son Joseph so much as the rudiments of the language. His many fine qualities were sadly obscured by a temper arrogant and overbearing in the last degree: on this subject it is enough to refer to the abuse which he lavishes on a better man than himself, the excellent Erasmus, in their controversy concerning _Ciceronianism_. Unfortunately, he bequeathed the same overweening vanity and propensity to scurrilous language to his still more distinguished son, the original of our portrait. Joseph Justus Scaliger, the tenth child of this singular man, was born at Agen, August 4, 1540. At the age of eleven he was sent with two of his brothers to study at the University of Bourdeaux; but at the end of three years the plague broke out, and he returned in consequence to his paternal home. The elder Scaliger from that time forward took charge of Joseph’s education: concerning his method of teaching we know little more than that he obliged his pupil to compose an essay every day upon some historical subject. He died in 1558; and in the following year Joseph Scaliger went to Paris, and devoted himself to the study of Greek under the celebrated Turnebus. At that time his acquaintance, if he had any, with the language was very slight. Before two months elapsed he found the progress of his master too slow to please him; and resolving to take the matter into his own hands, he made himself cursorily acquainted with the conjugations, and set to work at once upon Homer, whom he read through in twenty-one days, constructing a grammar for himself as he went along. The other Greek poets he perused in the same manner in four months. The orators and historians he took next in order; but these extraordinary exertions rest upon his own testimony, which in things connected with the gratification of his vanity cannot be considered unimpeachable. After two years’ study of Greek he undertook Hebrew and other Oriental languages, which he learned without assistance in the same manner. He certainly possessed an uncommon talent for the study of languages: it is stated by Du Bartas that he knew thirteen,—Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, German, French,