Aubrey says “he understood Greek and Latin pretty well, but was no critique, and he wrote very bad Latin. The Circuitus Sanguinis was, as I take it, done into Latin by Sir George Ent, as also his booke de Generatione Animalium; but a little booke, in 12mo, against Riolan (I thinke) wherein he makes out his doctrine clearer, was writ by himself, and that, as I take it, at Oxford.”[71] Aubrey, in his gossiping, is doing injustice both to the scholarship and to the candour of Harvey. He heard or knew that Harvey wrote an indifferent hand, and this forsooth he turns into writing indifferent Latin. Everything points to the year 1619 as the period when the book De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (Aubrey does not even know the title!) was written; Ent, born in 1603, was then a lad of sixteen, and in all likelihood had never heard of Harvey’s name; in 1628, when the work came forth at Frankfort, he was but twenty-five, and scarcely emancipated from the leading strings of his instructors. The Exercises to Riolan, which Aubrey cites as a specimen of Harvey’s own latinity, are at least as well written as the Exercises on the Heart. And then our authority evidently speaks at random in regard to the time and place when these Exercises were composed. Harvey never resided at Oxford after 1646, and Riolan’s Encheiridium Anatomicum, to which Harvey’s Two Exercises were an answer, did not appear till 1648! Harvey’s reply could not have been written by anticipation. It came out at Cambridge the year after Riolan’s work--in 1649. With regard to the work on Generation, again, had Ent received it in English and turned it into Latin, this fact would certainly have been stated; whereas, there is only the information that he played the midwife’s part, and overlooked the press. More than this, from what Ent says, it is evident that the printer worked from Harvey’s own MS. “As our author writes a bad hand,” says Ent, “which no one without practice can easily read, I have taken some pains to prevent the printer committing any very grave blunders through this,--a point which, I observe, has not been sufficiently attended to in a small work of his (The Exercitatio ad Riolanum) which lately appeared.”[72] Harvey was a man of the most liberal education, and lived in an age when every man of liberal education wrote and conversed in Latin with ease at least, if not always with elegance. Harvey’s Latin is generally easy, often elegant, and not unfrequently copious and imaginative; he never seems to feel in the least fettered by the language he is using.