HIS CHARACTER. Ixxxi 



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 

 Avould certainly have been stated; whereas, there is only 

 the information that he played the midwife's part, and over- 

 looked 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 suffi- 

 ciently attended to in a small work of his (The Exercitatio 

 ad Riolanum) which lately appeared." 1 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. 



Harvey, if eager in the acquirement of knowledge, was also 

 ready at all times to communicate what he knew, " and," as 

 Aubrey has it, " to instruct any that were modest and respectful 

 to him. In order to my journey (I was at that time bound for 



1 Epistle Dedicatory to the work on Generation. 



