SCALIGER AGAINST ERASMUS. 175 



made for him ; I cannot mend mine properly. My father 

 wrote his copy very carefully, and that is why his books 

 were so well printed. He once imitated exactly, with his 

 pen, an old Arabic manuscript. My father replied to the 

 sixth edition of Cardan on Subtilty. His book was very 

 well printed at Paris; it did not contain one misprint. 



The second German edition was dedicated to me 



My father always said that he should die in the month of 



October; so he did My father, four years before 



his death, was half a Lutheran; he saw abuses more and 

 more every day, and he wrote epigrams against the monks, 

 whom he detested." 



The energetic Scaliger the First, of course, soon made 

 himself famous, and it need scarcely be said that his main 

 notion of literary laurels was, that they were to be earned 

 by fighting. He must win them in tilt against renowned 

 knights of the quill; and so it happened that he began 

 his literary career with a violent assault upon Erasmus. 

 Erasmus had published two orations upon Ciceronian 

 Latin 1 , the object of which was to show what most 

 literary men of the time, and Cardan among them, also 

 asserted and acknowledged, that the Latin of Cicero was 

 insufficient for the purposes of scholars in that day, and 

 that it must be modified and amplified for use in Europe 



1 Desiderii Erasmi Ciceronianus, sive De Optimo Dicendi Genere. 

 The preface to the first oration is dated 1531. 



