72 MEMOIR OF ARISTOTLE. 



them double that amount), only forty-eight have 

 been transmitted to the present age. But many of 

 these last consist of several books ; and, according 

 to the estimate of the laborious Fabricius, the whole 

 of these remains, taken together, form a golden 

 stream of Greek erudition, exceeding four times the 

 collective bulk of the Iliad and Odyssey *. 



Though the works edited by Andronicus had suf- 

 fered injuries which the utmost diligence and saga- 

 city could not completely repair, yet, in consequence 

 of those labours, the Peripatetic philosophy began 

 to resume the lustre of which it had been deprived 

 since the days of Theophrastus. In the Lycseum, 

 the precepts of the sect were preserved through a 

 line of successive teachers, by viva voce instructions ; 

 and it is not impossible that the disciples may have 

 had portions of their great master's lectures written 

 down ; yet the details of the system were evidently 

 entrusted to the tablets of memory. At Rome, the 

 productions of the Stagirite made few converts at 

 first ; and even in Cicero's time, their perusal was 

 confined to a few of the learned. This sect, there- 

 fore, in the Augustan age, made no considerable ap- 

 pearance in that capital ; and, with the exception of 

 Lucretius, we scarcely find among the Roman poets 



* By this calculation, the whole of Aristotle's works 

 must have contained a quantity of prose equal to sixteen 

 times 28,088 verses a fact the more extraordinary, since 

 the greater part of his writings are merely outlines or text- 

 books, giving the heads of his lectures, or the chief topics 

 of discussion in the different branches of science. 



