I 



THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 763 



devil.' It was a similar spirit which dwelt in Sir Philip Sidney, 

 who never heard the famous ballad of 'Percy and Douglas' without 

 feeling his ' heart moved more than with a trumpet.' 



It may seem to some but a small matter to vindicate for our 

 great discoverer claims to a familiarity with Greek ; still, any one 

 who will look at such passages as the one in the ' Exercitatio de 

 Partu/ p. ^S3, where he speaks of the mischief done by meddlesome 

 midwives, or other passages (pp. ii6, 139, and 133, 'Epistola 

 Secundaad Riolanum;' p. 613, 'Ep. ad Slegelium'), will see, I think, 

 that he had Greek in abundance at his command, and used it just 

 when it helped him to express his thoughts more clearly and con- 

 cisely than any other words at hand at the moment. He used it, 

 in fact, like a man of sense and real learning, when the use of it 

 would save him time or trouble — two things, of one of which he 

 had all too little, whilst of the other he had all too much for his and 

 our good. Let me add that, in the one authentic MS. which we 

 now possess of Harvey's (No. 486, Sloane Coll., British Museum), 

 a MS. never intended for publication, and consisting but of rough 

 notes for lectures to be delivered, I find that he employs Greek 

 words in several places (e.g. pp. 6^, 66 and 87)^. 



His style has been spoken of as being more or less inelegant and 

 unadorned ; and the Latin tongue which he used lends itself but 

 grudgingly and awkwardly to the purposes of science, being strictly 

 a political language, habituated and framed to describe the march of 

 the legions, the disputes of the forum, or the denunciations of the 

 moralist. Still, Harvey's style has always an impressiveness and 

 solidity of its own ; and sometimes, as for example in the glorious 

 eighth chapter, 'De Motu Cordis,' it rises into real eloquence where 

 a great occasion justifies the use of repetitions, of antitheses, and 

 abundance of metaphors. But, though the use of stilted phraseology 

 was common enough among Harvey's contemporaries, and though 



^ I have no sympathy with the eagerness which scientific men sometimes (see Fritz 

 Mtiller, • Fur Darwin,' p. 28 ; Dallas' Engl. Trans, p. 42) show in repudiating a know- 

 ledge of Greek, but on the other hand I should be sorry to be thought to overrate its 

 value. I am so far from doing this that I incline to thinking that, when through 

 want of leisure or of means, or through some other deficiency, a young man cannot 

 add on more than a second foreign language to his acquirement of Latin (which I 

 presuppose), that second foreign language should, in the case of EngUshmen, be, for 

 linguistic and educational, as weU as for more lowly practical reasons, not Greek but 

 German. 



