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previously to his investiture with the purple. The author of this 

 work, the learned Jesuit Famiano Strada, filled the office of 

 master of rhetoric in Rome for fifteen years. The work entitled 

 ' Prolusiones AcademicEe' was written while he filled that 

 office In 1617. He died in the year 1649. The remarkable 

 account of the uses to which the magnet might be turned occurs 

 in the second book (p. 233 of the Oxford edition pubUshed in 

 1745). The discovery of those uses, and the verses descrip- 

 tive of them, he attributes to Cardinal Bembo. The pageant 

 where those verses were recited he states was performed before 

 Leo X. The most celebrated poets of antiquity were repre- 

 sented in it by eminent Roman men of letters of that day, and 

 their several styles were Imitated in poetic pieces pm-porting to 

 have been improvised on that occasion by Cardinal Bembo, 

 Jovianus Strozzo, Naugerius, Parrhaslus, Sadoletus, and Cas- 

 tillone. The pieces, however, are evidently the compositions 

 of Strada. But it is to be observed, he narrates this exhibition 

 and display of intellectual prowess as reahties which had been 

 communicated to lilm by his friend Alexander Burgivis, to whom 

 they had been related by Jerome Amaltheus, who had heard 

 them from his intimate'acquaintances, Bembo, Sadoletus, and 

 Naugerius. Bembo, Itmaybe observed, went to Rome, and be- 

 came secretary to Leo X. in 1512, and died there in 1547, just 

 seventy years before Strada published his Prolusiones. In the 

 1 15th and 21st numbers of 'The Guardian' there are two papers 

 by Addison on critics and criticism, wherein he refers to the 

 ' Prolusiones' of the learned Jesuit Strada, as ' one of the 

 most entertaining, as weU as the most just piece of criticism 

 he ever read.' In those numbers he speaks of the pageant 

 abovereferred to. ' It is commonly known, ' he observes, ' that 

 Pope Leo the Tenth was a great patron of learning, and used 

 to be present at the performances, conversations, and disputes 

 of all the most polite writers of his time. Upon this bottom 

 Strada founds the following narrative.' The writer then de- 

 scribes the performances on the banks of the Tiber, near a viUa 

 of the Pope, on an artificial mount intended to represent Pamas- 



