Thesaurus temporum, in which he collected, restored and arranged every chronological relic extant in Greek or Latin. When in 1590 Lipsius retired from Leiden, the university and its protectors, the states-general of Holland and the prince of Orange, resolved to obtain Scaliger as his successor. He declined their offer. He hated lecturing, and there were those among his friends who erroneously believed that with the success of Henry IV. learning would flourish, and Protestantism be no bar to advancement. The invitation was renewed in the most flattering manner a year later. Scaliger would not be required to lecture. The university only wished for his presence. He would be in all respects the master of his time. This offer Scaliger provisionally accepted. About the middle of 1593 he started for Holland, where he passed the remaining thirteen years of his life, never returning to France. His reception at Leiden was all that he could wish. A handsome income was assured to him. He was treated with the highest consideration. His rank as a prince of Verona was recognized. Placed midway between The Hague and Amsterdam, he was able to obtain, besides the learned circle of Leiden, the advantages of the best society of both these capitals. For Scaliger was no hermit buried among his books; he was fond of social intercourse and was himself a good talker.
For the first seven years of his residence at Leiden his reputation was at its highest point. His literary dictatorship was unquestioned. From his throne at Leiden he ruled the learned world; a word from him could make or mar a rising reputation; and he was surrounded by young men eager to listen to and profit by his conversation. He encouraged Grotius when only a youth of sixteen to edit Capella; the early death of the younger Douza he wept as that of a beloved son; Daniel Heinsius, from being his favourite pupil, became his most intimate friend. But Scaliger had made numerous enemies, He hated ignorance, but he hated still more half-learning, and most of all dishonesty in argument or in quotation. Himself the soul of honour and truthfulness, he had no toleration for the disingenuous arguments and the mis-statements of facts of those who wrote to support a theory or to defend an unsound cause. His pungent sarcasms were soon carried to the persons of whom they were uttered, and his pen was not less bitter than his tongue. He resembles his father in his arrogant tone towards those whom he despises and those whom he hates, and he despises and hates all who differ from him. He is conscious of his power, and not always sufficiently cautious or sufficiently gentle in its exercise. Nor was he always right. He trusted much to his memory, which was occasionally treacherous. His emendations, if frequently happy, were sometimes absurd. In laying the foundations of a science of ancient chronology he relied sometimes upon groundless, sometimes even upon absurd hypotheses, frequently upon an imperfect induction of facts. Sometimes he misunderstood the astronomical science of the ancients, sometimes that of Copernicus and Tycho Brahe. And he was no mathematician. But his enemies were not merely those whose errors he had exposed and whose hostility he had excited by the violence of his language. The results of his system of historical criticism had been adverse to the Catholic controversialists and to the authenticity of many of the documents upon which they had been accustomed to rely. The Jesuits, who aspired to be the source of all scholarship and criticism, perceived that the writings and authority of Scaliger were the most formidable barrier to their claims. It was the day of conversions. Muretus in the latter part of his life professed the strictest orthodoxy; Lipsius had been reconciled to the Church of Rome; Casaubon was supposed to be wavering; but Scaliger was known to be hopeless, and as long as his supremacy was unquestioned the Protestants had the victory in learning and scholarship. A determined attempt must be made, if not to answer his criticisms, or to disprove his statements, yet to attack him as a man, and to destroy his reputation. This was no easy task, for his moral character was absolutely spotless.
After several scurrilous attacks by the Jesuit party, in which coarseness and violence were more conspicuous than ability, in 1607 a new and more successful attempt was made. Scaliger’s weak point was his pride. In 1594, in an evil hour for his happiness and his reputation, he published his Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae et J. C. Scaligeri vita. In 1607 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits, whom he afterwards so bitterly libelled, published his Scaliger hypobolimaeus (“The Supposititious Scaliger”), a quarto volume of more than four hundred pages, written with consummate ability, in an admirable and incisive style, with the entire disregard for truth which Scioppius always displayed, and with all the power of his accomplished sarcasm. Every piece of scandal which could be raked together respecting Scaliger or his family is to be found there. The author professes to point out five hundred lies in the Epistola de vetustate of Scaliger, but the main argument of the book is to show the falsity of his pretensions to be of the family of La Scala, and of the narrative of his father’s early life. “No stronger proof,” says Mark Pattison, “can be given of the impressions produced by this powerful philippic, dedicated to the defamation of an individual, than that it has been the source from which the biography of Scaliger, as it now stands in our biographical collections, has mainly flowed.” To Scaliger the blow was crushing. Whatever the case as to Julius, Joseph had undoubtedly believed himself a prince of Verona, and in his Epistola had put forth with the most perfect good faith, and without inquiry, all that he had heard from his father. He immediately wrote a reply to Scioppius, entitled Confutatio fabulae Burdonum. It is written, for Scaliger, with unusual moderation and good taste, but perhaps for that very reason had not the success which its author wished and even expected. In the opinion of the highest authority, Mark Pattison, “as a refutation of Scioppius it is most complete”; but there are certainly grounds for dissenting, though with diffidence, from this judgment. Scaliger undoubtedly shows that Scioppius committed more blunders than he corrected, that his book literally bristles with pure lies and baseless calumnies; but he does not succeed in adducing a single proof either of his father’s descent from the La Scala family, or of any single event narrated by Julius as happening to himself or any member of this family prior to his arrival at Agen. Nor does he even attempt a refutation of the crucial point, which Scioppius had proved, as far as a negative can be proved—namely, that William, the last prince of Verona, had no son Nicholas, the alleged grandfather of Julius, nor indeed any son who could have been such grandfather. But whether complete or not, the Coufutatio had no success; the attack of the Jesuits was successful, far more so than they could possibly have hoped. Scioppius was wont to boast that his book had killed Scaliger. It certainly embittered the few remaining months of his life, and it is not improbable that the mortification which he suffered may have shortened his days. The Confutatio was his last work. Five months after it appeared, “on the 21st of January 1609, at four in the morning, he fell asleep in Heinsius’s arms. The aspiring spirit ascended before the Infinite. The most richly stored intellect which had ever spent itself in acquiring knowledge was in the presence of the Omniscient” (Pattison).
Of Joseph Scaliger the only biography in any way adequate is that of Jacob Bernays (Berlin, 1855). It was reviewed by Mark Pattison in the Quarterly Review, vol. cviii. (1860), since reprinted in the Essays, i. (1889), 132-195. Pattison had made many manuscript collections for a life of Joseph Scaliger on a much more extensive scale, which he left unfinished. In writing the above article, Professor Christie had access to and made much use of these MSS., which include a life of Julius Caesar Scaliger. The fragments of the life of Joseph Scaliger have been printed in the Essays, i. 196-243. For the life of Joseph, besides the letters published by M. Tamizey de Larroque (Agen, 1881), the two old collections of Latin and French letters and the two Scaligerana are the most important sources of information. For the life of Julius Caesar the letters edited by his son, those subsequently published in 1620 by the President de Maussac, the Scaligerana, and his own writings, which are full of autobiographical matter, are the chief authorities. M. de Bourousse de Laffore’s Etude sur Jules César de Lescale (Agen, 1860) and M. Magen’s Documents sur Julius Caesar Scaliger et sa famille (Agen, 1873) add important details for the lives of both father and son. The lives by Charles Nisard—that of Julius in Les Gladiateurs de la républigue des lettres, and that of Joseph in
