Page:The Way of a Virgin.djvu/175

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EXCURSUS.

dical."[1]……It was about the year 1660 that he had, according to all probability, the first edition of the Aloisia secretly printed in Lyons. The work was supposed to have been written in Spanish, in the 16th century, by an erudite young girl, Luisa Sigea, whose father, Jacques Sigée, a native of France, had quitted his country to settle down at Toledo. (Luisa Sigea, who was born at Toledo about the year 1530 and died in 1560, says the English translator in a note, knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic. She was styled the Minerva of her time.) The Spanish work was lost; but there remained a Latin manuscript translation of it, which Chorier, in order to secure himself, attributed to the learned Dutchman Joannes Meursius, dead twenty years before……Chorier died in 1692; he left several manuscript works behind him, some of which have since been printed.

    wrote in the Ionian dialect, and according to Suidas he was the author of a poem entitled CinKdica (Martial, 2. 86). The title would leave us in no doubt as to the trend of the work. (Cinædus:=he who indulges in unnatural lust; Cinædicus=pertaining to one who is unchaste. Smith's Latin English Dictionary.) C.f. also Sir Richard Burton's "Sotadic Zone" in the Terminal Essay to The Thousand Nights and a Night (op. cit. sup.).

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