him, too, he separated from the main body of the expedition for the purpose of more unrestrainedly pursuing his scientific researches; and he returned to Russia in 1807, with a vast and various collection of notes on the Chinese, Mantchou, Mogul, and Japanese languages. With a similar object he was shortly after sent by the academy to collect information on the languages of the tribes of the Caucasus, from which mission he returned in 1810. He soon after quitted St. Petersburg for his native city, where, however, he did not settle; but, after spending some time in Italy, he took up his residence in Paris, established the Société Asiatique, and became the chief editor of its well-known journal. It was there also, that he published his great works-the Asia Polyglotta and the New Mithridates.' He died in 1835. Klaproth's attainments as a linguist, however, appear to have lain chiefly in the single family of languages which he made the study of his life; nor can he be enumerated among those who have distinguished themselves as speakers of foreign languages. 6 There is another distinguished scholar of modern Germany whom we cannot pass over in this enumeration, especially as his name is almost unknown to our English philologers, Christian William Buttner. He was born at Wolfenbüttel in 1716, and was destined by his father (an apothecary) for the medical profession; but although, like both those of whom we have been speaking, he gave his attention in the first instance to the sciences preparatory to that profession, the passion of his life became philology, and especially in its relation to the great science of ethnography. It was a saying of Cuvier's that Linnæus and Buttner realised by their united studies the title of Grotius's celebrated work 'De Jure Naturæ et Gentium;' Linnæus by his pursuit of Natural History assuming the first, and Buttner, by his ethnological studies, appropriating the second, as the respective spheres of their operations. In every country which Buttner visited, he acquired not only the general language, but the most minute peculiarities of its provincial dialects. Few literary lives are recorded in history which present such a picture of self-denial and of privation voluntarily endured in the cause of learning, as that of Buttner. His library and museum, accumulated from the hoardings of his paltry income, were exceedingly extensive and most valuable. In order to scrape together the means for their gradual purchase, he contented himself during the greater part of his later life with a single meal per day, the cost of which never exceeded a silber-groschen, or somewhat less than three half-pence! It may be inferred, however, from what has been said, that Buttner's attainments were mainly those of a book-man. In the scanty notices of him which we have gleaned, we do not find that his power of speaking foreign languages was at all what might have been expected from the extent and variety of his book knowledge. But his services as a scientific philologer were infinitely more important as well as more permanent than any such ephemeral faculty. He was the first to observe and to cultivate the true relations of the monosyllabic languages of southern Asia, and to place them at the head of his scheme of the Asiatic and European languages. He was the first to conceive, or at least to carry out, the theory of the geographical distribution of languages; and he may be looked on as the true founder of the science of glossography. He was the first to sytematise and to trace the origin and affiliations of the various alphabetical characters; and his researches in the history of the palæography of the Semitic family may be said to have exhausted the subject. Nevertheless, he has himself written very little; but he communicated freely to others the fruits of his researches; and there are few of the philologers of his time who have not confessed their obligations to him. Michaelis, Schlötzer, Gatterer, and almost every other German scholar of note, have freely acknowledged both the value of his communications and the generous and liberal spirit in which they were imparted. The catalogue of linguists eminent for the faculty of 'speaking a number of languages, though much more curious, is, nevertheless, also far inferior in number. The earliest example of this accomplishment after the revival of letters, is that of the celebrated Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, son of the Duke John Francis of that name. He was born in 1463, and from his childhood was regarded as one of the wonders of his age. Before he had completed his tenth year, he delivered lectures in civil and canon law, and was reputed a prodigy of eloquence. At the age of eighteen he had the reputation of knowing no less than twenty-two languages, a considerable number of which he spoke with fluency. And while he thus successfully cultivated the department of languages, he was, at the same time, an extraordinary proficient in all the other knowledge of his age. Making every allowance for the pedantry of his celebrated thesis at Rome in 1486, the nine hundred propositions of which it consisted comprised every department of knowledge cultivated at that period; nor can there be much doubt that, if his career had been prolonged to the usual term of human life, his reputation might have equalled that of almost any of the scholars, whether of the ancient or the modern world. He was cut off, however, at the early age of thirty-one. It is not unnatural to suppose that the rank of Pico, as well as the singular precocity of his talents, may have led to a false and exaggerated estimate of his acquirements. But even allowing all reasonable abatement on this score, he must be regarded as well worthy a high rank in the list of those who have made themselves a name by their linguistic attain ments. The celebrated Rabbinical scholar, William Postel, although less brilliant than Pico, appears to have been but little inferior to him in the extent and variety of his acquirements as a linguist. He was born at Doleric in 1510, and was one of the many scholars attracted to the French Court by the munificent patronage of Francis I. He was sent to the East by that monarch on a literary mission similar to that undertaken recently under the auspices of Louis Philippe and M. de Villemain, his Minister of Public Instruction, to collect and bring home Greek and Oriental MSS. On his return he was appointed Professor of Mathematics and also of Oriental Languages in the College de France; but the wild and visionary character of his mind appears to have been quite unsuited to any settled pursuit. He offered himself soon afterwards to the newly founded society of the Jesuits, from whom, however, he soon separated. After many wanderings in France, Italy, and Germany, he undertook a second expedition to the East, whence he returned wilder and more visionary than ever; and although his enthusiasm and eloquence attracted many followers, his subsequent career was but a succession of difficulties and embroilments, until eventually he was placed under surveillance in the Monastery of St. Martin des Champs, close to Paris, where he died in 1581. Postel's attainments in languages, living and dead, are well known to have been very extraordinary; but it is difficult to form an exact estimate of his powers as a speaker. He is said to have been able to converse in most of the living languages, and he himself used to boast that he could go round the entire world without ever requiring the aid of an interpreter. A celebrity as a linguist equally distinguished, and even more unamiable, than Postel's, is that of his countryman and contemporary, the younger of the two Scaligers. The personal history of Joseph Justus Scaliger is too well known to be repeated at much length here. He was born at Agen in 1544, and made his school studies at Bordeaux, where he was only remarkable for his exceeding dulness, having spent three years in a painfully laborious attempt to master the first rudiments of the Latin language. These clouds of the morning, however, were but the prelude of a brilliant day. His after successes were proportionately rapid and complete. The stories which are told of him seem almost legendary. He is said to have read the entire Iliad and Odyssey in twenty-one days, and to have run through the Greek Dramatists and Lyric Poets in four months. He was but seventeen years old when he produced his Edipus. At the same age he was able to speak Hebrew with all the fluency of a Rabbi. His application to study was unremitting, and his powers of endurance are described as beyond all example. He himself tells, that even in the darkness of the night, when he awoke from his brief slumbers, he was able (so powerful was his vision) to read without lighting his lamp!* After a brilliant career at Paris, he was invited to occupy the chair of Belles Lettres at Leyden, where the best part of his life was spent. Like most eminent linguists, Scaliger possessed the faculty of memory in an extraordinary degree. He could repeat eighty couplets of poetry after a single reading: he knew by heart every line of his own composition, and it was said of him that he never forgot anything which he once knew. But with all his gifts and all his accomplishments, he contrived to render himself an object of general dislike, or at least of general disesteem. His vanity was insufferable; and it was of that peculiarly offensive kind which is only gratified at the expense of the depreciation of others. His life was a series of literary quarrels; and in the whole annals of literary polemics, there are none with which, for acrimony, virulence, and ferocity of vituperation, they may not compete. And hence, although there is hardly a subject, literary, antiquarian, philological, or critical, on which he has not written, and (for his age) written well, there are few, nevertheless, who have exercised less influence upon contemporary opinions. Scaliger spoke thirteen languages, which are enumerated in the following lines of Du Bartas. The classification is ludicrously unscientific. 'Scaliger, merveille de nôtre age, Soleil des savants, qui parle elegamment Hebreu, Greçois, Romain, Espagnol, Allemand, Syriaque, Persian, Anglois, Chaldaique.' In his case it is difficult, as in most others, to ascertain the degree of his familiarity with each of these. To Du Bartas's poetical epithet elegamment, of course no importance is to be attached; and it would perhaps be equally unsafe to rely on the depreciatory representations of his literary antagonists. One Strange and apocryphal as this anecdote may seem, it is told seriously by Scaliger himself, who adds that the same extraordinary power was possessed also by Jerome Cardan and by his father. the curious article in Moreri, voce Scaliger.' See thing, at least, is certain, that he himself made the most of the accomplishment. He was not the man to hide his light from any overweening delicacy. The malicious wits of his own day used to say, that there could be no doubt as to his powers in one particular department of each language-its Billingsgate vocabulary. There was not one, they said, of the thirteen languages to which he laid claim, in which he was not perfectly qualified to scold, whatever his acquaintance with it in other respects might be. With these men, however, the study of languages formed almost the business of life; but it was not so with their brilliant contemporary, the Admirable Crichton,' who, notwithstanding the universality of his reputation, became equally eminent in this particular branch. There is not an accomplishment which he did not possess in its greatest perfection from the most abstruse departments of scholarship, philosophy, and divinity, down to the mere physical gifts and graces of the musician, the athlete, the swordsman, and the cavalier. Many of the details which are told of him are doubtless exaggerated, and perhaps legendary; but Tytler has shown that the substance of his history, prodigious as it seems, is perfectly reliable. As regards the particular subject of our present inquiry, one account states that, when he was but sixteen years old, he spoke ten languages. Another informs us that, at the age of twenty, the number of languages of which he was master exactly equalled the number of his years. But the most tangible data which we possess are drawn from his celebrated thesis in the University of Paris, in which he undertook to dispute in any of twelve languages-Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, English, German, Flemish and Slavonic. We are inclined to believe that Crichton's acquirements extended at least so far as this. It might seem that a vague challenge to dispute in any one out of such a number of foreign tongues was an empty and unsubstantial boast, and a mere exhibition of vanity, perfectly safe from the danger of exposure. But it is clear that Crichton's challenge was not so unpractical as this. He not only specified the languages of his challenge, but there is not one of those that he selected which was not represented in the University of Paris at the time, not only sufficiently to test the proficiency of the daring disputant, but to secure his ignominious exposure, if there were grounds to suspect him of charlatanism or impos ture. One of the scholars engaged in the compilation of Walton's Polyglot, Andrew Müller, has left a reputation less marvellous, |