determined to prove that he  could understand
him, at all events. The result was a work
which has formed the basis of every edition
since—which contants a mass of learning
about antiquity, and which has associated
the name of Casaubon with that of Persius
for ever. His next great occupation was his
Polybius, the preface to which Warton
considers one of the three finest prefaces ever
written.

Of course,—he was not to be converted.
—"Were I an atheist," he says, bitterly, "I
should be at Rome." He complains of his
little facilities for attending public worship.
To this misfortune was soon added a serious
business one. By some decision at Geneva,
he lost in sixteen hundred and seven, the
whole of his wife's fortune,—"and we are
left naked," he adds. "We have no fortune:
I have nothing left but my books and my
children! ... Ungrateful bipeds enjoy the
fruits of my labours." Thus he wails in the
spring of sixteen hundred and eight—a
bitter cold one—during which he huddled
himself over the fire with a book. A new
domestic trouble, too, makes its appearance.
"Prid. Kal. Feb. (January the thirty-first).
As I see, fire and water will agree better
than these two women, namely my wife
and sister! O miserable lot! O hard destiny."
Summing up the last year's history, he says:
—"Yet my studies, though they have
suffered much detriment, have not totally failed.
Witness my Polybius, &c."

But he now suffered the greatest home
sorrow of which his Diary gives any record—
the death of his eldest daughter Philippa.
He enters with melancholy minuteness that
she was aged eighteen years, six months,
twenty-one days, and four hours. "O my
light, my darling, love, delight, and glory of
your mother!" For days and days, the
image of poor Philippa haunts the pages of
the Diary. He leaves off his books, every
now and then, at the thought of her, and
relapses into grief. And, at this time, he
is labouring at "that most intricate question
of the difference between the Macedonian
phalanx and the Roman legion," and
compelled to send off every period to the printer
as fast as it is finished.

Soon after, we find him daily inserting a
prayer in the Diary for Joseph Scaliger, now
in his last illness, and recording the birth of
a daughter, his wife's seventeenth child. At
last comes the news of Scaliger's death in
February, sixteen hundred and nine:
"Extinguished is that lamp of our age, the light of
letters, the glory of France, the ornament of
Europe. " Scaliger left him a silver cup. They
had been on friendly terms always. Casaubon
honoured Scaliger with true affection and
admiration,—and Scaliger, in the Scaligeriana,
speaks always of Casaubon in a
corresponding tone. The great scholars have
often mauled each other; it is pleasant to
remember, that these two (and there never
were two greater men of the kind) thought
and spoke of each other worthily and
well.

In the kind of way we have been
describing, the Parisian years rolled by.
Casaubon's greatest trouble was, that they
would insist on endeavouring to convert
him. They waylaid him in the library, and
entangled him in controversies; sometimes
they spread a report that he was converted,
and alarmed the "reformed" throughout
Europe. But they did succeed in striking
him a severe blow; they managed to convert
his son John, a youth ignorant of all
the great questions of dispute. This hurt
Casaubon severely. We can fancy him in his
"museum," brooding over this sore grief,—
his hand carelessly playing with the leaves of
a folio—when a stranger is announced. An
Italian enters, and has something to say
evidently of a very secret nature. Casaubon
begs that he will speak out. The Italian
hesitates; then would Casaubon grant him
an interview with—his familiar ? Obstupui!
says Casaubon, entering the fact in his Diary.
What with alchymy, and diablerie, and astrology,
men's minds were ever hovering about
the verge of the wonderful in those days,
and shadows and shapes lurked in corners
out of which gas-light and other light has
long driven them.

Sixteen hundred and ten opened on
Casaubon, still cloudy in the theological quarter,
and in others. He was reading, revising, and
editing, as usual, and forming pleasant castles
in the air—such as visits to Italy and the
like. A visit to Italy was still a favourite
vision of scholars, who loved the thought of
the morning-land of learning. Casaubon
wanted to go to Italy, as Erasmus had done;
he wanted to see the country and talk with
the learned men; and, particularly, he wished
to visit Venice, and inform himself accurately
about the Greek Church. For, it was one
great and leading desire of Casaubon's, that
a day might come when he should devote
himself entirely to sacred learning. The
memory of his father sanctified that idea;
when he first presented the good minister
with a learned work, the old man told him
that he would rather see one text of the
Scriptures rightly interpreted by him, than
all the fine fruits of the Pagan mind.
Casaubon thought often of that saying; he
remembered the pious zeal of the old man,
supporting them all, in the terrible days
which followed on the Saint Bartholomew,
when the Casaubons fled like hunted beasts
to the caves and mountains, and worshipped
God in sore distress and terror. It was the
pet dream of Isaac Casaubon, to devote
his old age to theology; and, indeed, it may
be doubted if he ever expounded a mere
comic writer, such as Plautus, without a kind
of uneasy regret.

Such were the dreams, studies, trials, and
troubles of Casaubon—the pious, laborious,