LYONS. ENGAGEMENT AS READER FOR THE PRESS WITH THE TRECHSELS. EDITS THE GEOGRAPHY OF PTOLEMY.

Theology, however, after which we see Servetus still hankering—hÆret lateri letalis arundo!—and even the study of the mathematics on which he was now engaged, had to be abandoned for present means of subsistence; and as Lyons seemed even a better field for the scholar than Paris, to Lyons, after a short stay at Avignon and Orleans, he betook himself. There he appears immediately to have found employment as reader and corrector of the press in the house of the distinguished typographers, the Brothers Trechsel; and if the Age have its character from the aggregate of its science and culture, and the Individual his bent from his more immediate surroundings, we cannot but think of Servetus’s connection with these light-spreaders as another among the highly influential events in his life.

Books in the early days of printing were much more generally written in Latin than in the vernacular, and ever more and more with references to Greek, lately brought greatly into vogue by Erasmus and the Reformers. The reader for press in the best establishments was therefore, and of necessity, a scholar and man of letters; and the opportunities for improvement now put in the way of one like Servetus, even whilst pursuing the mechanical part of his duties, have only to be hinted at to be appreciated. The reading room of the distinguished typographers of those days was, indeed in some sort, a continuation of school and college to the competent corrector of the press.

Servetus’s liberal elementary education, therefore, stood him in good stead at this time; for the Trechsels ere long, instead of holding him to the subordinate though still important duties of reader and corrector, engaged him further as editor of various costly works that issued from their press. Among the number of these a handsome edition of the Geography of Ptolemy36 deserves particular mention, both as evincing the good repute in which he stood when we find him entrusted with such a work, and also as showing the extent of his reading and general knowledge—strangely enough, also, as influencing in some remote degree the fate that finally befel him.

Earlier editions of the Ptolemy were faulty in several ways, and disfigured in different degrees by errors due, in part at least, to indifferent editing. These, where literal, Villanovanus corrected in the new issue; and where the sense was obscure through faulty wording, he brought light by the better readings he supplied, having formed his text, as he says, by collating all the editions he could lay his hands on, and where these gave him no aid, by suggestions of his own.

In his address to the reader, our editor, whom we shall often speak of under his adopted name of Villanovanus, gives a short account of his author, Claudius PtolemÆus, his birth-place, the Roman emperors under whom he flourished, ‘his knowledge of philosophy and the mathematics, and the more than Herculean glory he achieved by his successful but peaceful invasion of so many lands. Nor indeed was this all, for he may be said to have bound earth to heaven by assimilating the measurements of the one to those of the other; and, coming after Strabo, Pliny, and Pomponius Mela, he as far surpassed them, as they excelled all the geographers who had gone before them.’

But Villanovanus did much more than edit and amend the text of Ptolemy. ‘We,’ he says, ‘have added scholia to the text, whereby the book is made more interesting and more complete. Using our familiarity with the historical, poetical, and miscellaneous writings of the Greeks and Romans, in so far as they bear on our subject, we have given the names by which the countries, mountains, rivers, and cities were known to them; and, to aid the tyro, have further translated the ancient titles of places into those by which they are now designated—into French for France, Italian for Italy, German for Germany, &c., all of which countries we have seen, besides having a knowledge of their languages.’ Extending his vision beyond the mere physical features of the lands he is passing under review, he might have added that he also gives short, but graphic accounts of their inhabitants, the prominent traits of their character, their manners, customs, &c., which are extremely interesting. But Michael Villanovanus is not one of those who hide themselves behind their good works, and so is he now careful to inform his readers of the pains he has taken in their behalf. By them, he says, he hopes his vigils will be properly appreciated, ‘for day and night have I laboured assiduously at my task—dies noctesque jugiter laboravi.’ He concludes his preliminary address in these words: ‘No one, I imagine, will under-estimate the labour, though pleasant in itself, that is implied in the collation of our text with that of other earlier editions, unless it be some Zoilus of the contracted brow, who cannot without envy look on the serious labours of others. But thou, candid reader, whoever thou art, we trust wilt be well disposed, kindly to receive and to approve our work. Farewell!’

Villanovanus’s edition of the Ptolemy is certainly an advance on that of Bilibald Pirckheimer, which formed its groundwork; but it is not so free from literal errors as the laudatory address of the editor might lead us to expect. And it would have been better had he said that he had enlarged and improved the short and meagre scholia of his editorial predecessor than spoken as if he had supplied them wholly of himself. Villanovanus’s improved comments, however, impress us very favourably with a sense of the pains he must have bestowed on the work, and arouse our respect for the extent and variety of the reading he had undertaken to obtain the information he brings to bear on the physical aspects and natural productions of the several countries described, as well as of the customs, manners, and moral qualities of their inhabitants. Now it was that the smattering of geographic and historic lore he may have picked up as a student at Saragossa and elsewhere stood him in good stead, enabling him, as it did, to advance and profit by the ample stores of information of the kind which the city of Lyons placed within his reach. Living immediately after the age of the great navigators—Columbus, Vasco de Gama, Magellan, the Vespucii, and the rest—and in the very days when the works of Peter Martyr of Anghiera, Simon GrynÆus, Sebastian Munster, and others enabled the educated to acquire something like a true knowledge of the world they lived in, the new edition of Ptolemy by Michael Villanovanus was a happy thought, and contributed, we need not doubt, no less to his own development than to the spread of useful and humanising information. Engaged on the Ptolemy, the super-subtleties of scholasticism and theology seem to have vanished before the light of the more positive kind of knowledge that now broke around him.

When we turn to the writings of the able individuals mentioned above, we have no difficulty in discovering whence Servetus had most, perhaps all, of his geographical and astronomical knowledge. The Opus Epistolarum of Angleria, in particular, seems to have been the mine from whence he made himself rich in mental wealth of many kinds. We find him imitating, and even improving upon, the lines which head Angleria’s De Rebus Oceanicis and GrynÆus’s Typi Cosmographici, as the reader may see by comparing the verse below37 with the one he will find further on, which is prefixed to the 2nd edition of the Ptolemy.

Turning to the Scholia of Villanovanus, we find it not a little interesting in these days to have a glimpse of ourselves in our sires, and of our neighbours in theirs, from the pen of a man of genius hard upon three centuries and a half ago; and as Michael Servetus is really only known to us through his works and the judicial trials he underwent, we make no apology for referring briefly to his additions to the bald and matter-of-fact text of the original Ptolemy.

The map of the first country in the series of fifty by which the work is illustrated is that of Great Britain. The people of Scotland, Villanovanus informs his reader, are hot-tempered, prone to revenge, and fierce in their anger; but valiant in war and patient beyond belief of cold, hunger, and fatigue. They are handsome in person, and their clothing and language are the same as those of the Irish, their tunics being dyed yellow, their legs bare, and their feet protected by sandals of undressed hide with the hair on. They live mainly on fish and flesh; they have numerous flocks, mostly of sheep, for the country is free from wolves; and they have milk and cheese in abundance. Their arms are bows and arrows and broad swords—lati gladii. Instead of wood, they have coal for fuel. Unlike the people of the last few generations, he says the Scotch are not a particularly religious people. He ‘who never feared the face of man,’ as the Earl of Morton said of Knox, when looking down on his dead body, had not yet made himself felt in the land of his birth; and the School-house had not yet risen as a necessary complement to the Kirk and the Manse, to make the people of Scotland what they have become since his day—among the very foremost of the sons of men.

England, Villanovanus observes, is wonderfully well peopled, and the inhabitants are long-lived. Tall in stature, they are fair in complexion, and have blue eyes. They are brave in war, and admirable bowmen. He has the familiar tale of the English children seen as captives at Rome by the blessed Gregory, who said they were called Angli, indeed; but in form and feature showed like Angeli. He must, as it seems, have given some little attention to the English language, if he did not study it more particularly. He says it is so difficult to learn and to pronounce, because the people who speak it are a compound of so many different races.

Of Ireland and the Irish our editor does not speak so favourably. The country, he observes, is generally marshy, so that, unless the summers are dry, the cattle are apt to get lost in the bogs. It is free from noxious creatures of every kind, there being no reptiles, such as snakes, toads, and frogs, and no insects, such as spiders and bees—a state of things which, if it ever obtained, certainly does so no longer. The climate is very temperate, and the soil of great fertility; but the people are rude, inhospitable, barbarous, and cruel, more given to hunting and idle play than to industry. Only three days’ sail from Spain, the Irish, he says, have many customs in common with the Spaniards.

Of Spain, the account given is particularly full, but by no means complimentary, and its people are contrasted—not to their advantage—with their neighbours the French. The extreme dryness of the climate is noticed, which tends to make the country less fertile than France. Irrigation, however, being practised on an extensive scale in many parts, tends to make up for the infrequency of rain, the conduits being often carried to great distances from the rivers. His description of the people is far from laudatory. ‘The Spaniard,’ he says, ‘is of a restless disposition, apt enough of understanding, but learning imperfectly or amiss, so that you shall find a learned Spaniard almost anywhere sooner than in Spain. Half-informed, he thinks himself brimful of information, and always pretends to more knowledge than he has in fact. He is much given to vast projects, never realised; and in conversation he delights in subtleties and sophistry. Teachers commonly prefer to speak Spanish rather than Latin in the schools and colleges of the country; but the people in general have little taste for letters, and produce few books themselves, mostly procuring those they want from France.’ The Spanish language, indeed, he speaks of as defective in many respects, and does not fail to remark on the number of Moorish words incorporated with it. The people, he says, ‘have many barbarous notions and usages,’ derived by implication from their old Moorish conquerors and fellow-denizens. ‘The women have a custom that would be held barbarous in France, of piercing their ears and hanging gold rings in them, often set with precious stones. They besmirch their faces, too, with minium and ceruse—red and white lead—and walk about on clogs a foot or a foot and a half high, so that they seem to walk above rather than on the earth. The people are extremely temperate, and the women never drink wine. Spaniards, he concludes, are notably the most superstitious people in the world in their religious notions; but they are brave in the field, of signal endurance under privation and difficulty, and by their voyages of discovery have spread their name over the face of the globe.’

Of France, M. Villeneuve has less to say than of Spain; but what he tells us of the royal touch for the cure of scrofula is still interesting in the annals of superstition. ‘I have myself seen the king touching many labouring under this disease, but I did not see that they were cured.’

Of Germany, and he uses the title in a very comprehensive sense—he speaks at considerable length. Smarting under the rebuff he had received at the hands of the Swiss and German Reformers, he is nowise disposed to find the Teutons and their congeners or neighbours however designated, an interesting people, or their territories as in any way attractive. Referring to Tacitus’s account of Germany proper, as overgrown by vast forests, and defaced by frightful swamps, its climate he says is at once as insufferably hot in summer as it is bitterly cold in winter. ‘Hungary,’ he observes, ‘is commonly said to produce oxen, Bavaria swine, Franconia onions, turnips and liquorice, Swabia harlots, Bohemia heretics, Switzerland butchers, Westphalia cheats, and the whole country gluttons and drunkards. The Germans, however, are a religious people; not easily turned from opinions they have once espoused and not readily persuaded to concord in matters of schism, everyone valiantly and obstinately defending the heresy he has himself adopted;’ words in which we may presume Villanovanus sought to give ease to the pent-up displeasure he felt against his repudiators, the Reformers of Basle and Strasburg.

Of Italy and its people he has little to say; and that not good. The natives readily enough pretend to forgive injuries, but, occasion offering, none revenge themselves so savagely. They make use in their everyday talk of the most horrid oaths and imprecations. Holding all the rest of the world in contempt and calling them barbarians, they themselves have nevertheless been alternately the prey of France, of Spain, and of Germany.

In his survey of Babylonia, he refers to a certain abominable custom observed by young marriageable women, which is particularly mentioned by Herodotus and also by the writers of the Bible, when read by unsealed eyes, as obtaining among the Jews, and of the money, so objectionably earned in our estimation, being devoted to the service of the Temple.

But the most interesting to us perhaps of all the commentaries attached to the Ptolemy, inasmuch as it influenced the fate of Servetus on his trial at Geneva, is the one appended to the map of Palestine or the Holy Land. Demurring to much that is said in praise of JudÆa in the Bible and by Josephus, as a country specially blessed in various ways, as being well-watered, fertile, &c., the commentator says, that in so far as climate is concerned, it is a temperate land, obnoxious to the extremes neither of heat nor of cold; a condition of things that may have led the Israelites or Hebrews to imagine that it must be the land that was promised to their forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; a land metaphorically said to be flowing with milk and honey. ‘The Israelites,’ it is said in continuation, ‘lived at length under laws received from Moses, although they had gone on piously and prosperously enough through countless ages, before his day, without any written law, having had regard to the oracles of divine or natural truth alone, gifted as they were with aptitude and greatness of mind. Moses, however, that distinguished theologian, thinking that no state could exist without a written code of law and equity, gave them one reduced to ten principal heads, engraved on two tables of stone; with the addition of a great number of minor commandments for the regulation of their lives and dealings with one another. But any more particular notice of these, they being so numerous—great birds not sitting in little nests—must here be passed by. Know, however, most worthy reader, that it is mere boasting and untruth when so much of excellence is ascribed to this land; the experience of merchants and others, travellers who have visited it, proving it to be inhospitable, barren, and altogether without amenity. Wherefore you may say that the land was promised, indeed, but is of little promise when spoken of in everyday terms.’

The Ptolemy of Villanovanus was well received, and though costly, a second edition was by and by required. We find it much commended in subsequent reprints by their publishers; and no wonder, for the Ptolemy is really a sumptuous book, upon which a large sum of money must have been spent, the typography being excellent and the text profusely ornamented with woodcuts on the sides of the pages as well as at the heads and tails of the chapters.38