LIFE OF JULIUS CAESAR SCALIGER,
byProf. Vernon Hall Jr. The American Philo-sophical Society, Phila.; 1950; c. 300; n.p.
"No one in Agen, which I visited for this purpose, has been able to clear up this last mystery connected with the Scaliger family" the mysterious duplicates and triplicates in the family papers. But not much else has escaped the indefatigable zeal of Scaliger's first and definitive biographer.
Like Sir William Hamilton and Mark Pattison before him, Hr. Hall has investigated the rumor that Scaliger was not a scion of the princely family of Verona but the off spring of an ignoble sign-painter named Bordoni. And rightly he is more impressed with the version which, after all, Scaliger was able to make all his contemporaries be lieve. The real interest for us in Scaliger's life is fortunately well documented, his adult contacts and controversies with his fellow humanists and medicos, with Erasmus and Cardan and Rabelais; and it is this period which Mr. Hall recreates for us in the body of the book. His copious and illuminating translations from the prose and verse of Scaliger and his mighty opposites give the true touch of the Renaissance, its salty and peppery wit.
No one should miss either the peculiar pleasures of the appendices. One is an engaging document "Official Report of the Handing-Over of the Skull of Julius Caesar Scaliger to the Bureau of the Society of Agriculture, Sciences and Arts of Agen". (Alas, poor Yorick!) The other is the romantic tale of Scaliger's rather unrespectable American descendants and the sealed box which they deposited in Philadelphia with the American Philosophical Society.
The biography, quite properly, does not attempt to give an encyclopedic account of Scaliger's manifold works. But literary critics will be grateful for the admirable treatment of Scaliger's Defense of Poetry and of the larger, posthumous Poetics. In connection with the latter Mr. Hall neatly summarizes both the range and limitations of Scaliger's genius:
Scaliger was a soldier, doctor, philosopher, grammarian, textual critic, physicist, botanist, poet, and the author of a poetics. For him all of these activities were but one activity the acquirement of knowledge and with knowledge, power. Power over the forces of nature and power to influence the mind of man. Poetry is as practical as physics.
