: i ' ince. His Even that great work for it merits the epithet of
itlyadmired. great both by its design and by its execution— thi
- I iverj the marquis Latin poem which preserves his reputation, was hi. in
■ delivered as incomplete and rragmentarv a condition as the an-
leim had existed, cienl ruins from which he had recovered the shattered
l;^1;:1.' 'el for those monuments of ancienl art. He never finished il he
elected never put its finished parts together ("varias partes
ariis temporibus perpoliendo, dissolutas, ac dissipates
- in uniini corpus revocare numquam curaveraf). A few
before his death he consigned hi- u tarranged
nihil." I nn honoi „ce8) BIMj
in 1717 ol or- u.re fairly merited. 11- had through life been
,llll~'"! I "'- manuscripts to his long-tried companion and friendthe
POLIGNAC
353
POLIGNAC
abbe de Rothelin, appointing bim bis literary executor, to revise, arrange, connect, complete the scattered leaves, or to suppress them, according to his discretion. The provision lor the performance of these duties seems to have been early made. The marquis D'Argenson re- ports it in his Memoires, published fifteen years before Polignac's death: "A poem against Lucretius, of equal length with the original, and divided into nine books, requires the life of a man to carry it to perfection. The cardinal began too late, and cannot flatter himself with the hope of living to finish it. It is said that he means to charge the abbe de Rothelin with the task, who, from vanity, will not refuse it, and will think it an honor to put the work of his respectable friend in a state to appear before the public. But to this end the aid of some able professor of the university will be necessary : the abbe will never accomplish it of himself. . . . But who, at present, will read a Latin poem entirely philo- sophical, of five or six thousand lines? . . . Greek is entirely forgotten ; it is to be feared that Latin will soon be so, and that the cardinal de Folignac, the abbe de Rothelin, and a certain M. Le Beau, coming up in the university, will be called the last of the Romans." From vanity, from affection, from love of learning, from zeal for philosophy, or from all these motives combined, the pious task intrusted to him was faithfully and credita- bly discharged by the abbe de Rothelin. With the counsel and assistance of the abbate Cerati, rector of the University of Pisa, he prepared the work for the press, and wrote the dedication to pope Benedict XIV. He, too, died without seeing the fruit of his labors; and the long-expected work, which for forty years it had been a mark of polite culture to know (A nti-Lucretium nosse pars urbauitutis~), appeared at Paris under the su- pervision of Prof. Le Beau, to whom the charge of edit- ing it had been consigned by Rothelin. It was repro- duced at London in 1748. D'Argenson thought that translations would be left unread; but translations soon diffused the fame of the work among those who were ignorant of the classic tongues. At the commencement of the century, while the poem was in its crude infancy, a translation was begun by the dukes of Maine and Bourbon. The French version of Bougainville was is- sued in 1759, and the Italian of Ricci was produced in splendid form at Verona in 1767 (3 vols. 4to).
The Anti-Lucretius. — The philosophical poem of car- dinal Polignac, as published by Le Beau, and, appar- ently, as originally designed by its author, consists of nine books; but it closes without epilogue, peroration, or envoy. Notwithstanding its length, its protracted gestation, and its elaborate execution, it ends like that canto of Butler's Iludibras which celebrates the Bear and Fiddle, but " breaks off in the middle." It wants alike completeness and completion. It is fragmentary and desultory, deficient and redundant. Its arguments are ingenious without being convincing, and its polem- ics are more dazzling than satisfactory. The blind and fanatical Cartesianism of the poet confines him in a lab- yrinth of bewildering errors, and conceals from bim at once the vagaries and weaknesses of his master, and the strength and profundity of those who had risen up to confute his philosophic hallucinations. He is dizzied by the vortices in which he has involved himself. He forgets bis specific function as the antagonist of Epicu- rean ethics and physics, and devotes himself with more earnest energy to the refutation of all anti-Cartesians, whom he assimilates to and often identifies with the Epicurean herd. He is in consequence both undiscern- ing and unjust in the treatment of his brilliant prede- cessors and contemporaries. The statement and confu- tation of the doctrines of Spinoza might have been very acceptable to the Cartesians and theologians of his own day, when Spinoza was so little understood and so harshly appreciated (iii, 803-872; iv, 1295-1307). It may be highly approved even now by those who still retain the old fanatical delusions and the old animosi- ties in regard to Spinoza, and who cannot recognise in VIII.— Z
him Coleridge's "God-intoxicated sage." See Spinoza. But surely the language in which the cardinal assails the Newtonian system, and proceeds to confute Newton himself, does equal discredit to his good-sense and to his scientific perspicacity (ii, 865-1006; iv, 933-1124). He does, it is true, allow a faint echo of the universal admiration for Newton to escape him :