Arthur Augustus Tilley

“ While Bude wrote French with difficulty and considered it hardly a fit language for a scholar to use, Henri Estienne was loud in its praises and gave practical proof of its capabilities. Of his French writings three were devoted to this theme : (1) Conformité du Langage François avec le Grec (published in 1575, but without date; ed. L. Feugere, 1850) , in which French is shown to have, among modern languages, the most affinity with Greek, the first of all languages ”

“ Charles Estinne (1504 or 1505–1564) , the third son of Henri, was, like his brother Robert, a man of considerable learning. After the usual humanistic training lie studied medicine, aud became a doctor of that faculty in the university of Paris. In 1540 he accompanied the French ambassador Lazare Baif to Italy in the capacity of tutor to his natural son Antoine, the future poet. In 1551, when Robert Estienne left Paris for Geneva, Charles, who had remained a Catholic, took charge of his printing establishment, and in the same year was appointed king’s printer. ”

“ In 1559 he printed a Latin translation from his own pen of Sextus Empiricus, and an edition of Diodorus Siculus with the new books. In 1566 he published his best known French work, the Apologie pour Hérodote, or, as he himself called it, L’Introduction au Traité de la Conformité des Merveilles Anciennes avec les Modernes ou Traité preparatif à l’Apologie pour Hérodote. Some passages in the original edition being considered objectionable by the Geneva consistory, he was compelled to cancel the pages containing them. The book became highly popular. ”

“ Put together without any method, its extreme desultoriness makes it difficult to read continuously, but the numerous stories, collected partly from various literary sources, notably from the preachers Menot and Maillard, partly from the writer’s own multifarious experience, with which it is packed, make it an interesting commentary on the manners and fashions of the time. ”

“ In 1528 he married Perrette, a daughter of the scholar and printer Josse Bade (Jodocus Badius) , and in the same year he published his first Latin Bible, an edition in folio, upon which he had been at work for the last four years. In 1532 appeared his Thesaurus Linguæ Latinæ, a dictionary of Latin words and phrases, upon which for two years he had toiled incessantly, with no other assistance than that of Thierry of Beauvais. A second edition, greatly enlarged and improved, appeared in 1536, and a third, still further improved, in 3 vols. ”