Page "Joseph Justus Scaliger" Paragraph 19

After several scurrilous but ineffectual attacks by the Jesuit party, in 1607 a new and more successful attempt was made.

Scaliger's weak point was his pride.

In 1594 Scaliger had published his Epistola de vetustate et splendore gentis Scaligerae et JC Scaligeri vita.

In 1601 Gaspar Scioppius, then in the service of the Jesuits published his Scaliger hypototimaeus (" The Supposititious Scaliger "), a quarto volume of more than four hundred pages, written with consummate ability in an admirable and incisive style, with the entire disregard for truth which Scioppius always displayed, and with all the power of his accomplished sarcasm.

Every piece of scandal which could be raked together concerning Scaliger or his family is to be found there.

The author professes to point out five hundred lies in the Epistola de vetustate of Scaliger, but the main argument of the book is to show the falsity of his pretensions to be of the family of La Scala, and of the narrative of his father's early life.

" No stronger proof ," says Pattison, " can be given of the impressions produced by this powerful philippic, dedicated to the defamation of an individual, than that it had been the source from which the biography of Scaliger, as it now stands in our biographical collections, has mainly flowed.