Etienne Dolet : a Biography. By R. C. Christie. New
Edition. (Macmillan and Co. 10s.)—We welcome with unaffected pleasure this new edition of an admirable monograph. Mr. R. C. Christie's Etienne Dolet does credit to English scholarship, and long since received the honour of translation into French. That it is little known in our own country is due, perhaps, to an imperfect sympathy with a great movement, for, indeed, it is less a bio- graphy than a sketch of the intellectual renaissance as it happened in France. Now, Dolet, though perhaps it is hardly just to call him a "martyr," was a bold, even a violent man, and he fought for the New Learning as martyrs have fought for the faith. Nor did he spare his own skin, and he dared to write and to speak at Toulouse when the fires were still alight for con- tumacious scholars. But it was at Lyons that he did the best of his works, and printed the hooks which will keep his name alive. For though democratic France has chosen him as the type of freedom, though he wrote learned works concerning the art of translation and the excellence of Cicero, he lives neither as a man of letters nor as a champion of liberty. Briefly, it is Etienne Dolet the printer whom we remember, the printer of the New Testament, of Clement Marot, of Erasmus in French, and many a translation from the classics. His turbulent life was closed by a turbulent death, and the offence for whiell be was burned on the Place Maubert seems trivial enough to-day. He was sacrificed for the words rien du tout, which constituted the crime of blasphemy. In a translation from Plato be rendered the words fri, 74 our t at by "tu ne seras plus rien du tout," and for the last three words, which seemed to deny the immortality of the soul, he died at the stake. M. Baudrier, a French jurist, defends the Judges on the ground that for ten years previous to the final sentence Dolet had been an incessant law-breaker. He had twice been condemned to death, and once tried for murder. However, plausible as the argument is, we prefer to agree with Mr. Christie, whose sympathy with Dolet and hatred of religious persecution impel him to condemn the Court without reserve. But whatever were our conclusion, Dolet is surely among the most talented and vigorous men of his time, and nowhere can himself and his work be better studied than in Mr. Christie's learned, lucid, and impartial biography.
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