versal that every one among them would have every one else to do his bidding, he himself feeling bound to do the bidding of none.'

The Church and her favoured sons, the hierarchs thereof, having still thriven in the shadow of the throne, as Villeneuve was now living amid the clerical society of an archiepiscopal city, it was thought that the few words in the former edition, which seemed to question the efficacy of the Royal Touch' in curing scrofula, would be out of place. They are, therefore, now found modified. For the 'I did not see that any were cured,' we find 'I have heard say that many were cured!' The new edition, moreover, being dedicated to the Archbishop of Vienne, it was felt that any word in dispraise of the Holy Land would seem disrespectful and improper. All that is said in connection with the map of Palestine contradictory to the Bible account of Judæa as a land flowing with milk and honey, or as of signal beauty and fertility, is accordingly entirely expunged from the new impression.

These changes have been said to be due to warnings given by friends to Servetus, on the presumption, probably, that he could hardly have been living on terms of intimacy with many persons of note, both lay and clerical, without betraying something of the sceptical element that distinguished him at the outset of his career, and that got the mastery of him with such disastrous consequences at last. But we have no posi

tive intimation that Servetus ever failed to keep his counsel, or that he was known to a soul in Vienne, save as M. Michel Villeneuve, the physician. Calvin certainly knew him by no other name in Paris when they met there in 1534, a date at which we have surmised he had not yet read the 'De Erroribus Trinitatis,' and so escaped having his suspicions aroused through the sameness of the views propounded in that work, and those expressed by his acquaintance, Villeneuve, that he had its author, Michael Serveto, alias Revés, bodily before him.

That this was really the case is confirmed by the statement which he makes on his trial at Vienne, to the effect, that he had only been challenged by Calvin in the course of their correspondence, begun as many as fourteen years after the publication of his first book, with being no other than Servetus. Having read the 'De Erroribus' subsequently, Calvin did not fail to discover Michael Serveto under the cloak of Michael Villanovanus, his correspondent of Vienne, and may consequently, some time after the year 1546, have written to Cardinal Tournon, as said by Bolsec,1 or hinted to a friend in Lyons, that they had an egregious heretic, the writer of the work on Trinitarian Error, living among them under an assumed name. But of so much as this we have no reliable assurance, and even if we had, it could

Vie de Calvin, &c.

have no reference to the year 1541, the date of publication of the second edition of Villanovanus's 'Ptolemy.'1

1 This, the second edition of Villanovanus's Ptolemy, is one of the very rare books. All of the impression that could be discovered when Servetus was burned in effigy at Vienne, along with his Christianismi Restitutio, appears to have been seized and committed to the flames. I find both editions in the library of the British Museum.

CHAPTER XV.

EDITION OF SANTES PAGNINI'S LATIN BIBLE, WITH
COMMENTARY.

SERVETUS must have got through a very considerable amount of literary work during the earlier years of his residence at Vienne. His time not being then fully occupied by professional duties, he had leisure and certainly no lack of inclination for other work, so that he seems to have been kept well employed by the publishers of Lyons. Hardly had the second 'Ptolemy' seen the light, than we find another handsome volume in folio not only taking shape under his hands, but actually launched in the course of the following year, 1542. This was a new and elegant edition of the Latin Bible of the learned Santes Pagnini.1

1 Habes in hoc Libro, prudens Lector, utriusque Instrumenti novam Tralationem editam a Reverendo sacræ theologia Doctore Sancte Pagnini. Lugdun. 1527-28, fol. Such is the title of this, which we presume to be the first edition of Pagnini's Bible. Between it and the one of Cologne of 1541, edited by Melchior Novesianus, we find no other until we come to that of Villanovanus. Pagnini is said in the letter of J. F. Pico de Mirandola, which precedes the text, to have been twenty-five years engaged on the work. It is accompanied by no fewer than two commendatory epistles from Popes Adrian VI. and Clement VII., and is said to be the first edition of the Bible that is found divided into chapters. Richard Simon (Hist. du vieux Testament, liv. ii.) speaks slightingly of

Appreciating the naturally pious bent of Servetus's mind, as we do, to edit the Bible, we imagine, must to him have been like rest to the weary, and we think of the delight with which he received the proposal of Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons, to undertake a task of the kind. In his own earliest work we have seen him speaking of the Bible as a 'book fallen down. from heaven, to be read a thousand times over, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science.' But this is from the pen of the younger man; for study and after thought, with the privilege he possessed through his self-reliant spirit of reading without a foregone conclusion, enabled him by and by to discover that the accredited traditional interpretation of holy writ could not at all times be maintained without violence, not only to reason and experience, but to history and the plain meaning of the text. He came to the conclusion, in fact, that whilst the usual prophetical bearing ascribed to the Old Testament was ever to be kept in view, the text had a primary, literal, and immediate reference to the age in which it was composed, and to the personages, the events, and the circumstances amid which its writers lived.

In the Preface to his edition, consequently, we see that, having undertaken the responsible duty of editor,

its merits; but it has been highly prized by others, as good judges as he. To us it appears a very admirable version, our own English Bible being generally so like it, that we fancy it must have been used by our Translators.