Essays on Theodicy

...soon became. The contagion took hold, and it was not only the great number. Netherlands and Germany that were infected by it; it rapidly won over all of Italy and some corners of France. Scaliger Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), one of the greatest scholars of the Renaissance, known for his work on chronology and philology., who sensed the sickness, remedied it as much as he could through his example and through his exhortations; this great man, occupied with the progress of Literature Literally "Belles-Lettres," a term for the humanities and fine writing., recommended nothing so strongly to his disciples as not to allow themselves to be seduced by the charming vices of Lipsius’s style. Henri Estienne Also known as Henricus Stephanus, a famous French scholar-printer; he wrote a critique of Lipsius titled De Lipsii Latinitate. had already published on this matter a Work which would be better if it were less long, and if the main subject were not drowned in a heap of useless digressions. But neither the advice of Scaliger nor the harshness of Henri Estienne were capable of stopping, at that time, this torrent which was in its full force. Lipsius found not only admirers, but also many imitators (a), and his example produced in the Republic of Letters The "Republic of Letters" was the long-distance intellectual community of scholars and philosophers in Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries. a revolution roughly similar to that which Rome experienced in the time of Seneca (b), and France in the final years of the Reign of Louis XIV. Even those who would have been incapable of explaining what the true character of Lipsius’s style consisted of took pride in resembling him; but as they did not have

(a) See Morhof, Literary Polymath, Book I, Chapter 24. Daniel Georg Morhof was a 17th-century scholar known for his encyclopedic work on literary history.
(b) Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory, Book X, Chapter 50. original: "Quintilian. Lib. X. Instit. Orator. cap. 50." In this chapter, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian famously critiques Seneca the Younger for corrupting the tastes of Roman youth with a flashy but decadent style.