ON CODICES AND EDITIONS.

catchword: Scali-

In the? passage of time, the primary use of the elegy was in love and its cares, and it remained so even among those who pursued the games of wit rather than true? loves in verse: a thing already stated? by Ovid. But in expressing the cares of love, can everything proceed with equal evenness, so that one thought succeeds another as if in a speech composed with every rationality? and much deliberation and diligently elaborated?? I do not believe so; but as in a lover one impulse of the mind pushes and urges another, so it is necessary that thoughts—not sufficiently corresponding to one another and joined by a tighter bond—be subjected. We see the lover now being suppliant, now proud, now praying, beseeching, now? swearing, threatening, thundering, sometimes praising, chiding, weeping?, rejoicing, becoming angry. Would he not be insane with reason who, as in a calm style of oratory, would want to bring forward nothing except things appropriate and connected with one another? Therefore we ought not to marvel if in elegy we see something occasionally wavering? and gaping, and those things following one another whose connection could not proceed from subtle judgment, but from the cares of a distressed mind and from an impetus snatched into contraries. You ought to put on, as it were, the sense of the lover, to undergo his state and condition, and to substitute yourself in his place within your own mind. Since these things are so, I would not be led by light judgment to think—having always been of a mind alien to the Scaligerian transpositions, which Broukhusius embraced so greedily. But let us now look more accurately at his recension.

It is sufficiently clear? how hostile the mind of that great man was toward Muretus. From these same hatreds must have proceeded this: that, having clearly abandoned Muretus, he returned again to the first Aldine edition and handed it over to be printed as if amended by himself. For it is now clearly evident to me that the Scaligerana was derived from the first edition; and by this very fact it happened that very many things, which in the second Aldine and soon after by Muretus had been egregiously amended, are now brought forth again defiled by the old filth. And since Scaliger lacked the sense of Tibullian candor and simplicity, while possessing instead a store of exquisite, albeit excellent, learning, he changed or refashioned many things—doctly, who would deny it? Sometimes even ingeniously, but in a manner and method abhorrent to the genius of Tibullus. Yet because Broukhusius follows him religiously, the Scaligeran recension—which I wish had not been done—began to be held as most excellent in recent times.