Authors and Climbers

Anthony Grafton

• Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750 by Anne Goldgar
  Yale, 295 pp, £25.00, June 1995, ISBN 0 300 05359 2

The sight that confronted the French Protestant d’Origny Delaloge when he left his London house at nine o’clock one morning in 1707 struck him as out of the ordinary. A fellow Huguenot, wearing a blond wig, a black suit with a damask vest and a hat with a rose on it, stood before the house and addressed him, first in English and then in French. He identified himself as Jean Le Clerc, the celebrated philologist and theologian from Holland who had edited the complete Latin works of Erasmus, produced a widely read periodical and written the first systematic modern manual of critical method, the Ars Critica. Explaining that he was travelling incognito, he nonetheless managed to reveal that he had come to occupy a chair in Oriental languages at Cambridge, his Latin inaugural lecture in his pocket. When Delaloge, who clearly found him impressive, invited him to dinner, Le Clerc spread himself in literary gossip, talking freely of the publishing houses and periodicals to which he enjoyed access. He even tried to appropriate a manuscript by Delaloge, which he promised to print in the Bibliothèque choisie. Only when foiled in this effort did Le Clerc finally leave, and even then he behaved oddly, insisting that he would walk after his puzzled host had called him a coach.