or the garden of the botanist, there was no rarity of nature on which he had not something to communicate.  His mind toiled with that impatience of knowledge, that becomes a pain only when the mind is not on the advance.  In England PEIRESC was the associate of Camden and Selden, and had more than one interview with that friend to literary men, our calumniated James the First.  One may judge by these who were the men whom PEIRESC sought, and by whom he himself was ever after sought.  Such, indeed, were immortal friendships!  Immortal they may be justly called, from the objects in which they concerned themselves, and from the permanent results of the combined studies of such friends.

Another peculiar greatness in this literary character was PEIRESC’S enlarged devotion to literature out of its purest love for itself alone.  He made his own universal curiosity the source of knowledge to other men.  Considering the studious as forming but one great family wherever they were, for PEIRESC the national repositories of knowledge in Europe formed but one collection for the world.  This man of letters had possessed himself of their contents, that he might have manuscripts collated, unedited pieces explored, extracts supplied, and even draughtsmen employed in remote parts of the world, to furnish views and plans, and to copy antiquities for the student, who in some distant retirement often discovered that the literary treasures of the world were unfailingly opened to him by the secret devotion of this man of letters.

Carrying on the same grandeur in his views, his universal mind busied itself in every part of the habitable globe.  He kept up a noble traffic with all travellers, supplying them with philosophical instruments and recent inventions, by which he facilitated their discoveries, and secured their reception even in barbarous realms.  In return he claimed, at his own cost, for he was “born rather to give than to receive,” says Gassendi, fresh importations of Oriental literature, curious antiquities, or botanic rarities; and it was the curiosity of PEIRESC which first embellished his own garden, and thence the gardens of Europe, with a rich variety of exotic flowers and fruits.[A] Whenever presented with a medal, a vase, or a manuscript, he never slept over the gift till he had discovered what the donor delighted in; and a book, a picture, a plant, when money could not be offered, fed their mutual passion, and sustained the general cause of science.  The correspondence of PEIRESC branched out to the farthest bounds of Ethiopia, connected both Americas, and had touched the newly-discovered extremities of the universe, when this intrepid mind closed in a premature death.

[Footnote A:  On this subject see “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. ii. p. 151; and for some further account of Peiresc and his labours, vol. iii. p. 409, of the same work.—­ED.]