A new edition of Bayle in France is an event in literary history which could not have been easily predicted.  Every work which creates an epoch in literature is one of the great monuments of the human mind; and Bayle may be considered as the father of literary curiosity, and of modern literature.  Much has been alleged against our author:  yet let us be careful to preserve what is precious.  Bayle is the inventor of a work which dignified a collection of facts constituting his text, by the argumentative powers and the copious illustrations which charm us in his diversified commentary.  Conducting the humble pursuits of an Aulus Gellius and an Athenaeus with a high spirit, he showed us the philosophy of Books, and communicated to such limited researches a value which they had otherwise not possessed.

This was introducing a study perfectly distinct from what is pre-eminently distinguished as “classical learning,” and the subjects which had usually entered into philological pursuits.  Ancient literature, from century to century, had constituted the sole labours of the learned; and “variae lectiones” were long their pride and their reward.  Latin was the literary language of Europe.  The vernacular idiom in Italy was held in such contempt that their youths were not suffered to read Italian books, their native productions.  Varchi tells a curious anecdote of his father sending him to prison, where he was kept on bread and water, as a penance for his inveterate passion for reading Italian books!  Dante was reproached by the Italians for composing in his mother-tongue, still expressed by the degrading designation of il volgare, which the “resolute” John Florio renders “to make common;” and to translate was contemptuously called volgarizzare.  Petrarch rested his fame on his Latin poetry, and called his Italian nugellas vulgares!  With us Roger Ascham was the first who boldly avowed “To speak as the common people, to think as wise men;” yet, so late as the time of Bacon, this great man did not consider his “Moral Essays” as likely to last in the moveable sands of a modern language, for he has anxiously had them sculptured in the marble of ancient Rome.  Yet what had the great ancients themselves done, but trusted to their own volgare?  The Greeks, the finest and most original writers of the ancients, observes Adam Ferguson, “were unacquainted with every language but their own; and if they became learned, it was only by studying what they themselves had produced.”

During fourteen centuries, whatever lay out of the pale of classical learning was condemned as barbarism; in the meanwhile, however, amidst this barbarism, another literature was insensibly creating itself in Europe.  Every people, in the gradual accessions of their vernacular genius, discovered a new sort of knowledge, one which more deeply interested their feelings and the times, reflecting the image, not of the Greeks and the Latins, but of themselves!