this deception.  It availed little; they remained with their unsold edition of the two first volumes of the Adversaria, and the author with three thousand folio sheets in manuscript—­while both parties complained together, and their heirs could acquire nothing from the works of an author, of whom Bayle says that “his writings rise to such a prodigious bulk, that one can scarce conceive a single man could be capable of executing so great a variety; perhaps no copying clerk, who lived to grow old amidst the dust of an office, ever transcribed as much as this author has written.”  This was the memorable fate of one of that race of writers who imagine that their capacity extends with their volume.  Their land seems covered with fertility, but in shaking their wheat no ears fall.

Another memorable brother of this family of the Scribleri is the Abbe de Marolles, who with great ardour as a man of letters, and in the enjoyment of the leisure and opulence so necessary to carry on his pursuits, from an entire absence of judgment, closed his life with the bitter regrets of a voluminous author; and yet it cannot be denied that he has contributed one precious volume to the public stock of literature; a compliment which cannot be paid to some who have enjoyed a higher reputation than our author.  He has left us his very curious “Memoirs.”  A poor writer indeed, but the frankness and intrepidity of his character enable him, while he is painting himself, to paint man.  Gibbon was struck by the honesty of his pen, for he says in his life, “The dulness of Michael de Marolles and Anthony Wood[351] acquires some value from the faithful representation of men and manners.”

I have elsewhere shortly noticed the Abbe de Marolles in the character of “a literary sinner;” but the extent of his sins never struck me so forcibly as when I observed his delinquencies counted up in chronological order in Niceron’s “Hommes Illustres.”  It is extremely amusing to detect the swarming fecundity of his pen; from year to year, with author after author, was this translator wearying others, but remained himself unwearied.  Sometimes two or three classical victims in a season were dragged into his slaughter-house.  Of about seventy works, fifty were versions of the classical writers of antiquity, accompanied with notes.  But some odd circumstances happened to our extraordinary translator in the course of his life.  De l’Etang, a critic of that day, in his “Regles de bien traduire,” drew all his examples of bad translation from our abbe, who was more angry than usual, and among his circle the cries of our Marsyas resounded.  De l’Etang, who had done this not out of malice, but from urgent necessity to illustrate his principles, seemed very sorry, and was desirous of appeasing the angried translator.  One day in Easter, finding the abbe in church at prayers, the critic fell on his knees by the side of the translator:  it was an extraordinary moment, and a singular situation