The Devil's Details (13 page)

1. Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
, vol. 1 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 443.

2. Abraham Cowley,
Poems: Miscellanies, The Mistress, Pindarique Odes, Davideis. Verses Written on Several Occasions
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905), p. 251.

3. Ibid., p. 66.

4. Ibid., p. 242.

5. Ibid., p. 66.

6. Ibid., p. 246.

7. Ibid., p. 247.

8. Ibid., p. 270.

9. Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. ix.

10. Ibid., p. xvii.

11. Ibid., p. 72.

12. Ibid.

13. Janet Todd, ed.,
The Works of Aphra Behn
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1992), p. 72.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., p. 73.

16. Rosemary Cowler,
The Prose Works of Alexander Pope
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1986), p. 219.

17. See George Woodcock,
The English Sappho
(Montreal and New York: Black Rose Books, 1989), p. 102.

18. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad Variorum With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1929), pp. 36-8.

19. Ibid., p. 43.

20. Ibid., p. 44.

21. Ibid., p. 1.

22. R. J. White, Dr. Bentley: A Study in Academic Scarlet (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 206.

23. Ibid., p. 152.

24. R. C. Jebb,
Bentley
(London: Macmillan, 1909), p. 202.

25. White, ibid., p. 22.

26. Maynard Mack,
Alexander Pope: A Life
(London: W. W. Norton, 1985), p. 489.

27. Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 111.

1. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., p. xxiii. The original French edition was published in 1696, but this edition is more convenient for the general reader. F's in the text have been replaced by S' s.

2. Elisabeth Labrousse,
Bayle
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 63. Labrousse is the source of Bayle's life unless otherwise specified.

3. Pierre Bayle, “
Projet d'un Dictionaire critique
,” in
Projet et fragments d'un Dictionaire critique
(Rotterdam, 1692; repr. Geneva, 1970), sig. *2 verso. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 193. Grafton gives an account of Bayle's achievement that manages to be both succinct and thoughtful. His emphasis, however, is on the intellectual development of the footnote, an account that fails, in my eyes, to catch the full expansiveness of Bayle, or the humanity of Bayle's footnote.

4. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 5, p. 484, note [A].

5. Ibid., p. 491, note [L].

6. Ibid., note [74].

7. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 579.

8. Ibid., p. iii.

9. Ibid., p. 579, note [A].

10. Ibid.

11. Ibid., p. 579, note [C].

12. Thomas M. Lennon,
Reading Bayle
(Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 7. Lennon mentions “[s]helf counts of private libraries” but does not supply a reference. Though Lennon is surely correct about the book's popularity, the lack of footnote citation is unfortunate. As Lennon himself notes, Bayle's dictionary is no longer a staple of public, let alone private, libraries. Skeptical readers may take it on faith that Bayle outsold Locke or Rousseau. But Plato? For this, rigorous proof surely is needed. Plato, incidentally, is not to be found in Bayle's dictionary; Bayle apparently was satisfied with the entry in Louis Moréri's earlier dictionary—a rare agreement between the two. Moréri was a favorite target of Bayle's footnotes. See Elisabeth Labrousse,
Bayle
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 41. As the reader undoubtedly has noticed, Bayle's habit of digression is as easily caught as the Asian flu.

13. Quoted in H. T. Mason,
Pierre Bayle and Voltaire
(London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 10: Bayle “n'a jamais châtie son style ….”

14. A. Tibal,
Inventaire des manuscrits de Winckelmann déposés à la Bibliothèque Nationale
(Paris, 1911), p. 12. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 195. Grafton is also the source of many of the leads to works on Bayle that I have used without directly crediting him.

15. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 23.

16. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 23, note [D]. The note begins: “Some Fathers of the Church have maintained the Affirmative [18]; and the Heretics, taken notice of below, who took their names from
Abel
are of the same opinion; but those who believe, that
Abel
lived an hundred and twenty nine Years, think it improbable he should die a
Batchelor [sic]
.”

17. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 1, p. 27, note [G].

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., vol. 3, p. 381, note [F].

21. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 27.

22. Ibid., note [H].

23. Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 197. Grafton could also with justice be called a philosopher, as much of his writing drifts—intelligently and provocatively—into the domain of philosophy.

24. Ibid. But Scioppius's account of his youthful run-in with the sparrow is first in Latin and only later translated by Bayle, which surely limited his audience even in the sixteenth century more effectively that an R rating in the twenty-first.

25. Peter [sic] Bayle,
The Dictionary, Historical and Critical
(London: printed for J. J. and P. Knapton; D. Midwinter; J. Brotherton; A. Bettesworth, C. Hitch … [and 25 others], 1734-1738), 2nd ed., vol. 5, pp. 90-1.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., p. 90.

28. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 101.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., note [C].

31. Ibid., p. 110. Bayle probably was not genuinely worried about his own inclusion in later biographical dictionaries; more likely he simply could not pass up a chance for another swipe at Mr. Moréri, his competitor and
bête noir
. Moréri, as Bayle makes sure to point out, does not have an entry in his dictionary for the “indefatigable” Adam.

32. Ibid. The article on Billaut dismisses him with a few brief paragraphs; he “became a pretty good
French
poet” on whom critics “did not lavish praise” and who “did not grow rich by the Poet's Trade” (ibid., vol. 2, p. 9). Poets were a dime a dozen during the seventeenth century—literally. Only some ulterior motive can account for his gaining entry into Bayle's dictionary. That Bayle wanted to surround the first Adam with lesser lights would explain the entry.

33. Ibid., p. 101, note [A].

34. Ibid., p. 444, note [A].

35. Stuart Miller,
The Picaresque Novel
(Cleveland and London: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1967), p. 70.

36. Ibid., p. 71.

37. John Murray, ed.,
The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon
(London: John Murray, 1896), p. 247. Quoted in Patricia B. Craddock,
Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 127. It should be said—with regret perhaps, but also with some asperity—that Craddock has not been well served by her publishers. Citations are unconscionably abbreviated and squeezed into parentheses that disfigure the text: (M 247), for example. A trip to “Abbreviations” at the front of the book is required to learn that M stands for Murray's
Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon
and not Gibbon's
Memoirs
—unless one's own
M
, that is,
memory
, is exceptional. For Craddock's commentary notes we are trundled off to the end of the book. When found (a difficult task; see my note 52, page 86), these notes often have a reference that necessitates a journey back to the front of the book. Scholarly work is already circuitous enough without Johns Hopkins's mazy addition; that it occurs in the biography of England's best-known footnoter suggests a lack of taste as well as an absence of thoughtfulness.

38. Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 8.

39. Ibid., p. 93.

40. Ibid.

41. Quoted in Anthony Grafton,
The Footnote: A Curious History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 103. Grafton practices a kind of truncated footnoting that reflects, I think, the scholarly bias of his view of footnotes. His citation reads: “
The Letters of David Hume
, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford, 1932), II, 313.”

42. Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. I, p. 94. From the many editions of the
History
, I have chosen the one edited by J. B. Bury. It is a classic edition, of course, but its compact format, into which so many footnotes and marginality are given just enough but not more space than absolutely necessary, may alert the reader unfamiliar with Gibbon as to exactly how magnificent was his accomplishment. Not only did he master the voluminous and unreliable sources of Rome's history, not only did he manage to lay down parallel after parallel sentence with scarcely a dull paragraph—or at least without an entirely dull page—but he did it at a time when London lacked public libraries and when publishers lacked the resources that those of today often enjoy, and who were always tempted to make the page do more than it comfortably can do. One is hard pressed to choose Gibbon's primary virtue: his resilience, his reliability, or his readability.

43. Ibid., note 35.

44. Ibid., note 36.

45. Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. IV, p. 153, note 151.

46.Edward Gibbon,
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(London: Methuen, 1896), vol. VII, p. 281.

47. Ibid., p. 256.

48. Ibid.

49. Patricia B. Craddock,
Young Edward Gibbon: Gentleman of Letters
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 107.

50. Ibid., p. 110.

51. No love affair, however brief and however young the participants, can ever be summarized in a few lines. For a more complete, complicated, and painful account of this affair, see Patricia B. Craddock,
Edward Gibbon: Luminous Historian, 1772-1794
(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), especially pp. 136-7, 156-7, 172-4.