PEDANTRY.

Some critics have contemned the Latin of Ovid. Passerat owns, that he had professed the Belles Lettres a long time before he explained any of Ovid’s pieces; and that because he found a reigning prejudice against that poet. Balzac was not ignorant of the whimsical taste of this Italian. “I knew,” says he, “that under the pontificate of Leo X., a Venetian gentleman that was much esteemed by Fracastor, and by whose name he called his Dialogue of Poesy, had a custom on his anniversary birth-day of solemnly burning the works of Martial, as an annual sacrifice to the manes and memory of Catullus. I knew equally well, that another refined critic of the same time maintained, that the corruption of the Roman language commenced in the person of Ovid, whose Metamorphoses he translated for the use of his son, that* he might learn the Fables without the danger of adopting Ovid’s way of speaking, and that in seeking out the riches of poetry, he might not endanger the nobleness of his own style by a contagious reading. Scaliger observes, that Peter Victorius and Lambinus contemned Ovid extremely.” Another learned critic complains in the same strain without mentioning any body.—Art. Ovid.