Note 185 — SECTION I. WORKS WRITTEN OR ANNOTATED BY TORY.

Following the course pursued in the Psalterium Quincuplex, published shortly before by Henri Estienne, Tory proposed to write with a cedilla the last e but one of the third person plural of the perfect tense of verbs of the third conjugation (emere, contendere, etc.), to distinguish it from the infinitive. In our day the circumflex accent has been adopted for this purpose; but accented letters did not exist in Tory's time, and he sought to utilise, in the interest of the metre, the only distinctive sign at the disposal of typography, the e with the cedilla, which was then generally used for æ, in imitation of the manuscripts of the Middle Ages. Tory also proposed to spell with s, instead of x, certain words like mixtum; 'for,' he said, 'misceo has miscui in the perfect; and so, by analogy, we must say mistum.'

I will not comment here on some other observations of the same sort made by Tory in this same note to the reader; I will say simply that they all tend to prove his erudition and peremptorily contradict the extraordinary assertion of a certain Abbé Joly, who, in a huge folio, entitled Remarques critiques sur le Dictionnaire de Bayle, and published in 1740, observes that Tory was 'very ignorant,' without adducing a single fact in support of his opinion. In the Menagiana (vol. iv, p. 84 of the 12mo edition of 1729) Tory is rebuked, to be sure, for forging Latin words, after the example of the author of the Songe du Poliphile; but this is a less serious charge, and is not a proof of ignorance; on the contrary it proves misuse of knowledge. Geofroy Tory, says the author, attracted by the style of the Poliphile, composed seven epitaphs filled with words most worthy of a place in that work, 'such as murmurillare, insatianter, hilaranter, pederaptim, velocipediter, ægrimoniosius, avicipes, conspergitare, venustulentissus, vinulentibibulus, apneumaticus, and collifrangibulum, which he represented as ancient words, and which the excellent Catherinot, in his epitaph of this same Tory, did not fail to guarantee to be such.'—See what Catherinot has to say of Tory's Epitaphs in his epitaph of Tory, p. 44 supra. [Tumulos aliquot ludicros veterrimo stylo latine condiderit.]