follow; or François Daniel, whom Calvin salutes as "amice wcomparàbïlïs? or as "frater et amice integerrime"; or Nicolas du Chemin, whom he rallies on his literary ambitions, and addresses as "mea vita charior." The man is here revealed as nature made him, and before he had to struggle against grim death for what was dearer to him than life; affectionate and delicate, not in body, but in spirit.
In 1528 Calvin's father, perhaps illuminated by the disputes hi his Cathedral Chapter, discovered that the law was a surer road to wealth and honour than the Church, and decided that his son should leave theology for jurisprudence. The son, nothing loth, obeyed, and left Paris for Orleans, possibly, as he descended the steps of the College de Montaigu, brushing shoulders with a Spanish freshman named Ignatius Loyola. In Orleans Calvin studied law under Pierre de TEstoile, who is described as jurlsconsidtorum Gallarum facile princeps, and as eclipsing in classical knowledge Reuchlin, Aleander, and Erasmus; and Greek under Wolmar, in whose house he met for the first time Theodore Beza, then a boy about ten years of age. After a year in Orleans he went to Bourges, attracted by the fame of the Italian jurist Alciati, whose ungainliness of body and speech and vanity of mind his students loved to satirise and even by occasional rebellion to chasten. In 1531 Gérard Calvin died and his son in 1532 published his first work, a Commentary on Seneca's De dementia. His purpose has been construed by the light of his later career; and some have seen in the book a veiled defence of the Huguenot martyrs, others a cryptic censure of Francis I, and yet others a prophetic dissociation of himself from Stoicism. But there is no mystery in the matter; the work is that of a scholar who has no special interest in either theology or the Bible. This may be statistically illustrated: Calvin cites twenty-two Greek authors and fifty-five Latin, the quotations being most abundant and from many books; but in his whole treatise there are pnly three Biblical texts expressly cited, and those from the Vulgate. The man is cultivated and learned, writes elegant Latin, is a good judge of Latinity, criticises like any modern the mind and style, the knowledge and philosophy, the manner, the purpose, and the ethical ideas of Seneca; but the passion for religion has not as yet penetrated as it did later into his very bones. Erasmus is in Calvin's eyes the ornament of letters, though his large edition of Seneca is not all it ought to have been; but even Erasmus could not at twenty-three have produced a work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide in its outlook.
What gives the book significance is the nature that shines through it; the humanist is a man with a passion for conduct, moral, veracious, strenuous, who has loved labour and bestowed it without grudging on the classical writer with whom he has most affinity. Of the twin pillars of Roman philosophy and eloquence Cicero is for him an easy first, but Seneca is a clear second. Calvin is here at once a jurist and a scholar,
