LINACRE’S TRANSLATIONS
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To return to Linacre. His greatest object in life, which he pursued through many difficulties, was to make the works of Aristotle and Galen accessible by means of translations to scholars in general. He formed a sort of Aristotle society or club with his friends Grocyn and Latimer for the study and translation of the philosopher, and Erasmus tells us some versions of Aristotle were lying in Linacre’s desk which he hoped would be profitable to future scholars ; but they never appeared. Of Galen’s works he translated several, some of them long and important 1 . In medicine he wrote
Generation he is still more strikingly Aristotelian. Several times he refers to and adopts the doctrine that ‘ innate heat ’ and the seminal principle of generation are of celestial origin and analogous to the essence of the stars. In one passage where, as Dr. Church has ably remarked (in the Harveian Oration, 1895^, he no longer ascribes (with Aristotle) the innate heat to the heart, but refers it to the blood, he still only extends the Aristotelian doctrine by affirming that in the blood itself there is a nature or soul superior to the forces of the elements and analogous to the essence of the stars ( respondens elemento stellarum), a phrase used also by Cesalpino. A little further on, he compares the influence of the blood on the parts of the body to that of the superior heavenly bodies, especially the sun and moon, on the inferior. It seems as if Harvey, in spite of Copernicus and Galileo, was Still living under an Aristotelian heaven and remained till the close of his life a staunch Peripatetic. This, I suspect, was the main reason for his want of sympathy with Bacon, which has often been remarked. For it was Bacon’s avowed aim to destroy the supremacy of Aristotle ; and nothing could have been more repugnant to Harvey than this.
1 That Linacre had no superior and hardly an equal as a translator of Galen and Aristotle is evident from the numerous tributes paid him by the most eminent scholars of his time. Erasmus says that in Linacre’s lost versions of Aristotle the language is so good that the original hardly equals it in grace (‘ ut Aristoteles vix in suo sermone parem habeat gratiam ’), and that Galen , in Linacre’s translation, speaks better Latin than he had before spoken Greek. Aldus Manutius, the great Venetian printer, pays Linacre high compliments, wishing that the Italian physicians would learn to write Latin with the same classical elegance. Bude (Budaeus), the first Greek scholar in France, ventures to prophesy that, from Linacre’s versions of Galen, Britain will become as famous as was, of old, Galen’s own birthplace, Pergamus. He contrasts Linacre’s classical severity of style with the careless licence of contemporary (Latin) writing.
This last remark touches the only complaint made against Linacre’s style : that it was too severe as com- pared with the current Latin of physicians and scholars, and so too difficult. But a judgement passed on Linacre after his death, and therefore free from the suspicion of
