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But as A.D. Nuttall points out in a book mat borrows its tide from Browning, the figure from whom Eliot drew her character's namedie great sixteenth-century humanist and scholar Isaac Casaubonwas anything but dry as dust At die end of a day spent wholly in reading, he would write in his diary Hodie vixi ("Today I have lived"), but he could also complain of the "lifelessness" of his existence when he was separated from his wife and their nineteen- yes, nineteen- children. He was energetic in other realms as well, prodigiously learned in die whole of Greek literature and philosophy and in the Church Fadiers; he edited the ancients' manuscripts and wrote immense commentaries on them. A Huguenot he spent much of his career in Geneva, but the fair-mindedness of his patristic scholarship in an age of bitter tiffany bracelets on sale led many to suspect him of Catholic leanings. Late in his life he moved to England and seems to have found the Anglican way deeply congenial to his temperament.

As Andiony Grafton explains in his fascinating new book, Worlds Made of Words, Isaac Casaubon's passion for learning combined with scrupulous scholarly integrity made him an exemplary member of die Republic of Letters- a loose, freeform, international community of scholars diat began in the later fifteenth century, more or less. The name, Respublica Litterarum, is as old as die community, and indicates its aspirations to egalitarianism- or rather meritocratism, since, ideally anyway, one earned membership by intellectual and social virtue rather than by being scooped under the wing of any sort of sovereign. The community had a "strict code" of ethics: "Write to another scholar and you engaged yourself to reply to future letters in reasonable time, to give credit to your correspondent for information received and tiffany cufflinks on sale accepted, and to call him or her a friend- a term diat had a strong formal meaning."

The maintenance of such propriety was, if necessary, not a sufficient condition for citizenship:Any young man, and more than a few young women, could pay die pnce of admission. If they mastered Latin and, ideally, Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic; became proficient at what now seem the unconnected skills of mathematics and astronomy, history and geography, and physics and music; visited any recognized scholar . . . bearing a letter from a senior scholar, tiffany earrings on sale E-eeted their host in acceptable atin or French, they were assured of everything a learned man or woman would want: a warm and civilized welcome, a cup of chocolate (or, later, coffee), and an hour or two of ceremonious conversation on the latest editions of the classics and the most recent sightings of the rings of Saturn.

If this sounds like the platonic ideal of the scholarly life, Grafton means it to: Though he shows the varying ways tiffany money clips on sale citizens of the republic betrayed its idealsthrough competitiveness, selfaggrandizement, polemical exaggeration, religious partisanship, and general dishonesty- there's no question that he believes the Republic of Letters one of the sweetest and most delightful forms of human community ever invented, and he mourns its passing.

As well he should. One way to view the republic, Grafton says, is "as a sort of Pedantic Park- a world of wonders, many of them manmade, inhabited by scholarly dinosaurs." Indeed: There were giants on the earth in those days.A collection of essays and reviews on a more-or-less common theme, Grafton's Worlds Made by Words does not form a consecutive argument. Though some of the essays are brilliant and none are less than interesting, the inevitable spottiness of die history it lays out is frustrating at times. A significant number of the early republicans were, like Casaubon, Huguenots of the Reformed persuasion and tiffany key rings on sale opposed to much Catholic teaching and to papal authority. This resistance to the prevailing religious authority of their world seems fitting to many of us moderns: That persons egalitarian and meritocratic in matters of scholarship would hold similar views in matters of religion makes sense. The ideal citizen of the republic, beyond any question, is Erasmus, who famously had at best an ambivalent relation with die formal structures of the Catholic Church.And consider this other representative (though far less famous) figure: Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, a humanist scholar from Siena who wrote in polished and incisively witty Latin about the election of die pope