BURNED FOR HIS BOOKS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20656, 30 August 1930, Page 8 (Supplement)

BURNED FOR HIS BOOKS.

BRAVE DOLET OF FRANCE. The Oxford Bibliographical Society has had an exhibition of rare books at the Bodleian Library. Sometimes rare books can be very dull things: they are only rare because of a misprint in a certain edition of some classic, or they have some other peculiarity only interesting to pedants. But this exhibition is as human as it is learned, says the Children's Newspaper. Here, for instance, is a book bought in calm days by Marat, who wrote his name in it in pencil with the. same hand that was to send people to the guillotine and was to be raised in a vain attempt to ward off Charlotte Cordav's dagger. Here is a hook that might have been read only the other day by that charming letter-writer and selfish person Horace Walpole with his notes still fresh in it. Here are gifts from Pope and Johnson. But most striking of all the books in the collection is the first popular translation of Galon, the physician to Roman emperors, who wrote about 500 treatises. When Dolet translated some of Galen's work " into a tonguo which can be read by the barbers," the doctors were furious. Already the scholar-printer had annoyed the clergy, who twice had him imprisoned on a false charge of atheism. So on August 3, 1546, this enlightened Christian was tortured and strangled and burned in the Place Maupert. Most of the copies of his translation o.C Galen were binned too, but somebody was rash enough to keep a copy of that condemmed book. Now it lies at. Oxford, a mute witness to the passions and cruelties and heroes of a day that has gone.