the
most ancient of mankind. This insane proposition he puts forward as the
sole foundation of his two great folios, entitled, "_Origines Antwerpianae,
sive Cimmeriorum Beceselana_," printed at Antwerp in 1569, in which he
derives all the nations of antiquity from the Dutch, and makes all the
names of gods, demigods, heroes, and places of the Old World, to have
their only proper and characteristic signification in that language. The
grave precision with which he lays the first and only foundation-stone of
this monstrous superstructure, is sufficiently entertaining. "The
Phrygians spoke the Scythic (_i. e._ the High-Dutch) tongue; and the
Egyptians allowed the Phrygian language to be the primitive one. For when
their king had ascertained that bec was a word of the original language of
mankind, and could not understand it, he was informed that, among the
Phrygians, it signified bread; whereupon he adjudged that language to be
of all others the first in which _bec_ hath that meaning; which _bec_
being, at this day, our word for bread, and _becker_ ("baker") for
bread-maker, it stands, consequently, confessed, on this most ancient
testimony of Psammetichus, that our language is, of all others, the first
and oldest." From so extravagant a commencement, nothing but the most
fantastical results could be expected, and the reader will not be
surprised to find Goropius making Adam and Eve a Dutchman and a
Dutchwoman, as one of the very first corollaries from his fundamental
proposition; the Patriarchs follow; then the Gentile gods, goddesses, and
heroes; the Titans, the Cyclops, the pigmies, griffins, and

"Gorgons, and hydras, and chimeras dire,"--

nations, tribes, territories, seas, rivers, lakes, mountains, valleys,
cities, and villages--all are drawn into this vast vortex of nonsense, set
agoing originally by the single syllable _bec_, which, after all, if this
story of the priests of Vulcan have any foundation in fact, was, most
probably, nothing more than an imitation of the peculiar cry of the goats
by which the infants had been suckled. Goropius's book was published at a
time when the learned world were in no humour to tolerate such
absurdities; and therefore, although exhibiting a considerable amount of
learning in its own mad way, and a proportionate and characteristic degree
of ingenuity, it called forth one of the severest reproofs that literary
presumption has ever brought down, from the pen of Joseph Scaliger, w