Angelus, Christopher

, a learned Greek of the seventeenth century, author of several learned and curious works, was born at Peloponnesus in Greece, and obliged by the Turks to abandon his country on account of his religion, for which he suffered a variety of torments. He came afterwards to England, where he was supported by the bishop of Norwich and several of the clergy. By this prelate’s recommendation, he went to Cambridge, and studied about three years in Trinity college. In Whitsuntide 1610, he removed to Oxford, and studied at Baliol college, where he did great service to the young scholars of the university, | by instructing them in the Greek language; in which manner he employed himself till his death, which happened on the 1st of February 1638. He was buried in St. Ebbe’s church of church-yard, Oxford.

To this brief account from Wood’s Athenae, we are now enabled to add many particulars, gleaned from his works by a learned correspondent of the Gentleman’s Magazine. It appears that he was a Greek Christian, a native of Peloponnesus; that he travelled through Greece in quest of religious truth and instruction; and that when he came to Athens, the Turkish governor threw him into prison, and inflicted the severest cruelties upon him, because he would not abjure Christianity, and impeach the Athenian merchants, who then trafficked with Venice, of having sent him to betray Athene to the Spaniards; an impeachment solicited for the purpose of throwing odium on the Athenian Christians, and of enabling the governor to avenge himself for certain complaints they had preferred against him to the sublime Porte. These cruelties he survived; and having been released from prison on the intercession of some men of rank and influence, he escaped by the first conveyance to England. He landed at Yarmouth in 1608, and from the bishop (Dr. Jegon) and clergy of Norfolk, who contributed liberally to his relief, he received letters of recommendation to the heads of the university of Cambridge. After a year’s residence there, he removed for the sake of his health to Oxford, where, in 1617, he published the story of his persecution at Athens, and of his kind reception in England, to which country and its inhabitants he subjoined a short address of panegyric. ThU work, which is in Greek and English, is entitled “Of the many stripes and torments inflicted on him by the Turks, for the faith which he had in Jesus Christ.”

From Oxford next year he seems to have returned to Cambridge, as in 1619 he published “An Encomion of the famous kingdom of Great Britaine, and of the two flourishing sister universities of Cambridge and Oxford,” also Greek and English. The Greek in this, as in his other writings, though not perfectly chaste, is elegant and perspicuous, and the spirit of composition becoming thft genius of Greece, except perhaps in certain hyperboles of panegyric, which seem, however, to have sprung from the generous ardour of gratitude rather than from the base servility of adulation. His next work, the same year as the | above, and from the university-press, is a curious account of the rites and ceremonies of the Greek church. This is in Greek and Latin, “Enchiridion de institutis Groecorum.” Of this there were afterwards two editions by Fehlavius, Francfort, 1655, 12mo, and Leipsic, 1676, 4to. The former appears to have been the Latin only.

His fourth work, published at London, 1624, in Gr. and Lat. is entitled “Labor C. A. de Apostasia Ecclesiae, et de Homine peccati, scilicet Antichristo, &c.” The object is, in the first’instance, to establish a distinction betwixt the apostacy and the man of sin in 2 Thess. ii. 3; to prove that the apostacy, predicted as necessary to take place before the coming of Antichrist, was fulfilled in the surrender of the temporal powers to pope Boniface by the emperor Phocas, and that Mahomet, who appeared within eleven years after, was the Antichrist; and lastly, to demonstrate, by some ingenious calculations, which are also applied to other subjects of prophecy, that the destruction of the last of the Mahomets, to all of whom he attaches the title of Antichrist, will happen in the year 1376. ¹