Fabricius, George

, a learned German, and celebrated for a talent at Latin poetry, was born at Chemnitz in Misnia, a province of Upper Saxony, 1516. After a liberal education, he went to Italy and Rome, in quality of tutor to a nobleman; where he spent his time in a manner suitable to his parts and learning. He did not content himself with barely looking on, and blindly admiring; but he examined with great accuracy and minuteness, all the remains of antiquity, and compared them with the descriptions which the Latin writers have given of them. The result of these observations was his work entitled “Roma,” published in 1550, containing a description of that city. From Rome he returned to his native country, and was appointed master of the great school at Meissen, over which he presided twenty-six years, and died in that station, in 1571. He was the author of numerous Latin poems, and | had the strongest passion for verse that can be conceived. His poems appeared at Bale in 1567, in two volumes 8vo; and, besides this collection, there are also hymns, odes against the Turks, the Art of Poetry, Comparisons of the Latin Poets, &c. He is said to have received the laurel from the emperor Maximilian, a short time before his. death.

His poems are written with great purity and elegance. He was particularly careful in the choice of his words; and he carried his scruples in this respect so far, that he would not on any account make use of a word in his “Sacred Poems” which favoured the least of Paganism. He con-, demned some liberties of this sort, which he had taken in his youth; and he exceedingly blamed those Christians who applied themselves for matter to the divinities of Parnassus, and the fables of the ancients. He wrote also in, prose, the “Roma,” already mentipned the “Annals of Messein,” in seven books “Origines Saxonies,” in two volumes, folio the same quantity on the affairs of Germany and Saxony, &c. His “Roma” has been greatly admired by some, by Barthius in particular: and there is, this singularity in it, that he has so adapted to his descriptions the language of the Latin writers who have described the same things, as to make some Germans fancy it an ancient work. ¹