MEIBOMIUS (Marcus)

, a very learned person of the 17th century, of a family in Germany which had long been famous for learned men. He devoted himself to literature and criticism, but particularly to the learning of the Ancients; as their music, the structure of their galleys, &c. In 1652 he published a collection of seven Greek authors, who had written upon Ancient Music, to which he added a Latin version by himself. This work he dedicated to queen Christina of Sweden; in consequence of which he received an invitation to that Princess's court, like several other learned men, which he accepted. The queen engaged him one day to sing an air of ancient music, while a person danced the Greek dances to the sound of his voice; and the immoderate mirth which this occasioned in the spectators, so covered him with ridicule, and disgusted him so vehemently, that he abruptly left the court of Sweden immediately, after heartily battering with his fists the face of Bourdelot, the favourite physician and buffon to the queen, who had persuaded her to exhibit that spectacle.

Meibomius pretended that the Hebrew copy of the Bible was full of errors, and undertook to correct them by means of a metre, which he fancied he had discovered in those ancient writings; but this it seems drew upon him no small raillery from the Learned. Nevertheless, besides the work above mentioned, he produced several others, which shewed him to be a good scholar; witness his Notes upon Diogenes Laertius in Menage's edition; his Liber de Fabrica Triremium, 1671, in which he thinks he discovered the| method in which the Ancients disposed their ban<*>s of oars; his edition of the Ancient Greek Mythologists; and his Dialogues on Proportions, a curious work, in which the interlocutors, or persons represented as speaking, are Euclid, Archimedes, Apollonius, Pappus, Eutocius, Theo, and Hermotimus. This last work was opposed by Langius, and by Dr. Wallis, in a considerable Tract, printed in the first volume of his works.