HARDOUIN, Jean, was a classical scholar of the 17th century, at once singularly learned and learnedly singular. He was born at Quirnper in Brittany in 1646, and died at Paris in 1727. Having acquired a taste for literature in his father’s book-shop, he sought and obtained about his sixteenth year admission into the learned society of the Jesuits. In Paris, where he went to study theology, he ultimately became librarian of the Collége Louis le Grand. The life of laborious authorship inaugurated by his edition of Themistius (Paris, 1684), which included no less than thirteen new orations, was continued with wonderful perseverance and success. At the advice of Garnier he undertook to edit the Natural History of Pliny for the Delphin series, and five years saw the completion of a task which, in the opinion of Huet, would have taken any ordinary scholar fifty years. His attention having been turned to numismatics as auxiliary to his great editorial labours, he published several learned works in that department, marred, however, as almost everything he did was marred, by a determination to be at all hazards different from other interpreters. It is sufficient to mention his Nummi antiqui populorum et urbium illustrati (Paris, 1684), Antirrheticus de nummis antiquis coloniarum et municipiorum (Paris, 1689), and Chronologia Vet. Test, ad vulgatam versionem exacta et nummis illustrata (Paris, 1696). By the ecclesiastical authorities Hardouin was appointed to supervise the Conciliorum collectio regio, maxima (Greek and Latin, Paris, 1715, 12 vols.); but he was accused of suppressing important documents and foisting in apocryphal matter, and by order of the parliament of Paris the publication of the work was delayed till some of its deficiencies were remedied. It is, however, as ...