MORERI, Louis, author of the Historical Dictionary which bears his name, was born at Bargemont, in Provence, on the 25th of March 1643. Being destined for holy orders, he received the elements of his education at Draguignan and at Aix, and afterwards went to study theology at Lyons, where he acquired a knowledge of the Italian and Spanish languages, which afterwards proved of great use to him in his biographical labours. His early productions gave but faint indications of his future eminence. At the age of eighteen he composed the Paysd’ Amour, a frigid allegory, and, under the title of the Doux Plaisir de la Poésie, made a collection of pieces in verse; but the former evinced no peculiar aptitude for the ecclesiastical state, and the latter gave little promise of such a work as the Historical Dictionary. During his residence at Lyons he took priest’s orders, and preached controversy. But the idea which had long occupied his mind, and to the development of which he devoted his life, was the composition of his Dictionary, which appeared at Lyons in 1673, in one volume folio, when he was only thirty years of age. The immense erudition displayed in this work excited general admiration; but, as might have been expected, it was nevertheless found to be very incomplete. The author, however, applied himself with great vigour to enlarge it; and the second edition, in two vols. folio, was printed atParis in 1681, the year after the author’s death. The third edition, which appeared in 1683, is merely a reprint of the second; but, in 1689, a third or supplemental volume was published; and the whole, revised, corrected, and enlarged by Leclerc, was afterwards printed at Amsterdam, 1691, in four volumes folio. To the imperfections of this Dictionary we are indebted for that of Bayle, who at first proposed only to correct the errors or supply the omissions of Moreri. Speaking of the faults of his predecessor, Bayle anxiously guards himself against being misunderstood: “I do not wish that the unfavourable idea which this may give of his work,” says he, “should lessen the gratitude which is due to him. I enter into the sentiments of Horace respecting those who primarily show us the right road. The first authors of dictionaries have doubtless committed many faults; but they have earned a glory of which their successors can never deprive them.” To the gratitude of posterity, which Bayle claims in favour of Moreri, the latter has an additional claim, arising from the circumstance of his having fallen a victim to the zeal with which he prosecuted his laborious undertaking; for excessive labour having exhausted his strength, he died at Paris on the 10th of July 1680, in the thirty-eighth year of his age, when only the first volume of the second edition of the Dictionary had passed through the press. The principal defect ofMoreri’s work consists in the inaccuracy of the geographical portion, in the awkward jumble of mythology and history, in his perplexed nomenclature, aifd the number and prolixity of his genealogies; but he has nevertheless the merit of being the author of the first work in which are found the names of all those personages who have any title to celebrity. Moreri was also the editor of the Vies des Saints, in three vols., the style of which he corrected, adding chronological tables; and of a Relation Nouvelle du Levant, or treatise on the religion, government, and customs of the Persians, Armenians, and other eastern nations, by Father Gabriel de Chinon. He had likewise collected materials for an historical and bibliographical dictionary of celebrated Provençals, and commenced a history of the Councils; and he further left in manuscript a treatise on new year’s gifts. (a.)