JU'NIUS, FRANCISCUS. There are two learned persons of this name, father and son. The father was a Protestant minister in the Low Countries, best known by a translation of the Scriptures into the Latin tongue, in which he was assisted by Tremellius, whence it is usually called the version of Junius and Tremellius. He became pro fessor of theology at Leyden, where he died in 1002. Ills sou, the younger Francis Junius, of whom we are principally to speak, was born at Heidelberg in 1589, and accompanied his father to Leyden, but soon relinquished study and embraced the profession of arms. On the cessation of hostilities in those countries in 1699 he gave up arms, and betook himself to literature as a profession. He came over to England In 1610, and was soon entertained as his librarian by Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel, a nobleman whose name, whenever it occurs, Is found associated with some good deed connected with tho higher interests of man. Junius remained thirty years in this honour able connection, during which time, having few distractions and an insatiable appetite for curious knowledge, he accumulated vast stores of information.
The more particular direction of his studies was towards the northern languages, or rather the various dialects of that great language which, under the name of the Gothic or the Teutonic, seems to have been spoken in the remotest ages by the people who inhabited both shores of the Baltic. We owe to him the publication of the most valuable
relic of the literature of the people who spoke this language in what may be called its purity, a version of the gospels, commonly called Ulphllas's Version, and the manuscript which contains it, The Silver Codex.' This was printed, with many learned notes and other illus trations, in 1665. There is another work of his, published in his lifetime, on the' Painting of the Ancients,' which is a very useful book. But the work by which he is best known is a posthumous work, not printed indeed till 1743, entitled Etyraologicum Anglicanum,' iu which we have the investigation of the origin of numerous words iu the English relics of the language spoken by our Saxon pro genitors, conducted with a great apparatus of the knowledge required in such an undertaking. It was much used by Johnson.
Junius lived to his eighty-ninth year, dying in 1678 at Windsor, at the house of his nephew, Isaac Vossius, another of the great names in the list of the learned. He had formed a valuable collection of manuscripts, which he bequeathed to the University of Oxford, and they are now among the treasures of the Bodleian Library.