Enemy of the Enemies of Truth  Frank Kermode    • The Footnote:
A Curious History by Anthony Grafton     Faber, 241 pp, £12.99,
December 1997, ISBN 0 571 17668 2  When Browning’s grammarian,
grown old and bald and sick, was urged to get out of his cell
and see a bit of life before he died, he replied that he still
had work to do: ‘Grant I have mastered learning’s crabbed
text,/Still there’s the comment.’ Anthony Grafton’s book is a
commentary on the comment, some of it made, as Browning puts it,
‘shortly after the revival of learning in Europe’, though its
scope is much wider than that.  Copious commentary wasn’t a
humanist invention: it had adorned classical texts to such an
extent that it couldn’t be confined to the page’s foot, but
swarmed in the margins, lavishly explaining and allegorising.
Sometimes the text looks like the last remaining piece of ground
above water in a time of flood. But humanist commentators had
more urgent critical programmes, some with powerful political
and ecclesiastical implicati