BRUNCK, RICHARD FRANÇOIS PHILIPPE, an eminent French scholar, was born at Strasburg, 20th December 1729. He was educated at the Jesuits' college at Paris, but having early entered the public service, he soon forgot his Latin and Greek. At the age of thirty he returned to his native town and resumed his studies, paying especial attention to Greek. The nature of the office which he held put considerable sums of money at his disposal, which he expended in publishing editions of the Greek classics. The first work which he edited was the Anthologia Græca, in which his innovations on the established mode startled European scholars. For wherever it seemed to him that an obscure or difficult passage might be made intelligible and easy by a change of text, he did not scruple to make the necessary alterations, whether the new reading were supported by manuscript authority or not. With the assistance of Schweighæuser, then an unknown youth, he next brought out editions of the Greek dramatists, characterized by the same peculiarities as the Anthologia, and ultimately the Gnomici Poetæ Græci. In 1781 he published an edition of Virgil, for which he was pensioned by the French king. At the outbreak of the French Revolution, in which he took an active part, he lost his pension and was reduced to such extremities that he was obliged to sell a portion of his library. In 1802 his pension was restored to him, but too late to prevent the sale of the remainder of his books. He had brought out an edition of Plautus in 1788, and was in the act of republishing it when he died, June 12, 1803.