ALLATIUS, Leo, keeper of the Vatican library, a native of Scio, and a celebrated writer of the seventeenth century. He was of great service to the Port Royalists in their controversy with M. Claude, touching the belief of the Greeks with regard to the eucharist. No Latin was ever more devoted to the See of Rome, or more inveterate against the Greek schismatics, than Allatius. He never was married, nor did he take orders; and when Pope Alexander VII. asked him one day why he did not enter into orders, he answered, "Because I would be free to marry." The pope rejoined, "If so, why do you not marry?" "Because," replied Allatius, "I would be at liberty to take orders." "Thus," as the sarcastic Bayle observes, "he passed his whole life, wavering between a parish and a wife; sorry, perhaps, at his death, for having chosen neither of them; when, if he had fixed upon one, he might have repented his choice for thirty or forty years." In his works he discovers more erudition and industry than sound judgment; and his style is perplexed and diffuse. He died at Rome in 1669, aged 83.