POSTSCRIPT.

THE particulars of those other kinds of collections, which have been occasionally regarded, are already given under the articles, BARBOU, BASKERVILLE, BRINDLEY, and DELPHINUS. It may perhaps appear strange not to find many other collections here, which have hitherto been quoted in bibliographical manuals. But it is now high time to discard at once whatever neither answers to the present advanced state of our literature, nor even to the wants of the collector.

This principle finds its first application in the collection of editions cum notis variorum, both in octavo and in quarto, which was formerly so eagerly attended to. In the first third of the preceding century, in which Holland and England had acquired an almost exclusive right to the publication of editions of classic authors, combining in the highest degree a complete critical and exegetical apparatus with typographical beauty and equality of size, it might perhaps be possible to include the most satisfactory efforts of that period in favour of classic literature within limits extending only to quarto and octavo volumes. Twenty years afterwards, this was no longer the case. Duker's Thucydides, Alberti's Hesychius, Wesseling's Herodotus, Reimarus's Dio Cassius, and other editions, which supplanted the efforts that had been hitherto made, appeared in a larger size, and the idea of a quarto or octavo collection must then have really been given up. But when the German philologists, entering the lists, were active for the same objects in quite a different manner, and with a success, at which even foreign countries could not withhold their astonishment, (proud England itself acknowledged this success at least by disgraceful reprints!) then this collection, cum notis variorum, sunk back, as such, into an insignificance, from which the intrinsic value of some articles of that series, which is acknowledged even at the present day, could not raise it up. The French collectors, who, it must be confessed to their honour, were the first to estimate, according to their merit, the value of the German philological efforts, extended the earlier collections to wider limits, and placed the German editions in the room of those which had been supplanted by more modern exertions. By this means, however (especially as the Germans by no means confined themselves to what are called Standard-editions), the collection received an arbitrariness and a typographical dissimilarity, which no longer allows the notion to be entertained of a combination under one generally admitted and acknowledged principle. This col

lection, however, is still to be met with in France on paper, but not in the book-cases of collectors. In Germany it was never thought of in earnest, and is consequently omitted in this work, as we hope, with undoubted justice.

Still less can passing over the series of the Bipont editions excite any surprise. There can now hardly be a difference of opinion, that only some few productions of that press are deserving of a place in the cabinet of a scrutinizing collector, and that the majority of them can make no pretensions to such a reception either in a critical or typographical point of view. The new reprint of Horace of 1828 has again placed this beyond doubt.

With regard to the so called Anas, for a list of which the author has been repeatedly solicited, as they are an object of estimation only to a few individuals, and deficient in scientific importance, they by no means belong to a general bibliographical dictionary.

Instead of what has been passed over, many other things, hitherto either not regarded at all, or at least not separately classed, might probably deserve notice here. But the termination of the work could no longer be delayed for the completion of inquiries already commenced on that head. They will consequently be reserved for some other occasion.