Transcriber’s Note: Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. [Illustration: LITERATURE OF LIBRARIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES EDITED BY JOHN COTTON DANA AND HENRY W. KENT CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG AND COMPANY 1907] A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF LIBRARIES _An Edition of two hundred and fifty copies in this form and one of twenty-five copies on Large Paper were printed at The Merrymount Press, Boston, in May, 1907_ A BRIEF OUTLINE OF THE HISTORY OF LIBRARIES BY JUSTUS LIPSIUS TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND EDITION (ANTWERP, THE PLANTIN PRESS JOHN MORETUS, 1607) THE LAST FROM THE HAND OF THE AUTHOR BY JOHN COTTON DANA [Illustration: (fleuron)] CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. MDCCCCVII COPYRIGHT, A. C. McCLURG & CO., 1907 PUBLISHED, JUNE 1, 1907 D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON NOTE INTRODUCTORY NOTE Few of the biographers of Justus Lipsius have devoted their attention to that part of his writings which, in an English translation by John Cotton Dana, is here offered to lovers of libraries. They have found matters of greater importance to the world at large in the chief things of his life,--his theological, historical and literary writings. Mr. Peter Bayle, in his famous _General Dictionary_, which first appeared in 1697, and afterwards Englished, in 1710, says in this connection, as an introduction to his own contribution to Lipsius’s biography: