“I might relate a great many curious particulars concerning him; but as others[1] have already collected them, and have not even omitted what relates to his education and his early learning, I am obliged to confine myself to such particulars as they have not mentioned.” These particulars related to one of Lipsius’s greatest faults, for which he was chiefly censured,--his inconsistency with regard to religious beliefs,--and they take on an additional interest when treated by Bayle, who was himself given to tasting of religion at all its different founts. With gossipy pen, he briefly summarizes the facts in Lipsius’s stormy theological career, which to a sixteenth-century mind, and even to one of the eighteenth century, must have seemed as important as it was chequered. The theologian of a century or so ago undoubtedly found that Lipsius had contributed something to religious thought, but to us, in this century of freedom in such matters, Justus Lipsius is chiefly a subject for antiquarian curiosity, just as he was to Bayle. It would be idle to speculate on the present-day value of his _Diva Virgo Hallensis_, or his _Diva Sichemiensis_, written for the Jesuits, when late in his life he had accepted the professorship of Latin in the Colegium Buslidanium at Louvain and had become, to quote from Bayle, “a bigot, like a silly woman.” The polite literature which Lipsius taught at Louvain, in a manner “very glorious to him,” is quite unread to-day; it is unnecessary now when so much polite literature has been, and is constantly being, added to the world’s carefully shelved stock. Whatever defects of matter or style our writer may have had, like all the humanists he served a great purpose in retailing to further generations--and especially to librarians--the opinions of the classic writers on the history of libraries. It is not for us, who have received so great a favour at his hands, to criticise his scholarship, as some have done,--as does one writer who says, speaking of one of his mental tendencies, “The other, derived from his Jesuit training, showed itself in his merely rhetorical or verbal view of classical literature, of which the one interest lay in its style.” Neither need we concern ourselves with his tendency to change his religious point of view,--now Jesuit, now Lutheran, now Calvinist, now Romanist. To Lipsius bibliophiles owe their thanks because he published the first history of libraries, in the modern sense of the word,--a history which is as fresh and useful to-day as it was when it was written. Only a man of great scholarship could have written such a story, requiring the searching of the original authorities in Latin, Greek and Hebrew, and only the scholarship of the sixteenth century--careful, conscientious and leisurely--could have brought together all the facts that Lipsius did. All of the histories since his time have borrowed freely from our author, or, like Edwards, have used his references for further