elaboration of their texts. If, however, but few of his biographers have devoted themselves to a matter which must have been of no small interest in Lipsius’s life (judging from his enthusiastic manner of treating it), one, at least, has done full justice to it,--a Frenchman, Étienne Gabriel Peignot, who, born in Arc-en-Barrios in 1767, devoted his whole life to the cause of bibliography. The account of this scholar written by Simonnet, in his _Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de Gabriel Peignot_, 1863, deserves to be on the shelves of every librarian, certainly of every bibliographer. Early in his career Peignot planned a great bibliographical work, of which his _Manuel Bibliographique_, published in 1804, was a first part, and his _Dictionnaire Raisonné de Bibliologie_ a second. The Manual is chiefly devoted to Lipsius, having for its opening chapter a life of our author, followed by a translation of the _Syntagma_. Peignot tells us that the plagiarism of Lipsius by authors who have not thought it worth their while to mention their indebtedness to him was one of the reasons why he was led to give the _Syntagma_ the chief place in his own book,--he wished to secure to this learned man his just due. In his “Notice préliminaire sur Juste Lipse et ses ouvrages” Peignot gives a selected list of Lipsius’s works dated from 1599, wherein it is seen that the book in which we are interested, _J. Lipsi de Bibliothecis Syntagma, Antverpiae_, came, like all of the others, “ex officina Plantiniana, apud J. Moretum.”[2] This, to the librarian, is a fact worthy of special note, because it gives the evidence of the friendship that existed between the printer, John Moretus, son-in-law of the great Plantin, founder of the house, “first printer to the king, and the king of printers,” and Lipsius, covering a long period of years. In the house of Christopher Plantin at Antwerp, now known as the Plantin-Moretus Museum, in the room called, since the sixteenth century, the “Room of Justus Lipsius,” the bust of the friend of the house looks down from its place of honour over the entrance door. And so, just as Lipsius’s name is closely linked with one of the great epochs of printing, it has also a part in the history of the development of the library idea. Whatever the facts concerning his theology, polite literature or other writings, whatever the final vote on the value of his style, the little tract, here reprinted, in the hands of friends of libraries will justify the faith that Lipsius had in his claim to fame, when, in hanging a votive silver pen before an altar of the Virgin, he wrote: