[Footnote 31: Of MICHAEL MAITTAIRE I have given a brief sketch in my Introduction to the _Greek and Latin Classics_, vol. I, 148. Mr. Beloe, in the 3rd vol. of his _Anecdotes of Literature_, p. ix., has described his merits with justice. The principal value of Maittaire's _Annales Typographici_ consists in a great deal of curious matter detailed in the notes; but the absence of the "lucidus ordo" renders the perusal of these fatiguing and dissatisfactory. The author brought a full and well-informed mind to the task he undertook--but he wanted taste and precision in the arrangement of his materials. The eye wanders over a vast indigested mass; and information, when it is to be acquired with excessive toil, is, comparatively, seldom acquired. Panzer has adopted an infinitely better plan, on the model of Orlandi; and, if his materials had been _printed_ with the same beauty with which they appear to have been composed, and his annals had descended to as late a period as those of Maittaire, his work must have made us, eventually, forget that of his predecessor. The bibliographer is, no doubt, aware that of Maittaire's first volume there are two editions. Why the author did not reprint, in the second edition (1733), the facsimile of the epigram and epistle of LASCAR prefixed to the edition of the Anthology 1496, and the disquisition concerning the ancient editions of Quintilian (both of which were in the first edition of 1719), is absolutely inexplicable. Maittaire was sharply attacked for this absurdity, in the "Catalogus Auctorum," of the "_Annus Tertius Saecularis Inv. Art. Topog._" Harlem, 1741, 8vo. p. 11. "Rara certe Librum augendi methodus (exclaims the author)! Satis patet auctorem hoc eo fecisse consilio, ut et primae et secundae Libri sive editioni pretium suum constaret, et una aeque ac altera Lectoribus necessaria esset." The catalogue of Maittaire's library [1748, 2 parts, 8vo.], which affords ample proof of the BIBLIOMANIA of its collector, is exceedingly scarce. A good copy of it, even unpriced, is worth a guinea: it was originally sold for 4 shillings; and was drawn up by Maittaire himself.] [Footnote 32: In a periodical publication called "_The Director_," to which I contributed under the article of "_Bibliographiana_" (and of which the printer of this work, Mr. William Savage, is now the sole publisher), there was rather a minute analysis of the famous library of HARLEY, EARL OF OXFORD: a library which seems not only to have revived, but eclipsed, the splendour of the Roman one formed by Lucullus. The following is an abridgement of this analysis: VOLUMES.