author:Justus Lipsius

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”