Barthius, on the system he had adopted, seems to have written a whole library; a circumstance which we discover by the continual references he makes in his printed works to his manuscript productions.  In the Index Authorum to his Statius, he inserts his own name, to which is appended a long list of unprinted works, which Bayle thinks, by their titles and extracts, conveys a very advantageous notion of them.  All these, and many such as these, he generously offered the world, would any bookseller be intrepid or courteous enough to usher them from his press; but their cowardice or incivility was intractable.  The truth is now to be revealed, and seems not to have been known to Bayle; the booksellers had been formerly so cajoled and complimented by our learned author, and had heard so much of the celebrated Barthius, that they had caught at the bait, and that the two folio volumes of the much referred-to “Adversaria” of Barthius had thus been published—­but from that day no bookseller ever offered himself to publish again!

The “Adversaria” is a collection of critical notes and quotations from ancient authors, with illustrations of their manners, customs, laws, and ceremonies; all these were to be classed into one hundred and eighty books; sixty of which we possess in two volumes folio, with eleven indexes.  The plan is vast, as the rapidity with which it was pursued:  Bayle finely characterises it by a single stroke—­“Its immensity tires even the imagination.”  But the truth is, this mighty labour turned out to be a complete failure:  there was neither order nor judgment in these masses of learning; crude, obscure, and contradictory; such as we might expect from a man who trusted to his memory, and would not throw away his time on any correction.  His contradictions are flagrant; but one of his friends would apologise for these by telling us that “He wrote everything which offered itself to his imagination; to-day one thing, to-morrow another, in order that when he should revise it again, this contrariety of opinion might induce him to examine the subject more accurately.”  The notions of the friends of authors are as extravagant as those of their enemies.  Barthius evidently wrote so much, that often he forgot what he had written, as happened to another great book-man, one Didymus, of whom Quintilian records, that on hearing a certain history, he treated it as utterly unworthy of credit; on which the teller called for one of Didymus’s own books, and showed where he might read it at full length!  That the work failed, we have the evidence of Clement in his “Bibliotheque curieuse de Livres difficiles a trouver,” under the article Barthius, where we discover the winding up of the history of this book.  Clement mentions more than one edition of the Adversaria; but on a more careful inspection he detected that the old title-pages had been removed for others of a fresher date; the booksellers not being able to sell the book practised