``La fin couronne les oeuvres.’’

In the first Folio we read:—­

     ``La fin corrone les eumenes.’’

CHAPTER IV.

BIBLIOGRAPEIICAL BLUNDERS.

THERE is no class that requires to be dealt with more leniently than do bibliographers, for pitfalls are before and behind them.  It is impossible for any one man to see all the books he describes in a general bibliography; and, in consequence of the necessity of trusting to second-hand information, he is often led imperceptibly into gross error.  Watt’s Bibliotheca Britannica is a most useful and valuable work, but, as may be expected from so comprehensive a compilation, many mistakes have crept into it:  for instance, under the head of Philip Beroaldus, we find the following title of a work:  ``A short view of the Persian Monarchy, published at the end of Daniel’s Works.’’ The mystery of the last part of the title is cleared up when we p 64find that it should properly be read, ``_and of Daniel’s Weekes_,’’ it being a work on prophecy.  The librarian of the old Marylebone Institution, knowing as little of Latin as the monk did of Hebrew when he described a book as having the beginning where the end should be, catalogued an edition of AEsop’s Fables as ``AEsopiarum’s Phoedri Fabulorum.’’

Two blunders that a bibliographer is very apt to fall into are the rolling of different authors of the same name into one, and the creation of an author who never existed.  The first kind we may illustrate by mentioning the dismay of the worthy Bishop Jebb, when he found himself identified in Watt’s Bibliotheca with his uncle, the Unitarian writer.  Of the second kind we might point out the names of men whose lives have been written and yet who never existed.  In the Zoological Biography of Agassiz, published by the Ray Society, there is an imaginary author, by name J. K. Broch, whose work, Entomologische Briefe, was published in 1823.  This pamphlet is really anonymous, and was written by p 65one who signed himself J. K. Broch, is merely an explanation in the catalogue from which the entry was taken that it was a brochure.  Moreri created an author, whom he styled Dorus Basilicus, out of the title of James I.’s gr Dron basiliko’n>, and Bishop Walton supposed the title of the great Arabic Dictionary, the Kamoos or Ocean, to be the name of an author whom he quotes as ``Camus.’’ In the article on Stenography in Rees’s Cyclopaedia there are two most amusing blunders.  John Nicolai published a Treatise on the Signs of the Ancients at the beginning of the last century, and the writer of the article, having seen it stated that a certain fact was to be found in Nicolai, jumped to the conclusion that it was the name of a place, and wrote, ``It was at Nicolai that this method of writing was first