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14
Introductory Note
lished 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. All of the histories since his time have borrowed freely from our author, or, like Edwards, have used his references for further elaboration of their texts.
If, however, but few of his bi-
