tory result. That it contains an
account of every, or nearly every, book is at once contradicted by its
bulk, yet it is often remarked that no one appeals to it in vain--a
specialty which seems to have arisen from the peculiar capacity of its
editors to dive, as it were, into the hearts of those likely to seek
their aid.

Naturally, the most satisfactory of bibliographies are those limited to
books of a special class. These are frequent in law and divinity, but
are most numerous in history. Hence have we such valued guides as
Lelong, Dupin, Dufresnoy, and our own dynasty of historical
bibliographers, which, including Leland, Bale, Pitts, and Tanner,
reached its climax in Bishop Nicholson, whose introduction to the
sources of British history, hitherto so valuable, will be superseded for
most practical purposes on the completion of Mr Duffus Hardy's
Descriptive Catalogue of Materials relating to the History of Great
Britain and Ireland. Science, though it can boast of the great
compilations of Haller, and of other sources of reference to its
literature, takes less aid from such guides than other departments of
intellectual labour, for the obvious reason that, except to the few who
are pursuing its history through its dawn and progress, the latest books
on any department generally supersede their predecessors. They are, in
fact, themselves the guides which show the scientific inquirer his work,
not lying like that of the historian and divine in old books, but in
existing things and practical experiments. Of books intended to show
what is to be found in others, an extremely curious history attaches to
one, the Bibliotheca of Photius. It is known of course to all divines,
but not necessarily, perhaps, to every other person, that this turbulent
and ambitious patriarch, during what he calls his embassy to Syria,
occupied himself in taking down notes of the contents of theological
treatises by his predecessors and contemporaries, with his judgments on
their merits. Being a man of controversial propensities, he selected for
criticism the works of the authors with whom he was at war. Ranking
himself among the orthodox, he thus collected notes of the works of
heterodox writers, and, among these, of several eminent Arians; and the
rather startling result of his labours is, that a considerable quantity
of Arian literature has thus been preserved, which, but for the
exertions of the man who intended to exterminate it by his censure,