ke the same spirit,
called The Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence, is known among ourselves; and
there is an answer to it assailing the Episcopal Church of Scotland, in
a tone which decidedly improves on the lesson of sarcasm and malignity
taught by the other side. Both writers are dishonest in the statements
they make and the passages they quote from their adversaries, and both
are grotesque and profane. Peignot, not being influenced by polemical
rancour, is no doubt honest in his quotations, and tells you that the
persons who preached the passages quoted by him uttered them in all
religious sincerity. Yet wide as the Christian world stretches beyond
our corner of it, by so far does the Frenchman's book in grotesqueness
and profanity out-shadow the attempts of the Scottish polemical
combatants.

Of that highly patrician class of bibliographies which offer their
services exclusively to the collectors of rare, curious, and costly
books, there are so many notices dotted over this volume, that I shall
only stop here to mark the recentness of their appearance in literature.
To judge from the title-page, one might trace them as far back as 1676,
in John Hallervord's Bibliotheca Curiosa, in which the editor professes
to indicate many authors which are very rare and known to few; but this
book would give no satisfaction to pure rarity seekers. Hallervord takes
curious in its old sense, which corresponds in some measure with the
present use of the word interesting; and the specialty of the books
being known to few, seems to refer to their profundity and the rarity of
learning sufficient to sound their depths. Nor does the list published a
few years later by the London bookseller Hartley, though it professes to
signalise very rare books, show that nice sense which discriminates game
of a high order from the vulgar and useful.[65] I suspect that before we
reach the dawn of this class of literature proper, we must descend at
once to the year 1750, distinguished by the simultaneous appearance of
Clement's Bibliotheque Curieuse, and Freytag's Analecta de Libris
Rarioribus.[66]

[Footnote 65: Catalogus Universalis Librorum in omni facultate linguaque
insignium et rarissimorum, &c. Londini, apud Joannem Hartley,
Bibliopolam, exadversum Hospitio Grayensi, in vico vulgo Holborn dicto.
MDCXCIX.]

[Footnote 66: Of course the Bibliographers prey relentlessly on each
other, and bibliographical notices of Bibliographies abound. Le Brun
sets a