n Stella, containing two hundred
and seventy-eight hexameters. "This," says Barthius, "did not quite lay
him open to Horace's censure of the man who made two hundred verses in
an hour, 'stans pede in uno.' Not," adds Barthius, "but that I think the
censure of Horace too hyperbolical, for I am not ignorant what it is to
make a great number of verses in a short time, and in three days I
translated into Latin the three first books of the Iliad, which amount
to above two thousand verses." Thus rapidity and volume were the great
enjoyments of this learned man's pen, and now we must look to the
fruits.

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 t