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known, but under that of Mélanges Historiques.' The work originally entitled ' Mélanges d'Histoire et de Littérature, recueillis par De Vigneul Marville,' but afterwards printed under the name of the Marvilliana,' was no report of any person's sayings, but was written by a Noel Bonaventure d'Argonne, and first published by himself at Rouen in 1699. In the same manner, the critic John le Clerc published at Amsterdam, in 1699 and 1701, two miscellaneous volumes, under the title of Parrhasiana, or Remarks and Opinions of Theodore Parrhase,' by which, according to the Greek etymology of the term, he seems to mean us to understand Theodore the Plain-dealer. A volume of thoughts on a variety of subjects by Huet, the learned Bishop of Avranches, was also published at Paris in 1722, the year after his death, from his own papers, under the title of the Huetiana.' Urbain Chevreau, when towards the end of his life he published two volumes of miscellanies (first at Paris in 1697, and again at Amsterdam in 1700), even gave them himself the title of 'Chevræana.' If the reader will try to elongate his own name in this fashion, he will feel what a piece of impudence it is in any man to put such a title on the front of a book.

Another of the Ana, which consists not of notes taken by a reporter, but of miscellaneous remarks prepared by the person himself after whom it is named, is the Casauboniana,' published at Hamburgh in 1710 by Christopher Wolf, from the papers of the great scholar, Isaac Casaubon, who had then been dead for some years. In a preface of above fifty pages in length, which he has inserted in this publication, Wolf has entered with great learning and minuteness into the history of such collections as the modern Ana, the origin of which he traces to a very remote antiquity indeed, alleging the Proverbs of Solomon as one of his early examples. Besides the various classical specimens we have noticed above, he enumerates Xenophon's Memorabilia of Socrates, the Biographies of Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, the Facetia of Hierocles, the Meditations of Marcus Antoninus, together with the various other collections now lost, of anecdotes

respecting eminent individuals, and of sayings, witty or wise, attributed to them. In his own day, he remarks, the practice of forming such collections, generally under the name of Ana, had become so common that a whole library might almost be made up of books of that kind.

A sketch of the history of books of this class is also given in the preface to the early editions of the ' Menagiana, or Bons-Mots and Remarks, Critical, Historical, Moral, and relating to matters of erudition, of M. Menage, collected by his friends.' This is one of the best, if not the very best of all the Ana, and is not untruly described by its last editor, De la Monnoye, as 66 a treasure of bons-mots, of pleasant historiettes, and of slight notices in literature and philosophy." It was not only that Menage was really a man of wit and of brilliant colloquial powers, as well as a very variously accomplished and accurate scholar; his remarks made in conversation and here collected had been carefully recorded at the time by certain of his friends, who were also persons of eminent literary acquirements, and quite capable of preserving the full amount and spirit of what he said. This accordingly is a miscellany as full of sound learning as it is lively and entertaining.

Menage, during a great part of his life, used to see all his friends who chose to come to him at his house every Wednesday evening: this he called holding his Mercuriale (from the Latin name for Wednesday). Towards the end of his life, after he had met with an accident which prevented him from going abroad, he was accessible to all who called upon him at all hours of the day. He had the faculty of writing his letters and going on with any similar occupation without being at all disturbed by the noise of his friends conversing around him. He was in all this very different from another eminent person who has given name to one of the Ana, M. Huet, who buried himself so constantly among his books that he was scarcely ever to be spoken to. A countryman, who had repeatedly applied for an audience, at length, one day when he received the usual answer that the bishop was in his library and could not be disturbed, exclaimed, that

he wished the King would send them a bishop who had finished his studies.

The first volume of the ' Menagiana 'appeared originally at Paris in 1693, the year following that in which Menage died, and the second in 1694. The third edition, however, published in four volumes in 1715, is greatly preferable to any of the preceding, the corrections and other matter added by the editor, De la Monnoye, amounting to full half the bulk of the original collection, and augmenting its value almost as much as its quantity.

The writer of the original preface to the Menagiana mentions as examples of the existence of such works in all countries, the collections which the Spaniards have of the sayings of the Duke of Ossuna, of the Aphorisms of Anthony Perez, &c. ; the Facetie, Motti, Burle, &c. of the Italians; and even similar collections possessed by the Turks and the Persians.

Among the old Italian Facetie, or jest-books, one has actually become famous as one of the Ana. This is the collection of the witty sayings of Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, the Florentine, one of the most famous among the restorers of letters in the early part of the fifteenth century. Poggio's jests were first published in Latin in a quarto volume, without date of year or place, but in all probability at Rome and before the year 1470. Another edition, in folio, was printed at Venice in 1471, and in quarto at Ferrara the same year. Many additional impressions of the book followed both in Italy, in Germany, and in France, before the close of the century. It was also early translated into the French language. So that this was a very popular collection long before the first of the modern Ana appeared. Poggio's jests, however (and some of them are none of the most decorous), were generally forgotten, when in 1720 James Lenfant, a Protestant clergyman, reprinted them with some additional matter in two volumes octavo at Amsterdam, with the new and more modish title of 'Poggiana.'

A couple of duodecimos were printed at Oxford in 1797, with the title of 'Selections from the French Anas, containing Remarks of Eminent Scholars on Men and Books, together with Anecdotes and Apophthegms of Illustrious Persons, interspersed with pieces of Poetry.' The book is furnished with indexes, and a few notes; and the two volumes together extend to about five hundred pages. The first contains selections from the ' Poggiana,' the 'Perroniana,' the Valesiana ' (or Thoughts of Adrien de Valois, Royal Historiographer of France, published by his son in 1695), the Naudæana' and Patiniana' (or remarkable Singularities noted down from the conversation of Gabriel Naudé and Guy Patin, published at Paris in 1701, and believed to be nearly a forgery throughout); the 'Sorberiana, ' relating to M. Samuel Sorbière; the Segraisiana,' to Segrais the poet; the 'Longuerana,' to the eminent antiquarian and historical writer, Longuerue; the 'Furetieriana,' to Furetière, the author of the Dictionary; the Carpenteriana, to the academician Charpentier; the 'Ducatiana,' to Duchat,

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the learned editor of Rabelais; the 'Santoliana,' to the Latin poet Santeul, or Santolius; the Colomesiana,' and the Scaligerana.' The second volume is compiled from the Menagiana,' the 'Chevræana,' the Lutherana,' the 'St. Evremoniana,' the Huetiana,' and the 'Boiæana' (relating to the poet Boileau). This list may serve for a sort of catalogue of the most famous of the Ana.

A publication professing to be a reprint of a number of the old French Ana without abridgment, appeared at Amsterdam in 1799, in ten octavo volumes. The first volume contains the Furetieriana' and 'Poggiana;' the second, third, and fourth, the Menagiana;' the fifth and sixth, the Vigneul-Marvilliana;' the seventh, the 'Carpenteriana' and Valesiana;' the eighth, the 'Huetiana ;' the ninth, the Chevræana; and the tenth, what is designated the 'Sevigniana' (being merely a number of extracts from the letters of Madame de Sévigné), and the Bolæana.' This collection appears to be but a catchpenny book, and we suspect that but little confidence is to be placed in the correctness, not to say the honesty, of the reprints it affects to give. In the case of the Menagiana,' for instance, the editor, in a short advertisement which he has prefixed, is very careful to inform us that he has made various additions even to De la Monnoye's corrections and other notes, which he has distinguished by a particular mark; but neither here, nor anywhere else, as far as we have been able to discover, does he give us any intimation of another kind of doctoring to which he has also subjected the book,—namely, the entire omission of various parts of it. For the curtailments themselves there might perhaps have been a sufficient reason; but the fact of their having been made ought not to have been thus industriously concealed. The principle which may have directed the selection of the Ana reprinted in this publication is not very obvious. It seems also to have been brought to a close in haste; even the services of the index-maker, who had been employed for the first eight volumes, being dispensed with in the two last.

Mr. D'Israeli began his 'Curiosities of Literature' on the scheme of deriving a principal part of his mate