ANAGRAMMATICUM THE LATIN HYMNS OF THE BREVIARY AND OTHER FAMOUS ΤΗ PREFACE HE chief object of this book is to collect together in one volume certain remarkable literary curios which otherwise the lovers of such things would never have been able to see or even hear of. I do not expect my readers to be many, and therefore I have only printed a small edition; but I hope my audience will be to use Milton's words-" Fit tho' few." There is no need here to make any discourse on the rise and use of such extraordinary literary trifles as are here brought to notice, for I have already explained matters at some length in my former works. But to show the rarity of what is here presented to the reader, I would mention a circumstance connected with the learned Jesuit who fills perhaps the most conspicuous place in the following pages. His name is Laurentius Baptista, and you may look for that name in vain in the huge Bibliography of the Jesuit Order compiled with such care by the Brothers Bäcker, first in their Liège edition, and afterwards in the three huge folio volumes of their enlarged work, which for some years was the largest Bibliography in existence of any Religious Order. It is only recently, in the still more immense third edition, increased by the help of Sommervogel, that Baptista's name appears at all, and then only in a two or three lined title of one only out of his many works-and even this the editor had obviously not seen. But enough about the |