A bibliography of English military books up to 1642 and of ...

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and the writers would seem to have been employed by certain
printers, John Wolfe in particular in the sixteenth century, and
Butter and Bourne in the seventeenth, as war correspondents.
Much of the importance of these slight produ6lions lies in the faft
that names of persons and details concerning aftions are often to be
found in them which may be sought for in vain elsewhere.
In the first instance I had intended to include all such histories
and pamphlets bearing on military affairs ;
number of them was issued
and finding how large a
during the Civil Wars in England
thirty thousand, Oldys says,^ on various subje6ts, but many of them,
no doubt, relating to the wars in progress— I determined to break
off at 1642. I see now that the list might have been better carried
up to 1660, the date of the institution of the Standing Army, and
of the feudal militia.
of the final merging in it
Although the intention of the compilation was originally only
to furnish an index of works treating of the art of war as practised
by the English people, I soon found that a parasite such as our
military literature was in its first period could not be reviewed
independently and at the same time efKciently.
Therefore I added
the contemporary foreign works, arranged like the English in
chronological order, but, unlike them, having this order subordinated
to a classification according to subject, in order that the
student, examining an English book, may see at a glance what was
being written abroad, about the same time, on the same branch.
This divergence in the plan is rather significant of the difference
both in quality and number between native and foreign produdtions.
The former do not lend themselves to subdivision until quite the
close of the sixteenth century ; with few exceptions they are
nothing more than compendiums from some bulky foreign treatise,
and, not content to confine himself to one branch, the English
writer in one volume travels over the whole ground of the art,
filching and plagiarizing without scruple, and without acknowledgment.
An exad: translation was not to his liking. In the century
and a half between the English renderings of Christine de Pisan
* "Dissertation upon Pamphlets", London, 1731, 4°.
xiv