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

French I cannot speak, as there is no bibliography of these, and
search through the General Catalogue of nearly nine hundred
volumes was too great a task to be attempted.
The authority for
the inclusion of a book not seen by myself is always given.
The collector of these military works will in course of time
become possessed of some fine specimens of typography, adorned
with many beautiful engravings, and furnished with a vast store of
interesting and valuable matter.
For their rarity, the evidence of the
bibliographers shows it to be unquestionable. There seem to be
special reasons for this scarcity. In the first place, the demand was
small, and few copies were printed. We know that the pay of the
military man did not always find its way to his pocket, and where it
did, it was not so liberal that he could afford to spend it on books
so costly as these were ; and thus a single copy might have much
hard service laid upon it, and would be passed from hand to hand
till worn out. Many other copies doubtless perished in the accidents
inseparable from " the wandering, unquiet life of a soldier," a
risk much increased in the case of Englishmen, who, seeing no
service but on the continent, had to carry their text-books across
the seas with them, whence they were probably never brought
back. Again, on the appearance of a new work, as the soldier
would be unable to carry a library about with him, the old technical
treatise would be cast aside and lost. In this conne6tion, Marini
remarks that the scarcity of Italian works may also be accounted
for on the supposition that foreign plagiarists, when they could lay
hands on a copy, tore it
up to hide their thefts.
To conclude, I may observe that it is as well not always to
trust to the text fulfilling what is predicated of it on the title-page ;
as Doisy^ remarks: "One author will boldly announce that his
method of fortification is the best of all, although he may be in
' " Essai de Bib. Mil.", p. 9.
xxvi