, Renouard says: "How few
are there of those who esteem and pay so dearly for these pretty
editions who know that the type that so much please them are the work
of Francis Garamond, who cast them one hundred years before at Paris."

In his bibliographical notes (a volume seldom met with now) the learned
William Davis records that Louis Elzevir was the first who observed the
distinction between the v consonant and the u vowel, which distinction,
however, had been recommended long before by Ramus and other writers,
but had never been regarded. There were five of these Elzevirs, viz.:
Louis, Bonaventure, Abraham, Louis, Jr., and Daniel.

A hundred years ago a famous bibliophile remarked: "The diminutiveness
of a large portion, and the beauty of the whole, of the classics
printed by the Elzevirs at Leyden and Amsterdam have long rendered them
justly celebrated, and the prices they bear in public sales
sufficiently demonstrate the estimation in which they are at present
held."

The regard for these precious books still obtains, and we meet with it
in curiously out-of-the-way places, as well as in those libraries where
one would naturally expect to find it. My young friend Irving Way
(himself a collector of rare enthusiasm) tells me that recently during
a pilgrimage through the state of Texas he came upon a gentleman who
showed him in his modest home the most superb collection of Elzevirs he
had ever set eyes upon!

How far-reaching is thy grace, O bibliomania! How good and sweet it is
that no distance, no environment, no poverty, no distress can appall or
stay thee. Like that grim spectre we call death, thou knockest
impartially at the palace portal and at the cottage door. And it
seemeth thy especial delight to bring unto the lonely in desert places
the companionship that exalteth humanity!

It makes me groan to think of the number of Elzevirs that are lost in
the libraries of rich parvenus who know nothing of and care no thing
for the treasures about them further than a certain vulgar vanity which
is involved. When Catherine of Russia wearied of Koritz she took to
her affection one Kimsky Kossakof, a sergeant in the guards. Kimsky
was elated by this sudden acquisition of favor and riches. One of his
first orders was to his bookseller. Said he to that worthy: "Fit me
up a handsome library; little books above and great ones below."

It is narrated of a certain British warrior that upon his retirement
from