ntry not only the scholar, but the virtuoso, who
hoards the treasures which he loves, it may be chiefly for their rarity
and because others who know more than he does of their value set a high
price upon them. As the wine of old vintages is gently decanted out of
its cobwebbed bottles with their rotten corks into clean new receptacles,
so the wealth of the New World is quietly emptying many of the libraries
and galleries of the Old World into its newly formed collections and
newly raised edifices. And this process must go on in an accelerating
ratio. No Englishman will be offended if I say that before the New
Zealander takes his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the
ruins of St. Paul's in the midst of a vast solitude, the treasures of the
British Museum will have found a new shelter in the halls of New York or
Boston. No Catholic will think hardly of my saying that before the
Coliseum falls, and with it the imperial city, whose doom prophecy has
linked with that of the almost eternal amphitheatre, the marbles, the
bronzes, the paintings, the manuscripts of the Vatican will have left the
shores of the Tiber for those of the Potomac, the Hudson, the
Mississippi, or the Sacramento. And what a delight in the pursuit of the
rarities which the eager book-hunter follows with the scent of a beagle!

Shall I ever forget that rainy day in Lyons, that dingy bookshop, where I
found the Aetius, long missing from my Artis bledicae Principes, and
where I bought for a small pecuniary consideration, though it was marked
rare, and was really tres rare, the Aphorisms of Hippocrates, edited by
and with a preface from the hand of Francis Rabelais? And the
vellum-bound Tulpius, which I came upon in Venice, afterwards my only
reading when imprisoned in quarantine at Marseilles, so that the two
hundred and twenty-eight cases he has recorded are, many of them, to this
day still fresh in my memory. And the Schenckius,--the folio filled with
casus rariores, which had strayed in among the rubbish of the bookstall
on the boulevard,--and the noble old Vesalius with its grand frontispiece
not unworthy of Titian, and the fine old Ambroise Pare, long waited for
even in Paris and long ago, and the colossal Spigelius with his
eviscerated beauties, and Dutch Bidloo with its miracles of fine
engraving and bad dissection, and Italian Mascagni, the despair of all
would-be imitators, and pre-Adamite John de Ketam, and antediluvian
Berengarius C