,
Wither, Quarles, and Harvey (_School of the Heart_). But if the
collector goes outside the national frontier, he meets with works of
this class in even bewildering abundance in regard to number, variety
of type and treatment, and degree of artistic and literary merit.
Moreover, among the works of this species just enumerated as of
national origin, four of the six were more or less heavily indebted
to the Continent; the Whitney was printed at Leyden, and Wither,
Quarles, and Harvey did little more than write English letterpress to
sets of foreign plates.

_Books of Characters_, of which perhaps Earle's _Microcosmography_,
1628, is the most familiar, have attracted attention from more than
one of our book-fanciers; they constitute a somewhat extensive series,
and we gain a fair _apercu_ of it in the catalogue of the library of
DR. BLISS, of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, 1858. It was Bliss who
reprinted Earle in 1811, and inserted a bibliography of publications
on similar lines.

The above-mentioned gentleman also lent himself to two other paths of
collecting: one suggested by local associations, and consisting of
works printed at Oxford, the second dealing with those which appeared
just prior to the Great Fire of London in 1666.

One of Bliss's Oxford friends, DR. BANDINEL, Bodley's librarian, made
it his speciality to bring together as many of the fugitive
publications as possible relative to the Civil War Period and the
Commonwealth, and MR. JOHN FORSTER did the same. The Bandinel
Catalogue, 1861, is an excellent guide on this ground, although it is
almost unnecessary to state that it is very incomplete. The best and
most exhaustive assemblage of the literature of the Troubles and
Interregnum (1640-59) is the descriptive list of the King's pamphlets
in the British Museum formed by Thomason the stationer.

The interest and profit attendant on the study of the monastic and
patristic writers, who may be said to be less strictly national and
more cosmopolitan than those of later schools, are, as a rule, casual
and slender for the merely literary consulter or peruser, supposing
the rather extreme case, where such a person is sufficiently
courageous and robust to engage in anything approaching a serious
examination of these families of books. The authors were true
enthusiasts, labouring to their lives' last thread in some obscure
cell or dim closet, where pride of authorship, as we may feel and
enjoy it, there was none, wh