rses and hounds and
Pharaonic troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring it to
the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following the ancestral oaks
of the park. Such a volume is sacred to us. But it must be the original
foundling of the book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct
baronetcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial flowers of
some passion which the church-yard smothered while the Stuarts were yet
unkinged, suggestive of the trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there
with ashes from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn and
weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, perhaps, of
Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, doubtful between desire and
the odd sixpence. When it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more
choice. The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared with its
battered prototype that could draw us with a single hair of association.

It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed Mr. Smith in making
the selections for his series. A choice of old authors should be a
_florilegium_, and not a botanist's _hortus siccus_, to which grasses
are as important as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maidenly
genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided over the editing of
the "Library." We should be inclined to surmise that the works to be
reprinted had been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they were
especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their own names should
be signalized on the title-pages with the suffix of EDITOR. The volumes
already published are: Increase Mather's "Remarkable Providences"; the
poems of Drummond of Hawthornden; the "Visions" of Piers Ploughman; the
works in prose and verse of Sir Thomas Overbury; the "Hymns and Songs"
and the "Hallelujah" of George Wither; the poems of Southwell; Selden's
"Table-talk"; the "Enchiridion" of Quarles; the dramatic works of
Marston and Webster; and Chapman's translation of Homer. The volume of
Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to stand on the same
shelf with the "Magnalia" of his book-suffocated son. Cunningham's
comparatively recent edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long
time to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value to posterity is
as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir Thomas Overbury's "Characters" are
interesting illustrations of contemporary manners, and a mine of
footnotes to the works of better men,--but, with the exception