made no protest, but observed that their
convictions as to how they should behave in his presence had
corollaries in the shape of very definite convictions as to how he
should carry himself before them. He thought that such people might be
described as moral trainers. They do not profess virtue themselves,
but they take a real pleasure in keeping you up to your profession.

The Bibliotaph had no explanation to give why he was so immediately
and invariably accounted as one in orders. He was quite sure that the
clerical look was innate, and by no means dependent upon the wearing
of a high vest or a Joseph Parker style of whisker; for once as he sat
in the hot room of a Turkish bath and in the Adamitic simplicity of
attire suitable to the temperature and the place, a gentleman who
occupied the chair nearest introduced conversation by saying, 'I beg
your pardon, sir, but are you not a clergyman?'

'This incident,' said the Bibliotaph, 'gave me a vivid sense of the
possibility of determining a man's profession by a cursory examination
of his cuticle.' Lowell's conviction about N. P. Willis was
well-founded: namely, that if it had been proper to do so, Willis
could have worn his own plain bare skin in a way to suggest that it
was a representative Broadway tailor's best work.

I imagine that few boys escape an outburst of that savage instinct for
personal adornment which expresses itself in the form of rude tattooing
upon the arms. The Bibliotaph had had his attack in early days, and
the result was a series of decorations of a highly patriotic character,
and not at all in keeping with South Kensington standards. I said to
him once, apropos of the pictures on his arms: 'You are a great
surprise to your friends in this particular.' 'Yes,' he replied, 'few
of them are aware that the volume of this Life is extra-illustrated.'

But that which he of necessity tolerated in himself he would not
tolerate in his books. They were not allowed to become pictorially
amplified. He saw no objection to inserting a rare portrait in a good
book. It did not necessarily injure the book, and it was one way of
preserving the portrait. Yet the thing was questionable, and it was
likely to prove the first step in a downward path. As to cramming a
volume with a heterogeneous mass of pictures and letters gathered from
all imaginable sources, he held the practice in abhorrence, and the
bibliographical results as fit only for the libraries of the
illit