ensive or as limited
as you choose. You can crowd the great representative writers into
a small compass; or you can make a library consisting only of the
different editions of Horace, if you have space and money enough. Then
comes the Harem, the shelf or the bookcase of Delilahs, that you
have paid wicked prices for, that you love without pretending to be
reasonable about it, and would bag in case of fire before all the
rest, just as Mr. Townley took the Clytie to his carriage when the
anti-Catholic mob threatened his house in 1780. As for the foundlings
like my Hedericus, they go among their peers; it is a pleasure to
take them, from the dusty stall where they were elbowed by plebeian
school-books and battered odd volumes, and give them Alduses and
Elzevirs for companions.

Nothing remains but the Infirmary. The most painful subjects are the
unfortunates that have lost a cover. Bound a hundred years ago, perhaps,
and one of the rich old browned covers gone--what a pity! Do you know
what to do about it? I 'll tell you,--no, I 'll show you. Look at this
volume. M. T. Ciceronis Opera,--a dozen of 'em,--one of 'em minus half
his cover, a poor one-legged cripple, six months ago,--now see him.

--He looked very respectably indeed, both covers dark, ancient, very
decently matched; one would hardly notice the fact that they were not
twins.

-I 'll tell you what I did. You poor devil, said I, you are a disgrace
to your family. We must send you to a surgeon and have some kind of a
Taliacotian operation performed on you. (You remember the operation as
described in Hudibras, of course.) The first thing was to find a subject
of similar age and aspect ready to part with one of his members. So I
went to Quidlibet's,--you know Quidlibet and that hieroglyphic sign of
his with the omniscient-looking eye as its most prominent feature,--and
laid my case before him. I want you, said I, to look up an old book of
mighty little value,--one of your ten-cent vagabonds would be the sort
of thing,--but an old beggar, with a cover like this, and lay it by for
me.

And Quidlibet, who is a pleasant body to deal with,--only he has
insulted one or two gentlemanly books by selling them to me at very
low-bred and shamefully insufficient prices,--Quidlibet, I say, laid by
three old books for me to help myself from, and did n't take the trouble
even to make me pay the thirty cents for 'em. Well, said I to myself,
let us look at our three books that h