r, but for him, from the Aldus
on the lowest shelf to the Elzevir on the highest, every volume has
a language which none but he can interpret. Be patient with the
book-collector who loves his companions too well to let them go. Books
are not buried with their owners, and the veriest book-miser that ever
lived was probably doing far more for his successors than his more
liberal neighbor who despised his learned or unlearned avarice. Let
the fruit fall with the leaves still clinging round it. Who would have
stripped Southey's walls of the books that filled them, when, his mind
no longer capable of taking in their meaning, he would still pat and
fondle them with the vague loving sense of what they had once been
to him,--to him, the great scholar, now like a little child among his
playthings?

We need in this country 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