-mill,
shouted 'Prodigious' till the roof rung to his raptures. 'He had never,'
he said, 'seen so many books together, except in the College Library';
and now his dignity and delight in being superintendent of the collection
raised him, in his own opinion, almost to the rank of the academical
librarian, whom he had always regarded as the greatest and happiest man
on earth. Neither were his transports diminished upon a hasty examination
of the contents of these volumes. Some, indeed, of BELLES LETTRES, poems,
plays, or memoirs he tossed indignantly aside, with the implied censure
of'psha,'or 'frivolous'; but the greater and bulkier part of the
collection bore a very different character. The deceased prelate, a
divine of the old and deeply-learned cast, had loaded his shelves with
volumes which displayed the antique and venerable attributes so happily
described by a modern poet:--

That weight of wood, with leathern coat o'erlaid,
Those ample clasps of solid metal made,
The close-press'd leaves unoped for many an age,
The dull red edging of the well-fill'd page,
On the broad back the stubborn ridges roll'd,
Where yet the title stands in tarnish'd gold.

Books of theology and controversial divinity, commentaries, and
polyglots, sets of the Fathers, and sermons which might each furnish
forth ten brief discourses of modern date, books of science, ancient and
modern, classical authors in their best and rarest forms--such formed the
late bishop's venerable library, and over such the eye of Dominie Sampson
gloated with rapture. He entered them in the catalogue in his best
running hand, forming each letter with the accuracy of a lover writing a
valentine, and placed each individually on the destined shelf with all
the reverence which I have seen a lady pay to a jar of old china. With
all this zeal his labours advanced slowly. He often opened a volume when
halfway up the library steps, fell upon some interesting passage, and,
without shifting his inconvenient posture, continued immersed in the
fascinating perusal until the servant pulled him by the skirts to assure
him that dinner waited. He then repaired to the parlour, bolted his food
down his capacious throat in squares of three inches, answered ay and no
at random to whatever question was asked at him, and again hurried back
to the library, as soon as his napkin was removed, and sometimes with it
hanging round his neck like a pinafore;--