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ad the sense to step into the breach and to save the 'Thuana' from destruction. When he sold the library to the Cardinal de Rohan, in 1706, he reserved the _Collection Du Puy_ for his daughters. It is believed that the Cardinal, through the cleverness of his secretary Oliva, obtained the historian's choice examples for less than the price of the binding. We must follow the career of the collection to its melancholy end. The Cardinal left it to his nephew the Prince de Soubise. The world knows him as the inventor of a sauce and as the general in one lost battle; but he had a higher fame among the booksellers for his prowess in the auction-room. He seems to have been the victim of a frenzy for books. He impressed them by crowds, and marshalled them in regiments and myriads. They all fell in 1789 before the hammer of the auctioneer. Dibdin has described the catalogue. It was unostentatious and printed on indifferent material. He hoped, with his curious insistance on the point, that there were 'some few copies on large paper.' It is a mark of the changes in book-collecting that Dibdin praised the index as excellent, 'enabling us to discover any work of which we may be in want'; but it is now regarded as remarkable for its poverty, and especially for the extraordinary carelessness that left eight noble specimens from Grolier's library without the slightest mark of distinction. Gian-Vincenzio Pinelli was a celebrated man of letters whose library at Padua formed 'a perpetual Academy' for all the scholars of his day. Born at Naples in 1538, he spent the greater part of his long life at Padua, where he was sent to study the law; but the only sign of his professional labours appears to have been that he rigidly excluded all works on jurisprudence from his magnificent library. His books, says Hallam, were collected by the labours of many years: 'the catalogues of the Frankfort fairs and those of the principal booksellers in Italy were diligently perused, nor did any work of value appear from the press on either side of the Alps which he did not instantly add to his shelves.' Remembering the traditions of the age of Poggio, when the rarest classics might be found perishing in a garret or a cellar, Pinelli was always in the habit of visiting the dealers in old parchment and the brokers who carried off deeds and papers from sales, just as Dr. Rawlinson collected and gave to the Bodleian a mass of unsorted documents, including, as we
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