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l sincerity.' Next day Casaubon came in from the _Bibliotheque du Roi_, and showed much pleasure at being introduced to the traveller. His letters of a later date show his high esteem for Peiresc. 'I am eagerly waiting to hear what Scaliger will say about the antiques, but I foresee that you will have room to glean after his harvest.' On another occasion he wrote: 'I do not know if you heard that the Duke of Urbino has sent me the Polybius, but I am indeed most beholden to you for the kindness.' Ten years afterwards Peiresc came to Paris again, wishing to explore the Oriental treasures in the library of De Mesmes, and to visit the huge collections in the houses of St. Victor and St. Germain. Here he gained the friendship of Pierre Seguier and the elegant Nicolas Rigault, and of Jerome Bignon, the first of a long dynasty of librarians. In England he saw the Bodleian, and talked with Savile, and admired Sir Robert Cotton as 'an honestly curious sort of man.' In Holland his chief business was to visit Scaliger, and we are told that he was careful not to ask about the treatise on squaring the circle, or to hint any doubt as to the truth of the Verona romance. Here at Leyden he read in the great library, soon to be endowed with Scaliger's books, and saw the room of which Heinsius so nobly said: 'In the very bosom of Eternity among all these illustrious souls I take my seat'; and at Louvain he could only lament the death of Justus Lipsius, whom he regarded as 'the light and the loadstar of wisdom.' Gassendi has left us an account of the library collected by Peiresc. Besides his acquisitions in the East, of which we have spoken elsewhere, the books came in crowds from his agents in France and Germany, and his scribes in the Vatican and Escorial. 'When any library was to be sold by public outcry, he took care to buy the best books, especially if they were of some neat edition that he did not already possess.' He bound them in red morocco with his cypher or initials in gold. One binder always lived in the house, and sometimes several were employed at once, 'when the books came rolling in on every side.' He would even bind up bits of old volumes and worm-eaten leaves; good books, he said, were so badly used by the vulgar, that he would try to have them prized at least for their beauty, and so perhaps they might escape the hands of the tobacconist and the grocer. A treatise published by Jerome Alexander contained a wonderful de
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