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