resources. He had a
wonderful pencil--it was potent for the beautiful, the terrible, and the
ridiculous; but it took a wayward wilful course, like everything else
about him. He had a brilliant pen, too, when he chose to wield it; but
the idea that he should exercise any of these his gifts in common
display before the world, for any even of the higher motives that make
people desire fame and praise, would have sickened him. His faculties
were his own as much as his collection, and to be used according to his
caprice and pleasure. So fluttered through existence one who, had it
been his fate to have his own bread to make, might have been a great
man. Alas for the end! Some curious annotations are all that remain of
his literary powers--some drawings and etchings in private collections
all of his artistic. His collection, with its long train of legends and
associations, came to what he himself must have counted as dispersal. He
left it to his housekeeper, who, like a wise woman, converted it into
cash while its mysterious reputation was fresh. Huddled in a great
auction-room, its several catalogued items lay in humiliating contrast
with the decorous order in which they were wont to be arranged. _Sic
transit gloria mundi._

Let us now call up a different and a more commonplace type of the
book-hunter--it shall be Inchrule Brewer. He is guiltless of all
intermeddling with the contents of books, but in their external
attributes his learning is marvellous. He derived his nickname, from the
practice of keeping, as his inseparable pocket-companion, one of those
graduated folding measures of length which may often be seen protruding
from the moleskin pocket of the joiner. He used it at auctions and on
other appropriate occasions, to measure the different elements of a
book--the letterpress--the unprinted margin--the external expanse of the
binding; for to the perfectly scientific collector all these things are
very significant.[26] They are, in fact, on record among the craft, like
the pedigrees and physical characteristics recorded in stud-books and
short-horn books. One so accomplished in this kind of analysis could
tell at once, by this criterion, whether the treasure under the hammer
was the same that had been knocked down before at the Roxburghe
sale--the Askew, the Gordonstoun, or the Heber, perhaps--or was
veritably an impostor--or was in reality a new and previously unknown
prize well worth contending for. The minuteness