admiration,
exclaimed--"Come, is that really our Jamie's doin' now?--weel, I never
thought the cratur wad hae had the handicraft to do the like!"

The feeling by which this worthy man was influenced was a mere sensible
practical respect for good workmanship. The aspirations of the
collectors, however, in this matter, go out of the boundaries of the
sphere of the utilitarian into that of the aesthetic. Their priests and
prophets, by the way, do not seem to be aware how far back this
veneration for the coverings of books may be traced, or to know how
strongly their votaries have been influenced in the direction of their
taste by the traditions of the middle ages. The binding of a book was,
of old, a shrine on which the finest workmanship in bullion and the
costliest gems were lavished. The psalter or the breviary of some early
saint, a portion of the Scriptures, or some other volume held sacred,
would be thus enshrined. It has happened sometimes that tattered
fragments of them have been preserved as effective relics within outer
shells or shrines; and in some instances, long after the books
themselves have disappeared, specimens of these old bindings have
remained to us beautiful in their decay;--but we are getting far beyond
the Inchrule.

Your affluent omnivorous collector, who has more of that kind of
business on hand than he can perform for himself, naturally brings about
him a train of satellites, who make it their business to minister to his
importunate cravings. With them the phraseology of the initiated
degenerates into a hard business sort of slang. Whatever slight remnant
of respect towards literature as a vehicle of knowledge may linger in
the conversation of their employers, has never belonged to theirs. They
are dealers who have just two things to look to--the price of their
merchandise, and the peculiar propensities of the unfortunates who
employ them. Not that they are destitute of all sympathy with the malady
which they feed. The caterer generally gets infected in a superficial
cutaneous sort of way. He has often a collection himself, which he eyes
complacently of an evening as he smokes his pipe over his
brandy-and-water, but to which he is not so distractedly devoted but
that a pecuniary consideration will tempt him to dismember it. It
generally consists, indeed, of blunders or false speculations--books
which have been obtained in a mistaken reliance on their suiting the
craving of some wealthy collec