s muscular originality, impulsive grasping at the infinite,
and resolute disdain of popular and conventional models; but expressing
opinion that, as he turns round on the pivot of his own individual
idiosyncrasy, he will come out all right.

"4. Advertisement by a disinterested draper, beginning, 'awful
sacrifices,' and ending, 'early application necessary to prevent
disappointment.'

"5. Two sticks of prayer for a devotional work which has had an
unexpected run, and is largely distributed over the office for an
expeditious issue of a new edition.

"6. Part of an accountant's report, containing 45 schemes for the
ranking of the creditors on ten bankrupt estates, each of which has
drawn accommodation bills on all the others.

"7. Signature YY of 'A treatise on the form and material of the sickle
used by the Welsh Druids in cutting the mistletoe,' being a series of
quotations in Arabic, Hindoo, Greek, German, and Gaelic, cemented
together by thin lines of English. This is a stock job which keeps the
office going like a balance-wheel when there is nothing else specially
pressing, and is rather popular, as it contains a good many ethnological
and etymological tables, implying scheme-work, which the compositors who
are adepts in that department contemplate with great satisfaction as
they put it together."

It is surely pleasant to suppose that the compositor has acquired the
faculty of passing such dizzying whirls of heterogeneous elements
without absorbing them all, and that, when his day's labour is over, he
may find his own special intellectual food in his Milton or his Locke.
In this view, his apathy to the literary matter passing through his
hands may be contemplated as among the special beneficences in the
providential order of things, like the faculty of healthy vitality to
throw off morbid influences; and perhaps it has still closer analogy to
that professional coolness which separates the surgeon from a nervous
sympathy with the sufferings of those on whom he operates--a phenomenon
which, though sometimes denounced as professional callousness, is one
of the most beneficent specialties in the lot of mankind.

In the several phases of the book-hunter, he whose peculiar glory it is
to have his books illustrated--the Grangerite, as he is technically
termed--must not be omitted. "Illustrating" a volume consists in
inserting in or binding up with it portraits, landscapes, and other
works of art bearing a reference