and careful
preservation. It has sometimes happened to me, as it probably has to
many another inquisitive person, to penetrate to the heart of one of
these solid volumes and find it closed in this wise:--As the binder of a
book is himself bound to cut off as little as possible of its white
margin, it may take place, if any of the leaves are inaccurately folded,
that their edges are not cut, and that, as to such leaves, the book is
in the uncut condition so often denounced by impatient readers. So have
I sometimes had to open with a paper-cutter the pages which had shut up
for two hundred years that knowledge which the ponderous volume, like
any solemn holder-forth whom no one listens to, pretended to be
distributing abroad from its place of dignity on the shelf. Sometimes,
also, there will drop out of a heavy folio a little slip of
orange-yellow paper covered with some cabalistic-looking characters,
which a careful study discovers to be a hint, conveyed in high or low
Dutch, that the dealer from whom the volume was purchased, about the
time of some crisis in the Thirty Years' War, would be rather gratified
than otherwise should the purchaser be pleased to remit to him the price
of it.

Though quartos and folios are dwindling away, like many other
conventional distinctions of rank, yet are authors of the present day
not entirely divested of the opportunity of taking their place on the
shelf like these old dignitaries. It would be as absurd, of course, to
appear in folio as to step abroad in the small-clothes and queue of our
great-grandfathers' day, and even quarto is reserved for science and
some departments of the law. But then, on the other hand, octavos are
growing as large as some of the folios of the seventeenth century, and a
solid roomy-looking book is still practicable. Whoever desires to
achieve a sure, though it may be but a humble, niche in the temple of
fame, let him write a few solid volumes with respectably sounding
titles, and matter that will rather repel the reader than court him to
such familiarity as may beget contempt. Such books are to the frequenter
of a library like country gentlemen's seats to travellers, something to
know the name and ownership of in passing. The stage-coachman of old
used to proclaim each in succession--the guide-book tells them now. So
do literary guide-books in the shape of library-catalogues and
bibliographies, tell of these steady and respectable mansions of
literature. N