o one speaks ill of them, or even proclaims his ignorance
of their nature, and your "man who knows everything" will profess some
familiarity with them, the more readily that the verity of his
pretensions is not likely to be tested. A man's name may have resounded
for a time through all the newspapers as the gainer of a great victory
or the speaker of marvellous speeches--he may have been the most
brilliant wit of some distinguished social circle--the head of a great
profession--even a leading statesman; yet his memory has utterly
evaporated with the departure of his own generation. Had he but written
one or two of these solid books, now, his name would have been
perpetuated in catalogues and bibliographical dictionaries; nay,
biographies and encyclopaedias would contain their titles, and perhaps
the day of the author's birth and death. Let those who desire posthumous
fame, counting recollection as equivalent to fame, think of this.

It is with no desire to further the annihilation or decay of the stout
and long-lived class of books of which I have been speaking, that I now
draw attention to the book-hunter's services in the preservation of some
that are of a more fragile nature, and are liable to droop and decay. We
can see the process going on around us, just as we see other things
travelling towards extinction. Look, for instance, at school-books, how
rapidly and obviously they go to ruin. True, there are plenty of them,
but save of those preserved in the privileged libraries, or of some that
may be tossed aside among lumber in which they happen to remain until
they become curiosities, what chance is there of any of them being in
existence a century hence? Collectors know well the extreme rarity and
value of ancient school-books. Nor is their value by any means fanciful.
The dominie will tell us that they are old-fashioned, and the pedagogue
who keeps a school, "and ca's it a acaudemy," will sneer at them as
"obsolete and incompatible with the enlightened adjuncts of modern
tuition;" but if we are to consider that the condition of the human
intellect at any particular juncture is worth studying, it is certainly
of importance to know on what food its infancy is fed. And so of
children's play-books as well as their work-books; these are as
ephemeral as their other toys. Retaining dear recollections of some that
were the favourites, and desiring to awaken from them old recollections
of careless boyhood, or perhaps to try