sed up and put out of existence? True it was to be
with him--

"So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed,
And yet anon repairs his drooping head,
And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

But his tuneful companions who had less vital power have lain like some
ancient cemetery or buried city, in which antiquaries have been for a
long age digging and searching for some fragment of intellectual
treasure.

One book, and that the most read of all, was hedged by a sort of
divinity which protected it, so far as that was practicable, from the
dilapidating effects of use. The Bible seems to have been ever touched
with reverent gentleness, and, when the sordid effects of long handling
had become inevitably conspicuous, to have been generally removed out of
sight, and, as it were, decently interred. Hence it is that, of the old
editions of the Bible, the copies are so comparatively numerous and in
such fine preservation. Look at those two folios from the types of
Guttenburg and Fust, running so far back into the earliest stage of the
art of printing, that of them is told the legend of a combination with
the devil, which enabled one man to write so many copies identically the
same. See how clean and spotless is the paper, and how black, glossy,
and distinct the type, telling us how little progress printing has made
since the days of its inventors, in anything save the greater rapidity
with which, in consequence of the progress of machinery, it can now be
executed.

The reason of the extreme rarity of the books printed by the early
English printers is that, being very amusing, they were used up,
thumbed out of existence. Such were Caxton's Book of the Ordre of
Chyualry; his Knyght of the Toure; the Myrour of the World; and the
Golden Legende; Cocke Lorell's Bote, by De Worde; his Kalender of
Shepeherdes, and suchlike. If any one feels an interest in the process
of exhaustion, by which such treasures were reduced to rarity, he may
easily witness it in the _debris_ of a circulating library; and perhaps
he will find the phenomenon in still more distinct operation at any
book-stall where lie heaps of school-books, odd volumes of novels, and a
choice of Watts's Hymns and Pilgrim's Progresses. Here, too, it is
possible that the enlightened onlooker may catch sight of the
book-hunter plying his vocation, much after the manner in which, in some
ill-regulated town, he may