have beheld the _chiffonniers_, at early
dawn, rummaging among the cinder heaps for ejected treasures. A ragged
morsel is perhaps carefully severed from the heap, wrapped in paper to
keep its leaves together, and deposited in the purchaser's pocket. You
would probably find it difficult to recognise the fragment, if you
should see it in the brilliancy of its resuscitation. A skilled and
cautious workman has applied a bituminous solvent to its ragged edges,
and literally incorporated, by a sort of paper-making process, each
mouldering page into a broad leaf of fine strong paper, in which the
print, according to a simile used for such occasions, seems like a
small rivulet in a wide meadow of margin. This is termed inlaying, and
is a very lofty department in the art of binding. Then there is,
besides, the grandeur of russia or morocco, with gilding, and tooling,
and marbling, and perhaps a ribbon marker, dangling out with a
decoration at its end--all tending, like stars, and garters, and
official robes, to stamp the outer insignia of importance on the book,
and to warn all the world to respect it, and save it from the risks to
which the common herd of literature is liable. The French have, as
usual, dignified the process which restores diseased books to health and
condition by an appropriate technical name--it is Bibliuguiancie; and
under that title it will be found fitly and appropriately discussed in
the Dictionnaire de Bibliologie of Peignot, who specially mentions two
practitioners of this kind as having conferred lustre on their
profession by their skill and success--Vialard and Heudier.[62]

[Footnote 62: There is something exceedingly curious, not only in its
bearing on the matter of the text, but as a record of some peculiar
manners and habits of the fourteenth century, in Richard of Bury's
injunctions as to the proper treatment of the manuscripts which were
read in his day, and the signal contrast offered by the practice both of
the clergy and laity to his decorous precepts:--

"We not only set before ourselves a service to God in preparing volumes
of new books, but we exercise the duties of a holy piety, if we first
handle so as not to injure them, then return them to their proper places
and commend them to undefiling custody, that they may rejoice in their
purity while held in the hand, and repose in security when laid up in
their repositories. Truly, next to the vestments and vessels dedicated
to the body of t