r our blessed Reformation. Mr. Blades, on
the whole, managed to keep his.

Passing from fire, Mr. Blades has a good deal to say about water, and
the harm it has been allowed to do in our collegiate and cathedral
libraries. With really creditable composure he writes: 'Few old
libraries in England are now so thoroughly neglected as they were
thirty years ago. The state of many of our collegiate and cathedral
libraries was at that time simply appalling. I could mention many
instances--one especially--where, a window having been left broken for
a long time, the ivy had pushed through and crept over a row of books,
each of which was worth hundreds of pounds. In rainy weather the water
was conducted as by a pipe along the tops of the books, and soaked
through the whole.' Ours is indeed a learned Church. Fancy the mingled
amazement and dismay of the Dean and Chapter when they were informed
that all this mouldering literary trash had 'boodle' in it. 'In
another and a smaller collection the rain came through on to a
bookcase through a sky-light, saturating continually the top shelf,
containing Caxtons and other English books, one of which, although
rotten, was sold soon after by permission of the Charity Commissioners
for L200.' Oh, those scoundrelly Charity Commissioners! How
impertinent has been their interference with the loving care and
guardianship of the Lord's property by His lawfully consecrated
ministers! By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine
bookworm, the paper-eating insect, ravenous as he once was, has done
comparatively little mischief. Very little seems known of the
creature, though the purchaser of Mr. Blades's book becomes the owner
of a life-size portrait of the miscreant in one, at all events, of his
many shapes. Mr. Birdsall, of Northampton, sent Mr. Blades, in 1879,
by post, a fat little worm he had found in an old volume. Mr. Blades
did all, and more than all, that could be expected of a humane man to
keep the creature alive, actually feeding him with fragments of
Caxtons and seventeenth-century literature; but it availed not, for in
three weeks the thing died, and as the result of a post-mortem was
declared to be _Aecophera pseudopretella_. Some years later Dr.
Garnett, who has spent a long life obliging men of letters, sent Mr.
Blades two Athenian worms, which had travelled to this country in a
Hebrew Commentary; but, lovely and pleasant in their lives, in their
deaths they were not far divide