us elegance. B.B.]

To say that I was not gratified by the perusal of it would be a
confession contrary to the truth; but to say how ardently I
anticipated an amplification of the subject, how eagerly I looked
forward to a number of curious, apposite, and amusing anecdotes, and
found them not therein, is an avowal of which I need not fear the
rashness, when the known talents of the detector of Stern's
plagiarisms[4] are considered. I will not, however, disguise to you
that I read it with uniform delight, and that I rose from the perusal
with a keener appetite for

"The small, rare volume, black with tarnished gold."

_Dr. Ferriar's Ep._ v. 138.

[Footnote 4: In the fourth volume of the Transactions of the
Manchester Literary Society, part iv., p. 45-87, will be
found a most ingenious and amusing Essay, entitled
"_Comments on Sterne_," which excited a good deal of
interest at the time of its publication. This discovery may
be considered, in some measure, as the result of the
BIBLIOMANIA. In my edition of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, a
suggestion is thrown out that even Burton may have been an
imitator of Boisatuau [Transcriber's Note: Boiastuau]: see
vol. II. 143.]

Whoever undertakes to write down the follies which grow out of an
excessive attachment to any particular pursuit, be that pursuit
horses,[5] hawks, dogs, guns, snuff boxes,[6] old china, coins, or
rusty armour, may be thought to have little consulted the best means
of ensuring success for his labours, when he adopts the dull vehicle
of _Prose_ for the commnication [Transcriber's Note: communication] of
his ideas not considering that from _Poetry_ ten thousand bright
scintillations are struck off, which please and convince while they
attract and astonish. Thus when Pope talks of allotting for

"Pembroke[7] Statues, dirty Gods and Coins;
Rare monkish manuscripts for Hearne[8] alone;
And books to Mead[9] and butterflies to Sloane,"[10]

when he says that

These Aldus[11] printed, those Du Sueil has bound[12]

moreover that

For Locke or Milton[13] 'tis in vain to look;
These shelves admit not any modern book;

he not only seems to illustrate the propriety of the foregoing
remark, by shewing the immense superiority of verse to prose, in
ridiculing reigning absurdities, but he seems to have had a pretty
strong foresight of the BIBLIOMANIA which rages at the prese