ery shape and at every
onset he is discomfited. Such a champion as Atticus has perhaps never
before appeared within the arena of book-gladiators:

'Blest with talents, wealth, and taste;'[198]

and gifted with no common powers of general scholarship, he can easily
master a knotty passage in Eschylus or Aristotle; and quote Juvenal
and Horace as readily as the junior lads at Eton quote their '_As in
praesenti_:' moreover, he can enter, with equal ardour, into a minute
discussion about the romance literature of the middle ages, and the
dry though useful philology of the German school during the 16th and
17th centuries. In the pursuit after rare, curious, and valuable
books, nothing daunts or depresses him. With a mental and bodily
constitution such as few possess, and with a perpetual succession of
new objects rising up before him, he seems hardly ever conscious of
the vicissitudes of the seasons, and equally indifferent to petty
changes in politics. The cutting blasts of Siberia, or the fainting
heat of a Maltese sirocco, would not make him halt, or divert his
course, in the pursuit of a favourite volume, whether in the Greek,
Latin, Spanish, or Italian language. But as all human efforts, however
powerful, if carried on without intermission, must have a period of
cessation; and as the most active body cannot be at 'Thebes and at
Athens' at the same moment; so it follows that Atticus cannot be at
every auction and carry away every prize. His rivals narrowly watch,
and his enemies closely way-lay, him; and his victories are rarely
bloodless in consequence. If, like Darwin's whale, which swallows
'millions at a gulp,' Atticus should, at one auction, purchase from
two to seven hundred volumes, he must retire, like the '_Boa
Constrictor_,' for digestion: and accordingly he does, for a short
season, withdraw himself from 'the busy hum' of sale rooms, to
collate, methodize, and class his newly acquired treasures--to repair
what is defective, and to beautify what is deformed. Thus rendering
them 'companions meet' for their brethren in the rural shades of H----
Hall; where, in gay succession, stands many a row, heavily laden with
'rich and rare' productions. In this rural retreat, or academic bower,
Atticus spends a due portion of the autumnal season of the year; now
that the busy scenes of book-auctions in the metropolis have changed
their character--and dreary silence, and stagnant dirt, have succeeded
to noise and flyin