little time to collect my
powers, and then--

LIS. "Yes, and then"--you will infect us from top to toe with the
BOOK-DISEASE!

PHIL. In truth I already begin to feel the consequence of the
innumerable miasma of it, which are floating in the atmosphere of this
library. I move that we adjourn to a purer air.

LYSAND. I second the motion: for, having reached the commencement of
Henry's reign, it will be difficult to stop at any period in it
previous to that of the Reformation.

LIS. Agreed. Thanks to the bacchanalian bounty of Lorenzo, we are
sufficiently enlivened to enter yet further, and more enthusiastically,
into this congenial discourse. Dame nature and good sense equally
admonish us now to depart. Let us, therefore, close the apertures of
these gorgeous decanters:--

"Claudite jam rivos, pueri: sat prata biberunt!"

[Illustration]

[Illustration: The striking device of M. MORIN, Printer, Rouen.]

PART V.

=The Drawing Room.=

HISTORY OF THE BIBLIOMANIA, OR ACCOUNT
OF BOOK COLLECTORS, CONCLUDED.

Some in Learning's garb
With formal hand, and sable-cinctur'd gown,
And rags of mouldy volumes.

AKENSIDE; _Pleasures of Imagination_, b. iii., v. 96.

[Illustration]

=The Drawing Room.=

HISTORY OF THE BIBLIOMANIA, OR ACCOUNT OF
BOOK-COLLECTORS, CONTINUED.

Volatile as the reader may comceive [Transcriber's Note: conceive] the
character of Lisardo to be, there were traits in it of marked goodness
and merit. His enthusiasm so frequently made him violate the rules of
severe politeness; and the quickness with which he flew from one
subject to another, might have offended a narrator of the gravity,
without the urbanity, of Lysander; had not the frankness with which he
confessed his faults, and the warmth with which he always advocated
the cause of literature, rendered him amiable in the eyes of those who
thoroughly knew him. The friends, whose company he was now enjoying,
were fully competent to appreciate his worth. They perceived that
Lisardo's mind had been rather brilliantly cultivated; and that, as
his heart had always beaten at the call of virtue, so, in a due
course of years, his judgment would become matured, and his opinions
more decidedly fixed. He had been left, very early in life, without a
father, and bred up in the expectation of a large fortune; while the
excessive fondness of his mother had endeavoured to supply the want of