ted by a single perverse educator!"
Now, my friends, what have you to say against the _English_ system of
education?

PHIL. This is only defending bad by worse.

LIS. Where are we digressing? What are become of our bibliomaniacal
heroes?

LYSAND. You do right to call me to order. Let us turn from the birch,
to the book, history.

Contemporaneous with Peacham, lived that very curious collector of
ancient popular little pieces, as well as lover of "sacred secret soul
soliloquies," the renowned _melancholy_ composer, ycleped ROBERT
BURTON;[345] who, I do not scruple to number among the most marked
bibliomaniacs of the age; notwithstanding his saucy railing against
Frankfort book-fairs. We have abundance of testimony (exclusive of the
fruits of his researches, which appear by his innumerable marginal
references to authors of all ages and characters) that this original,
amusing, and now popular, author was an arrant book-hunter; or, as old
Anthony hath it, "a devourer of authors." Rouse, the Librarian of
Bodleian, is said to have liberally assisted Burton in furnishing him
with choice books for the prosecution of his extraordinary work.

[Footnote 345: I suppose Lysander to allude to a memorandum
of Hearne, in his _Benedictus Abbas_, p. iv., respecting
ROBERT BURTON being a collector of "ancient popular little
pieces." From this authority we find that he gave "a great
variety" of these pieces, with a multitude of books, of the
best kind, to the "Bodleian Library."--One of these was that
"opus incomparabile," the "_History of Tom Thumb_," and the
other, the "_Pleasant and Merry History of the Mylner of
Abingdon_." The expression "sacred secret soul soliloquies"
belongs to Braithwait: and is thus beautifully interwoven in
the following harmonious couplets:

----No minute but affords some tears.
No walks but private solitary groves
Shut from frequent, his contemplation loves;
No treatise, nor discourse, so sweetly please
As sacred-secret soule soliloquies.

_Arcadian Princesse_, lib. 4, p. 162.

And see, gentle reader, how the charms of solitude--of
"walking alone in some solitary grove, betwixt wood and
water, by a brook-side, to meditate upon some delightsome
and pleasant subject" are depicted by the truly original
pencil of this said Robert Burton, in his _Anatomy of
Me