rupted without inconvenience, and resumed without
effort; yet if the painful realities of life break into this visionary
world of literature and art, there is an atmosphere of taste about him
which will be dissolved, and harmonious ideas which will be chased away,
as it happens when something is violently flung among the trees where the
birds are singing--all instantly disperse!

Even to quit their collections for a short time is a real suffering to
these lovers; everything which surrounds them becomes endeared by habit,
and by some higher associations. Men of letters have died with grief from
having been forcibly deprived of the use of their libraries. DE THOU, with
all a brother's sympathy, in his great history, has recorded the sad fates
of several who had witnessed their collections dispersed in the civil wars
of France, or had otherwise been deprived of their precious volumes. Sir
ROBERT COTTON fell ill, and betrayed, in the ashy paleness of his
countenance, the misery which killed him on the sequestration of his
collections. "They have broken my heart who have locked up my library from
me," was his lament.

If this passion for acquisition and enjoyment be so strong and exquisite,
what wonder that these "lovers" should regard all things as valueless in
comparison with the objects of their love? There seem to be spells in
their collections, and in their fascination they have often submitted to
the ruin of their personal, but not of their internal enjoyments. They
have scorned to balance in the scales the treasures of literature and art,
though imperial magnificence once was ambitious to outweigh them.

VAN PRAUN, a friend of Albert Durer's, of whom we possess a catalogue of
pictures and prints, was one of these enthusiasts of taste. The Emperor of
Germany, probably desirous of finding a royal road to a rare collection,
sent an agent to procure the present one entire; and that some delicacy
might be observed with such a man, the purchase was to be proposed in the
form of a mutual exchange; the emperor had gold, pearls, and diamonds. Our
_lief-hebber_ having silently listened to the imperial agent, seemed
astonished that such things should be considered as equivalents for a
collection of works of art, which had required a long life of experience
and many previous studies and practised tastes to have formed, and
compared with which gold, pearls, and diamonds, afforded but a mean, an
unequal, and a barbarous barter.