elfish collector.
Balzac gives in his 'Cousin Pons' a vivid delineation of such a person.
The hero is a poor drudging music-teacher and orchestra-player, who has
invested every franc of his hard-won earnings in the collecting of
exquisite paintings, prints, bric-a-brac, and other rare mementoes of
the eighteenth century. Despised by all, even by his kindred, trodden
upon as a nobody, slow, patient, and ever courageous, he unites to a
complete technical knowledge a marvellous intuition of the beautiful,
and his treasures are for him pride, bliss, and life. There is no show
in this case, no desire for show, no ambition of the despicable
shoddy-genteel sort--a more than powerful creation of fiction. A
strikingly opposite career of selfishness is suggested by the fairly
well-known story of Don Vincente, the friar bookseller of Barcelona,
who, in order to obtain a volume which a rival bookseller, Paxtot, had
secured at an auction, set fire one night to Paxtot's shop, and stole
the precious volume--a supposed unique copy of the 'Furs e ordinacions
fetes per los gloriosos reys de Arago als regnicoes del regne de
Valencia,' printed by Lambert Palmart, 1482. When the friar was brought
up for judgment, he stolidly maintained his innocence, asserting that
Paxtot had sold it to him after the auction. Further inquiry resulted in
the discovery that Don Vincente possessed a number of books which had
been purchased from him by customers who were shortly afterwards found
assassinated. It was only after receiving a formal promise that his
library should not be dispersed, but preserved in its integrity, that he
determined to make a clean breast of it, and confess the details of the
crimes that he had committed. In cross-examination, Don Vincente spurned
the suggestion that he was a thief, for had he not given back to his
victims the money which they had paid him for the books?

'And it was solely for the sake of books that you committed these
murders?' asked the judge.

'Books! yes, books! Books are the glory of God!'

Vincente's counsel, in defence of his client, in this desperate strait
maintained that there might exist several copies of the books found in
his possession, and that it was out of the question to condemn, on his
own sham avowal, a man who appeared to be half cracked. The counsel for
the prosecution said that that plea could not be urged in the case of
the book printed by Lambert Palmart, as but one copy of that was in
e