spoiling a house, to carry away any thing
except the valuables. Meantime, millions of blank Bibles filled the
shelves of stationers, to be sold for day-books and ledgers, so that
there seemed to be no more employment for the paper-makers in that
direction for many years to come. A friend, who used to mourn over
the thought of palimpsest manuscripts,--of portions of Livy and Cicero
erased to make way for the nonsense of some old monkish chronicler,
--exclaimed, as he saw a tradesman trudging off with a handsome
morocco-bound quarto for a day-book, "Only think of the pages once
filled with the poetry of Isaiah, and the parables of Christ, sponged
clean to make way for orders for silks and satins, muslins, cheese,
and bacon!" The old authors, of course, were left to their mutilations;
there was no way in which the confusion could be remedied. But the
living began to prepare new editions of their works, in which they
endeavored to give a new turn to the thoughts which had been mutilated
by erasure, and I was nor a little amused to see that many, having
stolen from writers whose compositions were as much mutilated as
their own, could not tell the meaning of their own pages.

It seemed at first to be a not unnatural impression, that even those
who could recall the erased texts as they perused the injured books,
--who could mentally full up the imperfect clauses,--were not at
liberty to inscribe them; they seemed to fear that, if they did so,
the characters would be as if written in invisible ink, or would
surely fade away. It was with trembling that some at length made the
attempt, and to their unspeakable joy found the impression durable.
Day after day passed; still the characters remained; and the people
length came to the conclusion, that God left them at liberty, if they
could, to reconstruct the Bible for themselves out of their collective
remembrances of its divine contents. This led again to some curious
results, all of them singularly indicative of the good and ill that
is in human nature. It was with incredible joy that men came to the
conclusion that the book might be thus recovered nearly entire, and
nearly in the very words of the original, by the combined effort of
human memories. Some of the obscurest of the species, who had studied
nothing else but the Bible, but who had well studied that, came to be
objects of reverence among Christians and booksellers; and the various
texts they quoted were taken down with th