original editions, and in the most select
forms. I must have several copies of a book I have read forty times, as
long as there is anything about each copy that makes it peculiar, _sui
generis_. I must own the first edition of Paradise Lost, because it is
the first, and in ten books; the second, because it is the first in
twelve; then Newton's, then Todd's, then Mitford's, and so on, till my
catalogue of Miltons gets to equal Jeames de la Pluche's portraits of
the "Dook." "And when," as Henry indignantly says, "he could read Milton
all he wanted to, more than I should ever want to, notes and all, in
Little and Brown's edition that father gave him, he must go spending
money on a parcel of old truck printed a thousand years ago." Mad, quite
mad.

Now, to finish the melancholy picture, I am classic mad. I prefer the
ancient authors, decidedly, to the moderns. I love them as I never can
the moderns; they are my most intimate friends, my heart's own darlings.
And how I love to lavish money on them, to see them adorned in every
way! How I love to heap them up, Aldines, and Elzevirs, and
Baskervilles, and Biponts, in all their grace and majesty. This was what
filled that London box. This was all I had to show for twenty-five or
thirty guineas of good money; a parcel of trumpery old Greek and Latin
books I had by dozens already! Mad, mad.

Will you come in and see them, ladies and gentlemen? Here they are, all
ranged out on my table, large and small, clean and dirty. What have we
first?

A goodly fat quarto in white vellum, "Plinii Panegyricus, cum notis
Schwarzii, Norimbergae, 1733." A fine, clean, fresh copy,--one of those
brave old Teutonic classics of the last century, less exquisitely
printed than the Elzevirs, less learnedly critical than the later
Germans, but perfectly trustworthy and satisfactory, and attracting
every one's eye on a library shelf, by the rich sturdiness of their
creamy binding, that smacks of the true Dutch and German burgher wealth.
The model of them all is Oudendorp's Caesar. But there is nothing very
great about Pliny's Panegyric, and a man must be a very queer
bibliomaniac who would buy up all the vellum classics of the last
century he saw. Look inside the cover; read under the book-plate the
engraved name, "Edward Gibbon, Esq." What will you, my sanest friend,
not give for a book that belonged to the author of the "Decline and
Fall"?

The next is also a large quarto, but of a very different