character. It
is the Baskerville impression of the elegiac poets,--Catullus, Tibullus,
and Propertius: Birmingham, 1772. No books are more delightful to sight
and touch than the Baskerville classics. This Catullus of mine is
printed on the softest and glossiest post paper, with a mighty margin of
two inches and a half at the side, and rich broad letters,--the standard
_n_ is a tenth of an inch wide,--of a glorious blackness in spite of
their ninety-two years of age. The classics of all languages have never
been more fitly printed than by Baskerville; and the present book may
serve as an admirable lesson to those who think a large-paper book means
an ordinary octavo page printed in the middle of a quarto leaf,--for
instance; Irving's Washington. My Catullus is bound in glossy calf,
with a richly gilt back, and bears within the inscription, "From H. S.
C. | to her valued friend | Doctor Southey | Feb'y y'e 24th, 1813,"
in a true English lady's hand. This cannot be the poet Southey, who was
not made LL. D. till 1821; but it may be his brother, Henry Herbert
Southey, M. D.

Next comes a very neat and compact little Seneca, in four 18mo volumes,
bound in rich old Russia, and bearing the esteemed imprint, "Amstelodami
apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzevirios, M.D.CLVIII." As the Baskerville
classics are the noblest for the library table, so the Elzevirs are the
neatest and prettiest for the pocket or the lecture-room. And to their
great beauty of mechanical execution is generally added a scrupulous
textual accuracy, which the great Birmingham printer did not boast. This
edition of Seneca, for instance, is that of Gronovius. His dedicatory
epistle, and the title-pages of Vols. II., III. and IV., are all dated
1658, but the general title-page in Vol. I. is 1659, as if, like White's
Shakespeare, the first volume was the last published. Contrasting a
_bijou_ edition with a magnificent one, it may be noted that in the
Elzevir the four words and two stops, "Moriar: die ergo verum," occupy
just an inch, exactly the space of the one word "compositis" in the
Baskerville; but the printing of each is in its way exquisite.

Just about a century after the Elzevirs, and contemporary with
Baskerville, an English publisher of the name of Sandby, who appears to
have been, as we should say, the University printer and bookseller at
Cambridge, projected a series of classics, which are highly prized on
large paper and not despised on small. I posse