e is always a caustic flavour even in his drops of
honey. This _censeur_ either affected to disdain the commendation, or
availed himself of it as a trick of policy. This was a trying situation
for an author, now proud of a great work, and who himself partook more
of the bull than of the lamb. He who winced at the scratch of an
epithet, beheld his perfect limbs bruised by erasures and mutilated by
cancels. This sort of troubles indeed was not unusual with Lenglet. He
had occupied his old apartment in the Bastile so often, that at the
sight of the officer who was in the habit of conducting him there,
Lenglet would call for his nightcap and snuff; and finish the work he
had then in hand at the Bastile, where, he told Jordan, that he made his
edition of Marot. He often silently restituted an epithet or a sentence
which had been condemned by the _censeur_, at the risk of returning once
more; but in the present desperate affair he took his revenge by
collecting the castrations into a quarto volume, which was sold
clandestinely. I find, by Jordan, in his _Voyage Litteraire_, who
visited him, that it was his pride to read these cancels to his friends,
who generally, but secretly, were of opinion that the decision of the
_censeur_ was not so wrong as the hardihood of Lenglet insisted on. All
this increased the public rumour, and raised the price of the cancels.
The craft and mystery of authorship was practised by Lenglet to
perfection; and he often exulted, not only in the subterfuges by which
he parried his _censeurs_, but in his bargains with his booksellers, who
were equally desirous to possess, while they half feared to enjoy, his
uncertain or his perilous copyrights. When the _unique_ copy of the
_Methode_, in its pristine state, before it had suffered any
dilapidations, made its appearance at the sale of the curious library of
the _censeur_ Gros de Boze, it provoked a Roxburgh competition, where
the collectors, eagerly outbidding each other, the price of this
uncastrated copy reached to 1500 livres; and even more extraordinary in
the history of French bibliography, than in our own. The curious may now
find all these cancel sheets, or _castrations_, preserved in one of
those works of literary history, to which the Germans have contributed
more largely than other European nations, and I have discovered that
even the erasures, or _bruises_, are amply furnished in another
bibliographical record.[150]

This _Methode_, after sev