ng into dust "the god of his
idolatry," the Dagon of his devotion, is sufficient to terrify the
bibliographer, who views only a blind Samson pulling down the pillars of
his temple!

This future universal inundation of books, this superfluity of
knowledge, in billions and trillions, overwhelms the imaginnation! It
is now about four hundred years since the art of multiplying books has
been discovered; and an arithmetician has attempted to calculate the
incalculable of these four ages of typography, which he discovers have
actually produced 3,641,960 works! Taking each work at three volumes,
and reckoning only each impression to consist of three hundred copies,
which is too little, the actual amount from the presses of Europe will
give to 1816, 3,277,764,000 volumes! each of which being an inch thick,
if placed on a line, would cover 6069 leagues! Leibnitz facetiously
maintained that such would be the increase of literature, that future
generations would find whole cities insufficient to contain their
libraries. We are, however, indebted to the patriotic endeavours of our
grocers and trunkmakers, alchemists of literature! they annihilate the
gross bodies without injuring the finer spirits. We are still more
indebted to that neglected race, the bibliographers!

The science of books, for so bibliography is sometimes dignified, may
deserve the gratitude of a public, who are yet insensible of the useful
zeal of those book-practitioners, the nature of whose labours is yet so
imperfectly comprehended. Who is this vaticinator of the uselessness of
public libraries? Is he a _bibliognoste_, or a _bibliographe_, or a
_bibliomane_, or a _bibliophile_, or a _bibliotaphe_? A
_bibliothecaire_, or a _bibliopole_, the prophet cannot be; for the
_bibliothecaire_ is too delightfully busied among his shelves, and the
_bibliopole_ is too profitably concerned in furnishing perpetual
additions to admit of this hyperbolical terror of annihilation![232]

Unawares, we have dropped into that professional jargon which was
chiefly forged by one who, though seated in the "scorner's chair," was
the Thaumaturgus of books and manuscripts. The Abbe Rive had acquired a
singular taste and curiosity, not without a fermenting dash of singular
_charlatanerie_, in bibliography: the little volumes he occasionally put
forth are things which but few hands have touched. He knew well, that
for some books to be noised about, they should not be read: this was one
o