e Imitatione Christi" or not, one always likes
him for his love of books. Perhaps he was the only book-hunter that ever
wrought a miracle. "Other signs and miracles which he was wont to tell
as having happened at the prayer of an unnamed person, are believed to
have been granted to his own, such as the sudden reappearance of a lost
book in his cell." Ah, if Faith, that moveth mountains, could only bring
back the books we have lost, the books that have been borrowed from us!
But we are a faithless generation.

From a collector so much older and better experienced in misfortune than
yourself, you ask for some advice on the sport of book-hunting. Well, I
will give it; but you will not take it. No; you will hunt wild, like
young pointers before they are properly broken.

Let me suppose that you are "to middle fortune born," and that you cannot
stroll into the great book-marts and give your orders freely for all that
is rich and rare. You are obliged to wait and watch an opportunity, to
practise that maxim of the Stoic's, "Endure and abstain." Then abstain
from rushing at every volume, however out of the line of your literary
interests, which seems to be a bargain. Probably it is not even a
bargain; it can seldom be cheap to you, if you do not need it, and do not
mean to read it.

Not that any collector reads all his books. I may have, and indeed do
possess, an Aldine Homer and Caliergus his Theocritus; but I prefer to
study the authors in a cheap German edition. The old editions we buy
mainly for their beauty, and the sentiment of their antiquity and their
associations.

But I don't take my own advice. The shelves are crowded with books quite
out of my line--a whole small library of tomes on the pastime of curling,
and I don't curl; and "God's Revenge against Murther," though (so far) I
am not an assassin. Probably it was for love of Sir Walter Scott, and
his mention of this truculent treatise, that I purchased it. The full
title of it is "The Triumphs of God's Revenge against the Crying and
Execrable Sinne of (willful and premeditated) Murther." Or rather there
is nearly a column more of title, which I spare you. But the pictures
are so bad as to be nearly worth the price. Do not waste your money,
like your foolish adviser, on books like that, or on "Les Sept Visions de
Don Francisco de Quevedo," published at Cologne, in 1682.

Why in the world did I purchase this, with the title-page showing Quevedo
a