abits were
indeed peculiar: not much to be envied or imitated, as they sometimes
betrayed the flights of a madman and sometimes the asperities of a
cynic. His attachments were warm but fickle both in choice and
duration. He would frequently part from one with whom he had lived on
terms of close intimacy, without any assignable cause, and his
enmities once fixed were immovable. There was indeed a kind of venom
in his antipathies, nor would he suffer his ears to be assailed or his
heart to relent in favour of those against whom he entertained
animosities, however capricious and unfounded. In one pursuit only was
he consistent: one object only did he woo with an inflexible
attachment; and that object was Dame Drama."

In Dibdin's Bibliomaniacal romance, "Philemon" is credited with the
following narrative concerning one who was probably a bibliomaniac in
all that the compound sense of the term implies:--

"You all know my worthy friend Ferdinand, a very _helluo librorum_.
It was on a warm evening in summer, about an hour after sunset, that
Ferdinand made his way towards a small inn or rather village alehouse
that stood on a gentle eminence skirted by a luxuriant wood. He
entered, oppressed with heat and fatigued, but observed, on walking up
to the porch 'smothered with honeysuckles,' as I think Cowper
expresses it, that everything around bore the character of neatness
and simplicity. The hollyhocks were tall and finely variegated in
blossom, the pinks were carefully tied up, and roses of all colours
and fragrance stood around in a compacted form like a body-guard
forbidding the rude foot of trespasser to intrude. Within, Ferdinand
found corresponding simplicity and comfort.

"The 'gude man' of the house was spending the evening with a
neighbour, but poached eggs and a rasher of bacon, accompanied with a
flagon of sparkling ale, gave our guest no occasion to doubt the
hospitality of the house on account of the absence of its master. A
little past ten, after reading some dozen pages in a volume of Sir
Edgerton Brydges's _Censura Literaria_, which he happened to carry
about him, and partaking pretty largely of the aforesaid eggs and ale,
Ferdinand called for his candle and retired to repose. His bedroom was
small but neat and airy; at one end and almost facing the window there
was a pretty large closet with the door open; but Ferdinand was too
fatigued to indulge any curiosity about what it might contain.

"He extinguishe