THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed to the Roman senators and , and thence to every corner of the earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria, over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's flood!  
A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures, what else is that but a pres-90-ence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the Temple of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of Pallas? Men have lived and died, like of the air, about this preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the world, with its outlook into the future. In the pathetic companionship of books lived Southey, long after their beauty was shut out from him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking comfort in the certainty that they had not him.
 
Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A book is verily a pitiful thing. It is broken down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. It appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention so long in the precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratifying to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges, "bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to you. What a precious, tribute! What delicater flattery, than to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some interest in it, in a condition which, à posteriori, does not suggest soap and water?
 
Certain books, which we handle for the first time, we cannot for the life of us lay down again, without on that edict forbidding envy and . We for such a bit of property. Our pocket seems predestined to it. We love it much better than its , who never had the spirit to give it cordial abuse. We would not endure that paper cover veiling its face.-92- We would scorn to divorce it from any dusty nook it chose to frequent. If we it, it would be a great deal happier. On the same principle, it requires an impulse of righteousness to return a book to the library with the proper . It is heart-rending to make over a used and shaken veteran to the of the public, anew. We know well enough that it shall ere we shall have the to borrow it a second time. Or we speculate on an inestimable octavo, readerless on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark is set over against it, and to deeper than Abyssinian when we loosen its clinging hold; and wonder if what a townsman and a wit called "bookaneering" would not be a pursuit for us to follow.
 
Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, are terrors to the eye. When we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens, we shall that the "Tale of Two Cities" (never to be named without reverence) shall get its just due of difference in size and hue,-93- from any of its admirable kindred. Who wants Beaumont and Fletcher in sombre cloth, or in anything out of folio, or Jeremy Taylor in red morocco and ? Prefaces are not ill things in their places; but what has a preface got to do with jolly, self-explanatory Pepys; or a table of notes with Walton the Angler; or a glossary—fancy the pert thing!—with Philip Sidney's ? Illustrations to some tales are insufferable. Picture a menagerie let loose on the seventh or eighth page of Rasselas, to bear out the diverting Johnsonian description of the kid bounding on the rocks,............