ave undergone the last insult short
of the trunkmaker's or the paper-mills, and see what they are. There may
be something worth looking at in one or the other of 'em.

Now do you know it was with a kind of a tremor that I untied the package
and looked at these three unfortunates, too humble for the companionable
dime to recognize as its equal in value. The same sort of feeling you
know if you ever tried the Bible-and-key, or the Sortes Virgiliance.
I think you will like to know what the three books were which had been
bestowed upon me gratis, that I might tear away one of the covers of the
one that best matched my Cicero, and give it to the binder to cobble my
crippled volume with.

The Master took the three books from a cupboard and continued.

No. I. An odd volume of The Adventurer. It has many interesting things
enough, but is made precious by containing Simon Browne's famous
Dedication to the Queen of his Answer to Tindal's "Christianity as old
as the Creation." Simon Browne was the Man without a Soul. An excellent
person, a most worthy dissenting minister, but lying under a strange
delusion.

Here is a paragraph from his Dedication:

"He was once a man; and of some little name; but of no worth, as his
present unparalleled case makes but too manifest; for by the immediate
hand of an avenging GOD, his very thinking substance has, for more than
seven years, been continually wasting away, till it is wholly perished
out of him, if it be not utterly come to nothing. None, no, not the
least remembrance of its very ruins, remains, not the shadow of an
idea is left, nor any sense that so much as one single one, perfect or
imperfect, whole or diminished, ever did appear to a mind within him, or
was perceived by it."

Think of this as the Dedication of a book "universally allowed to be
the best which that controversy produced," and what a flood of light it
pours on the insanities of those self-analyzing diarists whose morbid
reveries have been so often mistaken for piety! No. I. had something
for me, then, besides the cover, which was all it claimed to have worth
offering.

No. II. was "A View of Society and Manners in Italy." Vol. III. By
John Moore, M. D. (Zeluco Moore.) You know his pleasant book. In
this particular volume what interested me most, perhaps, was the very
spirited and intelligent account of the miracle of the liquefaction of
the blood of Saint Januarius, but it gave me an hour's mighty agreeable
read