ns.

_Montesinos_.--Many, indeed; and in many instances most disastrous ones.
Not a few of these volumes have been cast up from the wreck of the family
or convent libraries during the late Revolution. Yonder "Acta Sanctorum"
belonged to the Capuchins, at Ghent. This book of St. Bridget's
Revelations, in which not only all the initial letters are illuminated,
but every capital throughout the volume was coloured, came from the
Carmelite Nunnery at Bruges. That copy of Alain Chartier, from the
Jesuits' College at Louvain; that _Imago Primi Saeculi Societatis_, from
their college at Ruremond. Here are books from Colbert's library, here
others from the Lamoignon one. And here are two volumes of a work, not
more rare than valuable for its contents, divorced, unhappily, and it is
to be feared for ever, from the one which should stand between them; they
were printed in a convent at Manila, and brought from thence when that
city was taken by Sir William Draper; they have given me, perhaps, as
many pleasurable hours (passed in acquiring information which I could not
otherwise have obtained), as Sir William spent years of anxiety and
vexation in vainly soliciting the reward of his conquest.

About a score of the more out-of-the-way works in my possession belonged
to some unknown person, who seems carefully to have gleaned the
bookstalls a little before and after the year 1790. He marked them with
certain ciphers, always at the end of the volume. They are in various
languages, and I never found his mark in any book that was not worth
buying, or that I should not have bought without that indication to
induce me. All were in ragged condition, and having been dispersed, upon
the owner's death probably, as of no value, to the stalls they had
returned; and there I found this portion of them just before my old
haunts as a book-hunter in the metropolis were disforested, to make room
for the improvements between Westminster and Oxford Road. I have
endeavoured without success to discover the name of their former
possessor. He must have been a remarkable man, and the whole of his
collection, judging of it by that part which has come into my hands, must
have been singularly curious. A book is the more valuable to me when I
know to whom it has belonged, and through what "scenes and changes" it
has passed.

_Sir Thomas More_.--You would have its history recorded in the fly-leaf
as carefully as the pedigree of a racehorse is preserv