portion of the victims of his
malady, was deemed a heavy scandal. He was suspected of reading his own
books--that is to say, when he could get at them; for there are those
who may still remember his rather shamefaced apparition of an evening,
petitioning, somewhat in the tone with which an old schoolfellow down in
the world requests your assistance to help him to go to York to get an
appointment--petitioning for the loan of a volume of which he could not
deny that he possessed numberless copies lurking in divers parts of his
vast collection. This reputation of reading the books in his collection,
which should be sacred to external inspection solely, is, with a certain
school of book-collectors, a scandal, such as it would be among a
hunting set to hint that a man had killed a fox. In the dialogues, not
always the most entertaining, of Dibdin's Bibliomania, there is this
short passage: "'I will frankly confess,' rejoined Lysander, 'that I am
an arrant _bibliomaniac_--that I love books dearly--that the very sight,
touch, and mere perusal----' 'Hold, my friend,' again exclaimed
Philemon; 'you have renounced your profession--you talk of _reading_
books--do _bibliomaniacs_ ever _read_ books?'"

Yes, the Archdeacon read books--he devoured them; and he did so to full
prolific purpose. His was a mind enriched with varied learning, which he
gave forth with full, strong, easy flow, like an inexhaustible perennial
spring coming from inner reservoirs, never dry, yet too capacious to
exhibit the brawling, bubbling symptoms of repletion. It was from a
majestic heedlessness of the busy world and its fame that he got the
character of indolence, and was set down as one who would leave no
lasting memorial of his great learning. But when he died, it was not
altogether without leaving a sign; for from the casual droppings of his
pen has been preserved enough to signify to many generations of students
in the walk he chiefly affected how richly his mind was stored, and how
much fresh matter there is in those fields of inquiry where compilers
have left their dreary tracks, for ardent students to cultivate into a
rich harvest. In him truly the bibliomania may be counted among the many
illustrations of the truth so often moralised on, that the highest
natures are not exempt from human frailty in some shape or other.

Let us now summon the shade of another departed victim--Fitzpatrick
Smart, Esq. He, too, through a long life, had been a vigilant