and unless he is inclined to
part with this, which is very inconvenient, or risk the injury of his
best copy, he must needs have a third at the service of his friends."

This last necessity is the key-note to Heber's popularity: he was a
liberal and kindly man, and though, like Wolsey, he was unsatisfied in
getting, yet, like him, in bestowing he was most princely. Many scholars
and authors obtained the raw material for their labours from his
transcendent stores. These, indeed, might be said less to be personal
to himself than to be a feature in the literary geography of Europe.
"Some years ago," says the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine, "he built
a new library at his house at Hodnet, which is said to be full. His
residence at Pimlico, where he died, is filled, like Magliabechi's at
Florence, with books, from the top to the bottom--every chair, every
table, every passage containing piles of erudition. He had another house
in York Street, leading to Great James's Street, Westminster, laden from
the ground-floor to the garret with curious books. He had a library in
the High Street, Oxford, an immense library at Paris, another at
Antwerp, another at Brussels, another at Ghent, and at other places in
the Low Countries and in Germany."

[Illustration]

_PART II.--HIS FUNCTIONS._

The Hobby.

Having devoted the preceding pages to the diagnosis of the book-hunter's
condition, or, in other words, to the different shapes which the
phenomena peculiar to it assume, I now propose to offer some account of
his place in the dispensations of Providence, which will probably show
that he is not altogether a mischievous or a merely useless member of
the human family, but does in reality, however unconsciously to himself,
minister in his own peculiar way to the service both of himself and
others. This is to be a methodical discourse, and therefore to be
divided and subdivided, insomuch that, taking in the first place his
services to himself, this branch shall be subdivided into the advantages
which are purely material and those which are properly intellectual.

And, first, of material advantages. Holding it to be the inevitable doom
of fallen man to inherit some frailty or failing, it would be difficult,
had he a Pandora's box-ful to pick and choose among, to find one less
dangerous or offensive. As the judicious physician informs the patient
suffering under some cutaneous or other external torture, that the
poison lay de