ypes--a theological book, in fact, treating of the types
of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me
that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an
acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The
latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might
have it and be d----d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a
word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means
rams: but the other competitor also declined the lot; he was a
compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly
devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr
Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolishing
the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive
influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the
matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of
sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run
among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I
think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of
which justified his high character for classification and arrangement by
binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips
with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering."
Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a
department in Bibliography, "Titres de livres qui ont induit en erreur
des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a
treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it
might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent
into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he
comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait place le
_Traite des Fluxions de Maclaurin_ avec les livres de pathologie,
prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathematiques."[41]

[Footnote 41: Dict. de Bibliologie, i. 391.]

Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a
title-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and constitute an
infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of
all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling
after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating
fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the