re of a
horse indifferently. He has been in Britain nearly three years.

"Any person that inclines to purchase him may have him for L40. He
belongs to Captain ABERCROMBIE at Broughton.

"This advertisement not to be repeated."

There was at that time probably more of this description of property in
Britain than in Virginia. It had become fashionable, as one may see in
Hogarth. Such advertisements--they were abundant--might furnish an apt
text on which a philosophical historian could speculate on the probable
results to this country, had not Mansfield gone to the root of the
matter by denying all property in slaves.

So much for the chances which still remain to the devourer of books, if,
after having consumed all the solid volumes within his reach, he should
be reduced to shreds and patches of literature,--like a ship's crew
having resort to shoe-leather and the sweepings of the locker.

Pretenders.

But now to return to the point whence we started--the disposition, and
almost the necessity, which the true enthusiast in the pursuit feels to
look into the soul, as it were, of his book, after he has got possession
of the body. When he is not of the omnivorous kind, but one who desires
to possess a particular book, and, having got it, dips into the contents
before committing it to permanent obscurity on his loaded shelves, there
is, as we have already seen, a certain thread of intelligent
association linking the items of his library to each other. The
collector knows what he wants, and why he wants it, and that _why_ does
not entirely depend on exteriors, though he may have his whim as to that
also.

He is a totally different being from the animal who goes to all sales,
and buys every book that is cheap. That is a painfully low and
grovelling type of the malady; and, fortunately for the honour of
literature, the bargain-hunter who suffers under it is not in general a
special votary of books, but buys all bargains that come in his
way--clocks, tables, forks, spoons, old uniforms, gas-meters, magic
lanterns, galvanic batteries, violins (warranted real Cremonas, from
their being smashed to pieces), classical busts (with the same testimony
to their genuineness), patent coffee-pots, crucibles, amputating knives,
wheel-barrows, retorts, cork-screws, boot-jacks, smoke-jacks,
melon-frames, bath-chairs, and hurdy-gurdies. It has been said that
once, a coffin, made too short for its tenant, being