es Bibliographisches Lexicon, or in Debure, Clement, Osmont, or
the Repertorium Bibliographicum,--such proclamation is immediate notice
to many fortunate possessors who were no more aware of the value of
their dingy-looking volumes than Monsieur Jourdain knew himself to be in
the habitual daily practice of talking prose.

So are we brought again back to the conclusion that the true book-hunter
must not be a follower of any abstract external rules, but must have an
inward sense and literary taste. It is not absolutely that a book is
rare, or that it is run after, that must commend it to him, but
something in the book itself. Hence the relics which he snatches from
ruin will have some innate merits to recommend them. They will not be of
that unhappy kind which nobody has desired to possess for their own
sake, and nobody ever will. Something there will be of original genius,
or if not that, yet of curious, odd, out-of-the-way information, or of
quaintness of imagination, or of characteristics pervading some class
of men, whether a literary or a polemical,--something, in short, which
people desirous of information will some day or other be anxious to
read,--such are the volumes which it is desirable to save from
annihilation, that they may find their place at last in some of the
great magazines of the world's literary treasures.

Librarians.

It will often be fortunate for these great institutions if they obtain
the services of the hunter himself, along with his spoils of the chase.
The leaders in the German wars often found it an exceedingly sound
policy to subsidise into their own service some captain of free lances,
who might have been a curse to all around him. Your great
game-preservers sometimes know the importance of taking the most
notorious poacher in the district into pay as a keeper. So it is
sometimes of the nature of the book-hunter, if he be of the genial sort,
and free of some of the more vicious peculiarities of his kind, to make
an invaluable librarian. Such an arrangement will sometimes be found to
be like mercy twice blessed,--it blesseth him that gives and him that
takes. The imprisoned spirit probably finds freedom at last, and those
purchases and accumulations which, to the private purse, were profuse
and culpable recklessness, may become veritable duty; while the wary
outlook and the vigilant observation, which before were only leading a
poor victim into temptation, may come forth as commend