inquiries after books, in these terms:
"There is but one copy of that book in the world. It is in the Grand
Seignior's library at Constantinople, and is the seventh book in the
second shelf on the right hand as you go in." His faculties were, like
those of all great men, self-born and self-trained. So little was the
impoverished soil in which he passed his infancy congenial to his
pursuits in after life, that it was not within the parental intentions
to teach him to read, and his earliest labours were in the shop of a
greengrocer. Had his genius run on natural science, he might have fed it
here, but it was his felicity and his fortune to be transferred to the
shop of a patronising bookseller. Here he drank in an education such as
no academic forcing machinery could ever infuse. He devoured books, and
the printed leaves became as necessary to his existence as the
cabbage-leaves to the caterpillars which at times made their not welcome
appearance in the abjured greengrocery. Like these verdant reptiles,
too, he became assimilated to the food he fed on, insomuch that he was
in a manner hot-pressed, bound, marble-topped, lettered, and shelved. He
could bear nothing but books around him, and would allow no space for
aught else; his furniture, according to repute, being limited to two
chairs, the second of which was admitted in order that the two together
might serve as a bed.

Another enthusiast of the same kind was Adrien Baillet, the author, or,
more properly speaking, the compiler, of the Jugemens des Savans. Some
copies of this book, which has a quantity of valuable matter scattered
through it, have Baillet's portrait, from which his calm scholarly
countenance looks genially forth, with this appropriate motto, "Dans une
douce solitude, a l'abri du mensonge et de la vanite, j'adoptai la
critique, et j'en fis mon etude, pour decouvrir la verite." Him,
struggling with poverty, aggravated with a thirst for books, did
Lamoignon the elder place at the head of his library, thus at once
pasturing him in clover. When the patron told his friend, Hermant, of
his desire to find a librarian possessed of certain fabulous
qualifications for the duty, his correspondent said, "I will bring the
very man to you;" and Baillet, a poor, frail, attenuated, diseased
scholar, was produced. His kind patron fed him up, so far as a man who
could not tear himself from his books, unless when nature became
entirely exhausted, could be fed up. The sta