to borrow Wordsworth's
'Excursion,' and Lamb being out, Burney took it, a high-handed
proceeding which involved the borrower in a blowing-up. Coleridge at
another time helped himself to Luther's 'Table-Talk,' and this also
called forth a great outcry. A copy of Chapman's Homer, which passed
through the hands of Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, eventually turned
up in one of Lilly's catalogues. This identical copy is noticed in an
account of Rydal Mount which appeared in the first volume of _Once a
Week_. Coleridge, of course, has made a number of notes in it, and in
one of these he describes the translation as 'an exquisite poem, spite
of its frequent and perverse quaintness and harshnesses, which are,
however, amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of
language.'

[Illustration: _William Hazlitt._]

The difference between a bibliophile and a bibliomaniac has been
described as between one who adorns his mind, and the other his
book-cases. Of the bibliomaniac as here characterized, we can suggest no
better type than Thomas Hill, the original of Poole's 'Paul Pry,' and of
Hull in Hook's novel, 'Gilbert Gurney.' Devoid as Hill was of
intellectual endowments, he managed to obtain and secure the friendship
of many eminent men--of Thomas Campbell, the poet, Matthews and Liston,
the comedians, Hook, Dubois, John and Leigh Hunt, James and Horace
Smith, John Taylor, editor of the _Sun_, Horace Twiss, Baron Field, Sir
George Rose, Barnes, subsequently editor of the _Times_, Cyrus Redding,
and many others. That he was kind-hearted and hospitable nearly everyone
has testified, and his literary parties at his Sydenham Tusculum were
quite important events, in spite of the ponderosity of his well-worn
stories. During the more acute stages of bibliomania in this country at
the latter part of the last century and the beginning of this, 'when the
Archaica, Heliconia, and Roxburghe Clubs were outbidding each other for
old black-letter works . . . when books, in short, which had only become
scarce because they were always worthless, were purchased upon the same
principle as that costly and valueless coin, a Queen Anne's farthing,'
Hill had been a constant collector of rare and other books which were in
demand. That he knew nothing of the insides of his books is very
certain; but he knew how much each copy would bring at an auction, and
how much it had brought at all previous sales. When the bibliomania had
reached its heig