LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 293 



the names ; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of 

 its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gen- 

 tleman's library can be complete without ; we see the 

 Bpendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic 

 troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring 

 it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following 

 the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred 

 to us. But it must be the original foundling of the 

 book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baron- 

 etcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial- 

 flowers of some passion which the churchyard smothered 

 ere the Stuarts were yet discrowned, suggestive of the 

 trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes 

 from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn 

 and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, 

 perhaps, of M alone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, 

 doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. "When 

 it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. 

 The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared 

 with its battered prototype that could draw us with a 

 single hair of association. 



It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed 

 Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A 

 choice of old authors should be ^ florilegium^ and not a 

 botanist's hortus siccus, to which grasses are as important 

 as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maid- 

 enly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided 

 over the editing of the " Library." We should be in- 

 clined to surmise that the works to be reprinted had 

 been commonh^ suggested by gentlemen with whom they 

 were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their 

 own names should be signalized on the title-pages with 

 the suffix of Editor. The volumes already published 

 are : Increase Mather's " Remarkable Providences " ; 

 the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden ; the " Vis- 



