88 Bibliomania. 



thousand volumes, and the other great names entitled to the descrip- 

 tion of Bibliomaniac. We must not forget, however, Sir Richard 

 Whittington, of feline fame, who gave £400 to found the library of 

 Christ's Hospital, London. The fair sex, good, bad and indifferent, 

 have been lovers of books, or founders of libraries; witness the dis- 

 tinguished names of Lady Jane Gray. ( 'atherine tie Medicis, and Diane 

 de Poictiers. It only remains to speak of the great opium-eater, who 

 was a sort of literary ghoul, famed for borrowing books and never 

 returning them, and whose library was thus made up of the enforced 

 contributions of friends — for who would have dared, refuse the loan 

 of a book to Thomas de Quincey ? The name of the unhappy man 

 would have descended to us with that of the incendiary of the Temple 

 of Diana at Ephesus. But the great Thomas was recklessly careless 

 and slovenly in his use of books ; and Burton, in the Book-hunter, 

 tells us that " he once gave in copy written on the edges of a tall octavo 

 Sohinium Scipionis, and as he did not obliterate the original matter, 

 the printer was rather puzzled, and made a funny jumble between the 

 letter-press Latin and the manuscript English." We. seriously fear 

 that with him must be ranked the gentle Elia, who said : "A book 

 reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us 

 that we know the topography of its blots and. dog's-ears, and can 

 trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins, or 

 over a pipe, which I think is the maximum." And yet a great degree 

 of slovenliness may be excused in Charles, because, according to Leigh 

 Hunt, he once gave a kiss to an old folio Chapman's Homer, and when 

 asked how he knew his books one from the other, for hardly any were 

 lettered, he answered: "How does a shepherd know his sheep?" 

 The love of books displayed by the sensual Henry, and the pugnacious 

 Junot, is not more remarkable than that of the epicurean and sumptu- 

 ous Lucullus, to whom Pompey, when sick, having been directed by 

 his physician to eat a thrush for dinner, and learning from his servants 

 that in summer time thrushes were not to be found anywhere but in 

 Lucullus' fattening coops, refused to be indebted for his meal, observ- 

 ing: « So if Lucullus had not been an epicure, Pompey had not lived." 

 Of him the veracious Plutarch says : " His furnishing a library, how- 

 ever, deserved praise and record, for he collected very many and choice 

 manuscripts ; and the use they were put to was even more magnificent 

 than the purchase, the library being always open, and the walks and 

 reading-rooms about it free to all Greeks, whose delight it was to leave 

 their other occupations and hasten thither as to the habitation of the 



