To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your borrowers of books—­those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes.  There is Comberbatch, matchless in his depredations!

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth knocked out—­(you are now with me in my little back study in Bloomsbury, reader!)—­with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side (like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, Opera Bonaventurae, choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,—­Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas), showed but as dwarfs,—­itself an Ascapart!—­that Comberbatch abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that “the title to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact ratio to the claimant’s powers of understanding and appreciating the same.”  Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves is safe?

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case—­two shelves from the ceiling—­scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser—­was whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial.  C. will hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to discover its beauties—­but so have I known a foolish lover to praise his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her off than himself.—­Just below, Dodsley’s dramas want their fourth volume, where Vittoria Corombona is!  The remainder nine are as distasteful as Priam’s refuse sons, when the Fates borrowed Hector.  Here stood the Anatomy of Melancholy, in sober state.—­There loitered the Complete Angler; quiet as in life, by some stream side.—­In yonder nook, John Buncle, a widower-volume, with “eyes closed,” I mourns his ravished mate.

One justice I must do my friend, that if he sometimes, like the sea, sweeps away a treasure, at another time, sea-like, he throws up as rich an equivalent to match it.  I have a small under-collection of this nature (my friend’s gathering’s in his various calls), picked up, he has forgotten at what odd places, and deposited with as little memory as mine.  I take in these orphans, the twice-deserted.  These proselytes of the gate are welcome as the true Hebrews.  There they stand in conjunction; natives, and naturalised.  The latter seem as little disposed to inquire out their true lineage as I am.—­I charge no warehouse-room for these deodands, nor shall ever put myself to the ungentlemanly trouble of advertising a sale of them to pay expenses.