for L200.’  Oh, those scoundrelly Charity Commissioners!  How impertinent has been their interference with the loving care and guardianship of the Lord’s property by His lawfully consecrated ministers!  By the side of these anthropoid apes, the genuine bookworm, the paper-eating insect, ravenous as he once was, has done comparatively little mischief.  Very little seems known of the creature, though the purchaser of Mr. Blades’s book becomes the owner of a life-size portrait of the miscreant in one, at all events, of his many shapes.  Mr. Birdsall, of Northampton, sent Mr. Blades, in 1879, by post, a fat little worm he had found in an old volume.  Mr. Blades did all, and more than all, that could be expected of a humane man to keep the creature alive, actually feeding him with fragments of Caxtons and seventeenth-century literature; but it availed not, for in three weeks the thing died, and as the result of a post-mortem was declared to be Aecophera pseudopretella.  Some years later Dr. Garnett, who has spent a long life obliging men of letters, sent Mr. Blades two Athenian worms, which had travelled to this country in a Hebrew Commentary; but, lovely and pleasant in their lives, in their deaths they were not far divided.  Mr. Blades, at least, mourned their loss.  The energy of bookworms, like that of men, greatly varies.  Some go much farther than others.  However fair they may start on the same folio, they end very differently.  Once upon a time 212 worms began to eat their way through a stout folio printed in the year 1477, by Peter Schoeffer, of Mentz.  It was an ungodly race they ran, but let me trace their progress.  By the time the sixty-first page was reached all but four had given in, either slinking back the way they came, or perishing en route.  By the time the eighty-sixth page had been reached but one was left, and he evidently on his last legs, for he failed to pierce his way through page 87.  At the other end of the same book another lot of worms began to bore, hoping, I presume, to meet in the middle, like the makers of submarine tunnels, but the last survivor of this gang only reached the sixty ninth page from the end.  Mr. Blades was of opinion that all these worms belonged to the Anobium pertinax.  Worms have fallen upon evil days, for, whether modern books are readable or not, they have long since ceased to be edible.  The worm’s instinct forbids him to ’eat the china clay, the bleaches, the plaster of Paris, the sulphate of barytes, the scores of adulterants now used to mix with the fibre.’  Alas, poor worm!  Alas, poor author!  Neglected by the Anobium pertinax, what chance is there of anyone, man or beast, a hundred years hence reaching his eighty-seventh page!

Time fails me to refer to bookbinders, frontispiece collectors, servants and children, and other enemies of books; but the volume I refer to is to be had of the booksellers, and is a pleasant volume, worthy of all commendation.  Its last words set me thinking; they are: