I have noticed one peculiarity that distinguishes many admirers of the Noctes:  they seldom care to read anything else; in the Noctes they find a response to the demand of every mood.  It is much the same way with lovers of Father Prout.  Dr. O’Rell divides his adoration between old Kit North and the sage of Watergrass Hill.  To be bitten of either mania is bad enough; when one is possessed at the same time of a passion both for the Noctes and for the Reliques hopeless indeed is his malady!  Dr. O’Rell is so deep under the spell of crusty Christopher and the Corkonian pere that he not only buys every copy of the Noctes and of the Reliques he comes across, but insists upon giving copies of these books to everybody in his acquaintance.  I have even known him to prescribe one or the other of these works to patients of his.

I recall that upon one occasion, having lost an Elzevir at a book auction, I was afflicted with melancholia to such a degree that I had to take to my bed.  Upon my physician’s arrival he made, as is his custom, a careful inquiry into my condition and into the causes inducing it.  Finally, ``You are afflicted,’’ said Dr. O’Rell, ``with the megrims, which, fortunately, is at present confined to the region of the Pacchionian depressions of the sinister parietal.  I shall administer Father Prout’s `Rogueries of Tom Moore’ (pronounced More) and Kit North’s debate with the Ettrick Shepherd upon the subject of sawmon.  No other remedy will prove effective.’’

The treatment did, in fact, avail me, for within forty-eight hours I was out of bed, and out of the house; and, what is better yet, I picked up at a bookstall, for a mere song, a first edition of ``Special Providences in New England’’!

Never, however, have I wholly ceased to regret the loss of the Elzevir, for an Elzevir is to me one of the most gladdening sights human eye can rest upon.  In his life of the elder Aldus, Renouard says:  ``How few are there of those who esteem and pay so dearly for these pretty editions who know that the type that so much please them are the work of Francis Garamond, who cast them one hundred years before at Paris.’’

In his bibliographical notes (a volume seldom met with now) the learned William Davis records that Louis Elzevir was the first who observed the distinction between the v consonant and the u vowel, which distinction, however, had been recommended long before by Ramus and other writers, but had never been regarded.  There were five of these Elzevirs, viz.:  Louis, Bonaventure, Abraham, Louis, Jr., and Daniel.

A hundred years ago a famous bibliophile remarked:  ``The diminutiveness of a large portion, and the beauty of the whole, of the classics printed by the Elzevirs at Leyden and Amsterdam have long rendered them justly celebrated, and the prices they bear in public sales sufficiently demonstrate the estimation in which they are at present held.’’