tradition de l'Eglise, Tirée des Conciles et des saints Pères," published by Lovys Billaine in 1660, especially when the tract is a clean copy, arrayed in a decorous black morocco.
These are but a few common examples, chosen from a meagre little library, a "twopenny treasure-house," but they illustrate, on a minute scale, the nature of the collector's passion,—the character of his innocent pleasures. He occasionally lights on other literary relics of a more personal character than mere first editions. A lucky collector lately bought Shelley's copy of Ossian, with the poet's signature on the title-page, in Booksellers' Row. Another possesses a copy of Foppens's rare edition of Petrarch's "Le Sage Resolu contre l'une et l'autre Fortune," which once belonged to Sir Hudson Lowe, the gaoler of Napoleon, and may have fortified, by its stoical maxims, the soul of one who knew the extremes of either fortune, the captive of St. Helena. But the best example of a book, which is also a relic, is the "Imitatio Christi," which belonged to J. J. Rousseau. Let M. Tenant de Latour, lately the happy owner of this possession, tell his own story of his treasure: It was in 1827 that M. de Latour was walking on the quai of the Louvre. Among the volumes in a shop, he noticed a shabby little copy of the "Imitatio Christi." M. de Latour, like other
