of Philolaus, while Aristotle paid nearly thrice the sum for a few books that had been in the library of Speusippus. Did not a Latin philosopher go great lengths in a laudable anxiety to purchase an Odyssey "as old as Homer," and what would not Cicero, that great collector, have given for the Ascraean editio princeps of Hesiod, scratched on mouldy old plates of lead? Perhaps research may find an original edition of the "Iliad" at Delphi; but of all early copies none seems so attractive as that engraved on the leaden plates which Pausanias saw at Ascra. Then, in modern times, what "great allies" has the collector, what brethren in book-hunting? The names are like the catalogue with which Villon fills his "Ballade des Seigneurs du Temps Jadis." A collector was "le preux Charlemaigne" and our English Alfred. The Kings of Hungary, as Mathias Corvinus; the Kings of France, and their queens, and their mistresses, and their lords, were all amateurs. So was our Henry VIII., and James I., who "wished he could be chained to a shelf in the Bodleian." The middle age gives us Richard de Bury, among ecclesiastics, and the Renaissance boasts Sir Thomas More, with that "pretty fardle of books, in the small type of Aldus," which he carried for a freight to the people of Utopia. Men of the world, like Bussy Rabutin, queens like
