celebration, could find few men that had so much as seen a book-worm, much less heard him utter his native wood-notes wild. Yet, in his "Enemies of Books," he describes some rare encounters with the worm. Dirty books, damp books, dusty books, and books that the owner never opens, are most exposed to the enemy; and "the worm, the proud worm, is the conqueror still," as a didactic poet sings, in an ode on man's mortality. As we have quoted Mentzelius, it may not be amiss to give D'Alembert's theory of book-worms: "I believe," he says, "that a little beetle lays her eggs in books in August, thence is hatched a mite, like the cheese-mite, which devours books merely because it is compelled to gnaw its way out into the air." Book-worms like the paste which binders employ, but D'Alembert adds that they cannot endure absinthe. Mr. Blades finds too that they disdain to devour our adulterate modern paper.
"Say, shall I sing of rats," asked Grainger, when reading to Johnson his epic, the "Sugar-cane." "No," said the Doctor; and though rats are the foe of the bibliophile, at least as much as of the sugarplanter, we do not propose to sing of them. M. Fertiault has done so already in "Les Sonnets d'un Bibliophile," where the reader must be pleased with the beautiful etchings of rats devouring an illuminated MS., and battening on
