"Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prêté,
Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gâté."
M. Paul Lacroix says he would not have lent a book to his own daughter. Once Lacroix asked for the loan of a work of little value. Pixérécourt frowned, and led his friend beneath the doorway, pointing to the motto. "Yes," said M. Lacroix, "but I thought that verse applied to every one but me." So Pixérécourt made him a present of the volume.
We cannot all imitate this "immense" but unamiable amateur. Therefore, bibliophiles have consoled themselves with the inventions of book-plates, quaint representations, perhaps heraldic, perhaps fanciful, of their claims to the possession of their own dear volumes. Mr. Leicester Warren and M. Poulet Malassis have written the history of these slender works of art, and each bibliophile may have his own engraved, and may formulate his own anathemas on people who borrow and restore not again. The process is futile, but may comfort the heart, like the curses against thieves which the Greeks were wont to scratch on leaden tablets, and deposit in the temple of Demeter. Each amateur can exercise his own taste in the design of a book-plate; and for such as love and collect rare editions of "Homer," I venture to suggest this motto, which may move the heart of
