Bibliomania; or Book-Madness: A Bibliographical RomanceDibdin, Thomas Frognall
History
Bibliomania; or Book-Madness: A Bibliographical Romance
Dibdin, Thomas Frognall
Bibliography; Bibliomania; Book collecting; Books -- Prices
He grew dissatisfied and melancholy. He scrambled through his terms;
took his degree; celebrated his anniversary of twenty-one, by
drenching his native village in ale which had been brewed at his
birth; added two wings to his father's house; launched out into coin
and picture collecting; bought fine books with fine bindings; then
sold all his coins and pictures; and, at the age of twenty-five, began
to read, and think, and act for himself.
At this crisis, he became acquainted with the circle which has already
been introduced to the reader's attention; and to which circle the
same reader may think it high time now to return.
Upon breaking up for THE DRAWING ROOM, it was amusing to behold the
vivacity of Lisardo; who, leaping about Lysander, and expressing his
high gratification at the discourse he had already heard, and his
pleasure at what he hoped yet to hear, reminded us of what Boswell has
said of Garrick, who used to flutter about Dr. Johnson, and try to
soften his severity by a thousand winning gestures.
The doors were opened; and we walked into Lorenzo's Drawing Room. The
reader is not to figure to himself a hundred fantastical and fugitive
pieces of furniture, purchased at Mr. Oakley's, and set off with
curtains, carpet, and looking-glasses--at a price which would have
maintained a country town of seven hundred poor with bread and soup
during the hardest winter--the reader will not suppose that a man of
Lorenzo's taste, who called books his best wealth, would devote two
thousand pounds to such idle trappings; which in the course of three
years, at farthest, would lose their comfort by losing their fashion.
But he will suppose that elegance and propriety were equally consulted
by our host.
Accordingly, a satin-wood book-case of 14 feet in width and 11 in
height, ornamented at the top with a few chaste Etruscan vases--a
light blue carpet, upon which were depicted bunches of grey roses,
shadowed in brown--fawn-coloured curtains, relieved with yellow silk
and black velvet borders--alabaster lamps shedding their soft light
upon small marble busts--and sofas and chairs corresponding with the
curtains--(and upon which a visitor might sit without torturing the
nerves of the owner of them) these, along with some genuine pictures
of Wouvermans, Berghem, and Rysdael, and a few other (subordinate)
ornaments, formed the furniture of Lorenzo's Drawing Room. As it was
_en suite_ with the library, which was fitted up in a grave style or
character, the contrast was sufficiently pleasing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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