conjoined into a variety of elaborate patterns, were first used for stamping the covers with gilding; the leather was stained of various tints, and a beauty imparted to volumes which has not been surpassed by the most skilful modern workmen.] [Footnote 8: The Fuggers were a rich family of merchants, residing at Augsburg, carrying on trade with both the Indies, and from thence over Europe. They were ennobled by the Emperor Maximilian I. Their wealth often maintained the armies of Charles V.; and when Anthony Fugger received that sovereign at his house at Augsburg he is said, as a part of the entertainment, to have consumed in a fire of fragrant woods the bond of the emperor who condescended to become his guest.] [Footnote 9: A living poet thus enthusiastically describes the charms of a student's life among his books--"he has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world, and the glories of a modern one."--Longfellow's _Hyperion_.] THE BIBLIOMANIA. The preceding article is honourable to literature, yet even a passion for collecting books is not always a passion for literature. The BIBLIOMANIA, or the collecting an enormous heap of books without intelligent curiosity, has, since libraries have existed, infected weak minds, who imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves. Their motley libraries have been called the _madhouses of the Human mind_; and again, _the tomb of books_, when the possessor will not communicate them, and coffins them up in the cases of his library. It was facetiously observed, these collections are not without a _Lock on the Human Understanding_.[10] The BIBLIOMANIA never raged more violently than in our own times. It is fortunate that literature is in no ways injured by the follies of collectors, since though they preserve the worthless, they necessarily protect the good.[11] Some collectors place all their fame on the _view_ of a splendid library, where volumes, arrayed in all the pomp of lettering, silk linings, triple gold bands, and tinted leather, are locked up in wire cases, and secured from the vulgar hands of the _mere reader_, dazzling our eyes like eastern beauties peering through their jalousies! LA BRUYERE has touched on this mania with humour:--"Of such a collector, as soon as I enter his house, I am ready to faint on the staircase, from a strong smell of Morocco leather. In vain he shows me fine editions, gold leaves, Etruscan bindings, and naming them one after another, as if he were showing a gallery of pictures! a gallery, by-the-bye, which he seldom traverses when _alone_, for he rarely reads; but me he offers to conduct through it! I thank him for his politeness, and as little as himself care to visit the tan-house, which he calls his library."