As for the books, the 'Select Collection' that the unsympathetic stock-takers turned over so irreverently with their feet as they lay in dusty ranges on the floor, it must be feared that worthy Mr. Good's description of them as 'Scarce, Curious and Valuable' is more creditable to his business traditions than his literary insight. Goldsmith was scarcely a book-lover in the sense in which that term is now used. The man who, as Hawkins relates, could tear half-a-dozen leaves out of a volume to save himself the trouble of transcription,--the man who underscored objectionable passages with his thumb-nail, as he once did to a new poem that belonged to Reynolds--was _not_ a genuine _amateur du livre_. They were a 'speculative lot' in all probability, the 'Brick Court Library;' and no doubt bore about them visibly the bumps and bruises of their transit 'in two returned post chaises' to the remote farm at Hyde, where their owner laboured at his vast 'Animated Nature.' Many of them had manifestly been collected to that end. Hill's 'Fossils,' 1748; Pliny's 'Historia Naturalis,' 1752; Gessner and Aldrovandus 'De Quadrupedibus;' Gouan's 'Histoire des Poissons,' 1770; Bohadsch's 'De Animalibus Marinis,' 1761; De Geer's 'Histoire des Insectes,' 1771, must all plainly have belonged to that series of purchases for the nonce which, he says in his preface, had so severely taxed his overburdened resources. In the classics he was fairly well equipped; and, as might be expected, he had many of the British poets, not to mention two copies of that indispensable manual, Mr. Edward Bysshe his treatise of the rhyming art. But it is in French literature generally, and in French minstrels and playwrights in particular, that his store is richest. He has the 'Encyclopédie,' the 'Dictionnaire' and 'Recueil d'Anecdotes,' the 'Dictionnaire Littéraire,' the 'Dictionnaire Critique, Pittoresque et Sentencieux,' the 'Dictionnaire Gentilhomme;' he has many of the _ana_--'Parrhasiana,' 'Ducatiana,' 'Nau-deana,' 'Patiniana,' although, oddly enough, there is no copy of the 'Ménagiana,' which not only supplied him with that ancient ballad of 'Monsieur de la Palice' out of which grew 'Madam Blaize,' but also with the little poem of Bernard de la Monnoye, which he paraphrased so brightly in the well-known stanzas beginning:= ````'Say, cruel Iris, pretty rake, `````Dear mercenary beauty, ````What annual offering shall I make, `````Expressive of my duty?'=