As to the sum total, nothing can be more precise: as to the items, could the list of them be but produced, this would be indeed a treasure. As to the denomination _magical_, given in the title of this section to those books, styled books "_of curious arts_,"--in the text, short is the only apology that need be made for it. Of the number of those _curious arts_ could not, most assuredly, have been any of the arts included at present under the name of _fine arts_; of the character of the _arts_ here designated by the appellation of _curious_, a sufficient indication is afforded by the story, by which the mention of them is, as above, immediately preceded. They were the arts, by which effects were undertaken to be produced, such as the self-constituted Apostle undertook to produce by so much more simple means. How vast soever were the collection, what would be the value of it,--the whole taken together,--when so much more than could be done by everything which it professed to teach, could be done by about a score or a dozen words, on the single condition, that the lips by which they were uttered were properly commissioned lips, not to speak of the still more simple operation of the touch of a used handkerchief? Of the state of art and science in the wake of the great temple of Diana, the representation here given is of itself no small curiosity. Books of curious arts--all of them arts of imposture--books, employed, all of them, in teaching the most secret of all secrets--books of this description, so well known to all men, as to bear a market-price! a market-price, so well known to all men, as if it were the price of bread and butcher's meat: and, in the single town of Ephesus, these books so numerous,--such the multitude or the value,--or rather the multitude as well as value, of them taken in the aggregate, that the price, that had been given for such of them as were thus given up, and which are only part, and, as it should seem by the word _many_, not the larger part, of the whole number, of those, which, at that same place, were at that same time in existence,--was, upon summing up, found actually to amount, so we are required to believe, to that vast sum.