Dr. Balguy's motto would not have suited our Doctor. For though books were among the comforts and enjoyments of his life from boyhood to old age, they never made him oblivious of its business. Like Ludovicus Bosch,—but remember I beseech you Ladies! his wig was not a caxon; and moreover that when he gave an early hour to his books, it was before the wig was put on, and that when he had a leisure evening for them, off went the wig, and a velvet or silken cap according to the season, supplied its place:—like Bosch, I say, when he was seated in his library,—but in no such conventual or collegiate apartment, and with no such assemblage of folios, quartos, and all inferior sizes, substantially bound, in venerable condition, and “in seemly order ranged;” nor with that atmospheric odour of antiquity and books which is more grateful to the olfactories of a student than the fumes of any pastille; but in a little room, with a ragged regiment upon his shelves, and an odour of the shop from below, in which rhubarb predominated, though it was sometimes overpowered by valerian, dear to cats, or assafœtida which sprung up, say the Turks, in Paradise, upon the spot where the Devil first set his foot:—like Bosch I say once more and without farther parenthesis, _περισσοὶ Παντες ὁι ᾿ν μεσῳ λογοι_,[1] like Bosch the Doctor never was weary with pursuing the game that might be started in a library. And though there was no forest at hand, there were some small preserves in the neighbourhood, over which he was at liberty to range. [Footnote 1: EURIPIDES.] Perhaps the reader's memory may serve him, where mine is just now at fault, and he may do for himself, what some future editor will do for me, that is supply the name of a man of letters who in his second childhood devised a new mode of book-hunting: he used to remove one of the books in his library from its proper place, and when he had forgotten as he soon did, where it had been put, he hunted the shelves till he found it. There will be some who see nothing more in this affecting anecdote than an exemplification of the vanity of human pursuits; but it is not refining too much, if we perceive in it a consolatory mark of a cheerful and philosophical mind, retaining its character even when far in decay. For no one who had not acquired a habit of happy philosophy would have extracted amusement from his infirmities, and made the failure of his memory serve to beguile some of those hours which could then no longer be profitably employed.