To one like Elia, whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers
than closed in iron coffers, there is a class of alienators more
formidable than that which I have touched upon; I mean your _borrowers
of books_--those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry
of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. There is Comberbatch,
matchless in his depredations!

That foul gap in the bottom shelf facing you, like a great eye-tooth
knocked out--(you are now with me in my little back study in
Bloomsbury, reader!)--with the huge Switzer-like tomes on each side
(like the Guildhall giants, in their reformed posture, guardant of
nothing) once held the tallest of my folios, _Opera Bonaventuræ_,
choice and massy divinity, to which its two supporters (school
divinity also, but of a lesser calibre,--Bellarmine, and Holy Thomas),
showed but as dwarfs,--itself an Ascapart!--_that_ Comberbatch
abstracted upon the faith of a theory he holds, which is more easy, I
confess, for me to suffer by than to refute, namely, that "the title
to property in a book (my Bonaventure, for instance), is in exact
ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the
same." Should he go on acting upon this theory, which of our shelves
is safe?

The slight vacuum in the left-hand case--two shelves from the
ceiling--scarcely distinguishable but by the quick eye of a loser--was
whilom the commodious resting-place of Brown on Urn Burial. C. will
hardly allege that he knows more about that treatise than I do, who
introduced it to him, and was indeed the first (of the moderns) to
discover its beauties--but so have I known a foolish lover to praise
his mistress in the presence of a rival more qualified to carry her