very touching way. The friends of the divine are requested to return
"Colenso on the Pentateuch," and another volume which they have borrowed.
The advertisement has none of that irony which finds play in the notice,
"The Gentleman who took a brown silk umbrella, with gold crutch handle,
and left a blue cotton article, is asked to restore the former." The
advertiser seems to speak more in sorrow and in hope than in anger, and
we sincerely trust that he may get his second volume of "Colenso on the
Pentateuch." But if he does, he will be more fortunate than most owners
of books. Pitiful are their thoughts as they look round their shelves.
The silent friends of their youth, the acquisitions of their mature age,
have departed. Even popular preachers cannot work miracles, like Thomas
a Kempis, and pray back their borrowed volumes. As the Rev. Robert
Elsmere says, "Miracles do not happen"--at least, to book-collectors.

"Murray sighs o'er Pope and Swift, and many a treasure more," said
Cowper, when Lord Mansfield's house was burned, and we have all had
experience of the sorrows of Murray. Even people who are not
bibliophiles, nay, who class bibliophiles with "blue-and-white young
men," know that a book in several volumes loses an unfair proportion of
its usefulness, and almost all its value, when one or more of the volumes
are gone. Grote's works, or Mill's, Carlyle's, or Milman's, seem nothing
when they are incomplete. It always happens, somehow, that the very tome
you want to consult is that which has fallen among borrowers. Even
Panurge, who praised the race of borrowers so eloquently, could scarcely
have found an excuse for the borrowers of books.

"Tel est le triste sort de tout livre prete,
Souvent il est perdu, toujours il est gate."

"Often lost, always spoiled," said Charles Nodier, "such is the fate of