but the sentiment after all is the main thing.

Other books come to be relics in another way. They are the copies
which belonged to illustrious people,--to the famous collectors who
make a kind of catena (a golden chain of bibliophiles) through the
centuries since printing was invented. There are Grolier (1479-
1565),--not a bookbinder, as an English newspaper supposed (probably
when Mr. Sala was on his travels),--De Thou (1553-1617), the great
Colbert, the Duc de la Valliere (1708-1780), Charles Nodier, a man
of yesterday, M. Didot, and the rest, too numerous to name. Again,
there are the books of kings, like Francis I., Henri III., and Louis
XIV. These princes had their favourite devices. Nicolas Eve,
Padeloup, Derome, and other artists arrayed their books in morocco,-
-tooled with skulls, cross-bones, and crucifixions for the
voluptuous pietist Henri III., with the salamander for Francis I.,
and powdered with fleurs de lys for the monarch who "was the State."
There are relics also of noble beauties. The volumes of Marguerite
d'Angouleme are covered with golden daisies. The cipher of Marie
Antoinette adorns too many books that Madame du Barry might have
welcomed to her hastily improvised library. The three daughters of
Louis XV. had their favourite colours of morocco, citron, red, and
olive, and their books are valued as much as if they bore the bees
of De Thou, or the intertwined C's of the illustrious and ridiculous
Abbe Cotin, the Trissotin of the comedy. Surely in all these things
there is a human interest, and our fingers are faintly thrilled, as
we touch these books, with the far-off contact of the hands of kings
and cardinals, scholars and coquettes, pedants, poets, and
precieuses, the people who are unforgotten in the mob that inhabited
dead centuries.